Of course The Office would never get made today and here's why.
Cancel culture can't abide complexity and clemency.
Mindy Kaling, who starred on and produced The Office for nine years, said this week that The Office could not be made today, because “tastes have changed, and honestly what offends people has changed so much now.” As she put it:
I think that actually is one of the reasons the show is popular, because people feel like there’s something kind of fearlessness about it or taboo that it talks about.
This is entirely correct—The Office couldn’t possibly be made today, nobody would even try—but apparently it made a lot of people mad to point that out. Lots of people tend to get mad when you criticize cancel culture. Here’s one good example:


This is the sort of viral take that’s meant to be incisive but instead entirely misses the point. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is indeed a show about “the worst humans to ever be featured on a mainstream TV show.” That’s the joke. People tolerate the base, reprehensible behavior of the Gang because they’re meant to be an obscene caricature, in the same way that a man might tolerate a “Your Mom” joke where he would never put up with an actual insult directed at his mother. People always make allowances for the outrageous and the absurd.
The Office is a much different show; its caricatures are at times absurdist, but nowhere near to the degree of Always Sunny. Most of the characters on The Office are wacky, kooky, frequently farcical; they are often awkwardly offensive in the matter of sensitive things like sexual orientation, skin color, religion; very often they display the kind of behavior and opinions that could easily get one cancelled in today’s socio-political environment. But at the same time the characters are also often presented as likable, personable, friendly, thoughtful; they are given sympathetic edges and empathetic handicaps; in effect the show depicts them as fully human—they possess major personality flaws and often embarrassingly bad judgment while at the same time they are good people whom you like and whom you root for in a genuine and non-ironic way.
That is what cancel culture cannot abide: Not wholesale parody but gentle reality. The people who pull the levers of cancel culture—whoever they are—are not afraid of ridiculous caricature and over-the-top satire; they are rather afraid of the idea that we should tolerate people’s shortcomings and mistakes, that we shouldn’t end the life and the career of a decent person who says something offensive, that you can be insensitive and hurtful about delicate topics and still be worthy of decency and respect and love. Hokey as it might sound, that’s actually pretty much the message of every Office episode: Be nice to each other, forgive each other, don’t hold a grudge. So essentially the polar opposite of the cancel thing.
I am not sure why anyone—particularly the enthusiasts of cancel culture—would deny this. This is the world we live in now. There’s reason to hope that it won’t always be that way, and that the tornadic influence of cancel culture will eventually wane to the point that we can have a more complex and thoughtful pop culture again. But there’s no harm in pointing out that, at the moment, we can’t.