Could The Farm really be worth a billion? It seems unlikely. “The window for a Dwight Schrute-centric comedy closed long before [Paul Lieberstein] turned in his first draft of ‘The Farm,’ but that doesn’t mean the character didn’t deserve a shot, once upon a time,” Erik Adams wrote in his recap for The A.V. Club when the episode aired back in 2013. “The Farm is not what an ailing network like NBC needs right now. Even if it shows more wit and heart than any of the broad comedies Bob Greenblatt and Jennifer Salke are currently courting, the series that would’ve sprung from the seeds of this episode would’ve just been another stone around the drowning Peacock’s neck. It’s too weird, too frequently still to live.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Wilson has a different take. “Even now, all the people that have seen The Office 20 times, they’re going to watch ‘The Farm’ at least once or twice. Would it have been as good as The Office? No. No way. Not even close. Would it have been good? Would it have been solid? Would it have been a good solid comedy? Yeah, it would have, and we would’ve done some really cool stuff. And I think they really missed out,” he said on the podcast. “But the history of The Office in NBC is, they never really got the show. Honestly, it was like five years after the show was over, when all of a sudden it started being watched in the billions of minutes on Netflix, that NBC was like, wait a minute, this is kind of a cash cow. This is actually a really good show and it’s got some legs.”
Back when The Farm was a prospect, an NBCUniversal streaming service wasn’t even a twinkle in Comcast’s eye. But when the company needed a lifeline for Peacock (the only streamer that hasn’t yet made a profit), it turned to Greg Daniels and The Office. “A few growing pains and the inevitable pressure to live up to a certain hype aside, The Paper‘s energy feels infectious thanks to sharp performances, writing, and editing,” The A.V. Club‘s Saloni Gajjar wrote in her review of the spin-off.
Though the show shares some continuity with the original Office (in the documentary crew and one of the characters, Oscar), it’s unlikely we’ll see Dwigh Schrute. “I don’t see how Dwight goes from Scranton to wherever they’re shooting it in the Midwest. But, you know, if Greg [Daniels] wants me to do something, I’m happy to do something,” Wilson told CinemaBlend in 2024. “But, I am sad that they’re leaving Scranton. I understand [why they’re] leaving Scranton, but I kind of feel like there should be like seven different office spin-offs kind of like Law And Order. Like there’s Law And Order: SVU and Law And Order: Criminal Intent, and there should be all of these workplace documentaries going on, but they should all be in the Scranton [Wilkes-Barre], Lackawanna County, greater Metropolitan area.” Perhaps he hasn’t fully given up on the dream of The Farm.
