The final season of “The Office” offered a glimpse at what might have been Thursday: a true spin-off involving life on the beet farm with Dwight.
NBC ultimately turned down “The Farm,” from Rainn Wilson and a team, and from what was seen of it in the episode of “The Office” it was easy to see why.
In it, Dwight sidesteps his beet farmer cousins Johan and Mose (played by Michael Schur, the guy behind the show that was originally pitched as an “Office” spin-off, “Parks and Recreation”). They are all present at the burial of Dwight’s surly Aunt Shirley, who made an appearance earlier this season (Angela was recruited to come out and help clean her up).
But the Amish-looking family relations are overshadowed in a hurry by Dwight’s brother and sister, played by Thomas Middleditch and Majandra Delfino. Brother Jeb, a pot farmer, drives up in a convertible that gets stuck in the grave; sister Frannie, a budding poet, comes out from the city with her businesslike young son (Blake Garrett).
The contrived plot, via a video message from the deceased, is that they can share the 1600 acres land she’s leaving behind if they all agree to farm it. The siblings don’t want to; Dwight does. Paul Lieberstein, the fellow “Office” writer and cast member (who plays Toby Flenderson) is credited with writing and directing the episode, and would have helped run the spin-off.
Would the show have worked? Who knows?
There were weird scenes as during the burial when anyone who speaks says merely some facts about the dead (how tall, how much land owned) but there were some truly weird moments, such as the Schrute tradition of shooting the corpse while in the casket to make sure it’s dead (they had been unlucky in previously burying some heavy sleepers).
Scenes in the chicken coop and goat milking barn didn’t have much going for them and the transition scene at the top of the show in which people at Dunder-Mifflin are invited to the funeral by the color of dirt thrown on them didn’t make much sense.
But there was a musical sequence, when all the rural people get together with their instruments and sing a rural sounding indie rock song (The Decemberists’ “Sons and Daughters” as it happened).
Mostly, it’s clear Dwight would be too annoying a character to lead a sitcom; he’s better as a sideshow extreme to goad the main characters.
Wilson had tweeted earlier in the day that only 15 minutes of “The Farm” pilot made it into the episode, with about a third of it trimmed and the remaining scenes re-arranged a bit.
To it all was added the shorter B-story back at the office, a particularly unpleasant one involving the return of David Koechner’s character Todd Packer, the crude salesman and onetime pal of Michael Scott. He was returning to apologize to everyone. He was “working the steps — “step eight at AA, and step nine at Narcotics Anonymous” and wanted to make amends.
So he apologized to people individually in statements that often added fresh new insults. But to prove his sincerity he passed out fancy cupcakes he had gotten from the high priced cupcake boutique at the SteamTown Mall, Nibbles.
It was all Pam could do to make her co-workers refrain from eating the cupcakes because she didn’t think any of them should accept his apologies. After he left, though, they couldn’t help themselves.
That’s when Packer admits to the camera crew in the parking lot that he had laced each of the cupcakes with drugs or laxatives; even a scene of the next day when people shared how sick or stoned they got, it still wasn’t funny.
But it didn’t make “The Farm” scenes any more enjoyable either.