Despite his time writing on Saturday Night Live, Michael Schur wasn’t a fan of 1 sketch parodying his work.
After leaving the NBC sketch comedy present to jot down for The Office in 2005, he stated the SNL sketch ‘The Japanese Office’ “didn’t feel right to me in some way” when Steve Carell and Ricky Gervais appeared within the May 17, 2008 episode.
“I worked at SNL, but you still feel like SNL at some point at some level is an arbiter of what matters in the culture,” Schur stated on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast. “And when [Carell] did ‘The Japanese Office’, I remember being a little bit rankled.”
The sketch was launched by Gervais, who created and starred within the unique BBC sequence that impressed The Office. He jokingly defined that the British model of The Office was based mostly on a Japanese present, enjoying a digital brief with Carell as a Japanese model of his character Michael Scott, main a wholly Japanese-language episode with no subtitles.
“It’s like, ‘They stole the show from me, but I stole it from the Japanese version,’ but then all the actors in the Japanese version are white people,” defined Schur. “It sort of didn’t track to me somehow.”
Schur stated it was “a very big deal” when any of The Office stars hosted SNL, noting he “loved the first time” when Rainn Wilson hosted in 2007, parodying the office mockumentary in his opening monologue. “I was like, ‘They’re nailing this. Everyone’s nailing it,’” he recalled.
Based on the 2001-’03 BBC sequence of the identical identify, The Office ran for 9 seasons on NBC from 2005 to 2013.