Rainn Wilson on "The Office" Ending and "The Farm" Spin-off

[JamesG]

Rainn Wilson Talks The End of "The Office"
12/16/2012


How are you feeling as "The Office" comes down the home stretch?

You know it's interesting. It's very bittersweet. Everyone is very ready for the show to end, and it's really run its course, and it feels like a really natural point in time to end the show. We get along so well ... and there's a lot of love on the set. We're going to miss each other greatly. So I know that I'm going to have a real heartache six months from now or a year from now around missing "The Office" and letting it go.

But you know, we do a lot of reminscing. There's only nine or 10 episodes left to be filmed at this point! We were shooting a scene in the warehouse the other day, and I was reminiscing wth Jenna [Fischer], and I was like, "Do you remember the first time we shot in "The Office" Dunder Mifflin warehouse?" That was September of 2004. We were first shooting a basketball game in the warehouse. That was a long time ago.







We've heard we're going to find out who's been making "The Office" documentary. Is that how the series is going to end?

Yes. It's Ken Burns. [Laughs] Part of the ending is going to be not only resolving the characters and what's happening in their lives, but the showing of the airing of the documentary on "The Office", and showing what effect that has on the characters.

That's going to happen over the course of the last six or eight episodes. "The Office" characters get to watch themselves in the documentary. I think they're probably being documented as they're watching themselves in the documentary.







I'd read that the pilot of "The Farm", the Dwight spinoff that NBC decided to pass on, would be airing as an episode of the "The Office".

Is that still the plan?

Yeah, either all or some of it will be airing as an episode of "The Office". So you will get to meet Dwight's brother and sister, some other family members, and see a little more life on the farm. But yeah, it's not happening as a show. And it was very disappointing.

We had worked really hard on it and I think created a really cool and different pilot. But it was kind of a relief in a way, because it's time to hang up the old Dwight bad haircut and glasses and move on.







Do you think the "The Farm" got caught up in a strategy shift that NBC has described as trying to go more broad with their comedies?

Yeah, I think they're going in a very different direction. I think they want bigger and broader stuff, and part of me doesn't blame them. There's a lot of Thursday night comedies that are really high quality, but they don't have a ton of viewers.

I can understand they've been the number four network for a long time, and they want to have bigger, broader audiences, so I get where they're coming from.

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