Spin-offs aren’t always a good idea. For every “Frasier” or “Young Sheldon,” which originated from “Cheers” and “The Big Bang Theory” respectively, there’s a “Joey,” the follow-up to “Friends” that spectacularly crashed and burned. “The Office” didn’t get a spin-off immediately after it ended in 2013, but it almost did — and one of the show’s last episodes was a backdoor pilot for the spin-off that never was. It’s a good thing it never came to fruition, frankly … because it would have screwed up the happy ending between main characters Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) and Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey).
The 17th episode of the ninth and final season of “The Office,” simply titled “The Farm,” was intended as a backdoor pilot — a seemingly bygone practice where showrunners would center an episode around characters and scenarios that they hope will result in a spin-off later. In the episode as it aired, Dwight goes back to Schrute Farms for his Aunt Shirley’s funeral and reunites with his family, including his brother Jeb (Thomas Middleditch) and sister Fannie (Majandra Delfino). Nora Kirkpatrick, who plays Dwight’s girlfriend Esther throughout season 9 of “The Office,” also appears in the episode, which seems to indicate that, had “The Farm” ever made it to series, Esther and Dwight would have remained involved.
As we all now know, “The Farm” never turned into a full-fledged series, and in the series finale of “The Office,” Esther is out of the picture and Dwight and Angela finally tie the knot. So what happened with “The Farm” in the end?
The Farm ultimately failed
Despite the fact that Rainn Wilson only original signed onto 13 episodes of season 9 of “The Office” to accomodate moving over to “The Farm” — and writer and showrunner Paul Lieberstein, who played Toby Flenderson on “The Office,” jumped over to help launch the enterprise — NBC declined to pick “The Farm” up as a full series, and the project died. Wilson announced this news online, according to The Hollywood Reporter; in a post on X (known as Twitter at the time), the actor wrote, “‘Farm’ Update: NBC has passed on moving forward with ‘The Farm’ TV show. Had a blast making the pilot – onwards & upwards!” One of the show’s original creators, Greg Daniels, weighed in on the whole thing in conversation with TVLine, and as he put it, the episode was simply retooled and reworked to fit into the final season of “The Office.” “We’re not going to air exactly what it was, because it has certain aspects that were appropriate for a pilot of a new show,” Daniels said at the time. “We’re going to shoot a little additional material to make it fit into the season more.”
Frankly, this was probably for the best — and if you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe a writer who happens to be one of the foremost “Office” experts. In an interview on Medium with Jeremy Roberts, Andy Greene, who wrote the 2020 book “The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s,” was quite blunt about the entire thing.
“Everyone I spoke to felt it was a bad idea. I agree. You don’t want to spend that much time with Dwight on the farm. He’s funny at an office with people that are his total opposites. ‘The Farm’ is a salvaged failed pilot that they chopped up into a regular episode because NBC didn’t want to pick it up. The whole thing was just a colossally wrong-headed idea and one of the worst Office episodes ever.”
Because The Farm never became a real spin-off, Dwight and Angela got their happily-ever-after
The fact that “The Farm” was simply slotted into the final season of “The Office” rather than given its own timeslot on NBC was a good thing for many reasons, and chief among them is that if “The Farm” had become a TV show, the series finale of “The Office” might have ended up being sort of bad!
Here’s what happens in the finale if we completely ignore that “The Farm” was ever going to be a show (something I’m happy to do). After multiple seasons of an on-again, off-again love affair, Dwight and Angela finally tie the knot — and in one of the show’s final episodes, Angela tells Dwight that her son, whom he believed was fathered by her ex-husband Senator Robert Lipton (Jack Coleman), is actually Dwight’s child. Thanks to the setting of a wedding, the episode is able to bring back several dearly departed characters, including Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak’s toxic lovers Kelly Kapoor and Ryan Howard, and in the most emotionally resonant scene to ever include a “that’s what she said” joke, Steve Carell, who left “The Office” in season 7, reappears as former manager Michael Scott to be Dwight’s best man (or, as Dwight and John Krasinski’s Jim Halpert call it, “bestest mensch”).
Watching Angela and Dwight get married and bring all of their loved ones together in the process makes for a genuinely good series finale, especially when you consider that “The Office” seriously dipped in quality in its later seasons, so let’s all be grateful that “The Farm” didn’t end up happening.
As for “The Office,” that entire series is streaming on Peacock now.
