Rating:

To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect from this book. I just watched The Office from start to end and felt like I needed something to get a kind of closure, so I picked it up. Luckily, after reading this book, I did feel like I got some closure.

The book is basically a history of The Office through interviews. The author did add a few lines here and there to provide structure, but that’s really it. Most of it is interview texts.

At times, it felt like many texts come from the same people: E.g. Steve Carell or John Krasinski were mentioned many times but only provided a few lines. That is not the authors’ fault, but still, I sometimes felt like he couldn’t find interviews from the most interesting people on a specific topic. But this is the only bad critique I can give.

What was really interesting was that he got many interviews from the writers, which couldn’t just talk about what happened, but also what the motivation behind it was. Some storylines were cut partly or completely, actors left the set to work on side projects (e.g., Ed Helms on Hangover) and there were spinoffs that never took off. Reading this really gave me a deeper understanding of the storyline.

The book also provides explanations as to what happened in the last seasons: It wasn’t just the viewers that gave bad ratings, the crew knew that something was lost along the line as well. To me, it was nice to read how it came to that, and that it wasn’t just a misinterpretation from the audience.

I would recommend this book to everybody who wants to know something more about the office or just rewatched the show and is searching for some closure.