Despite his time writing on Saturday Night Live, Michael Schur wasn’t a fan of one sketch parodying his work.
After leaving the NBC sketch comedy show to write for The Office in 2005, he said the SNL sketch ‘The Japanese Office’ “didn’t feel right to me in some way” when Steve Carell and Ricky Gervais appeared in the May 17, 2008 episode.
“I worked at SNL, but you still feel like SNL at some point at some level is an arbiter of what matters in the culture,” Schur said on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast. “And when [Carell] did ‘The Japanese Office’, I remember being a little bit rankled.”
The sketch was introduced by Gervais, who created and starred in the original BBC series that inspired The Office. He jokingly explained that the British version of The Office was based on a Japanese show, playing a digital short with Carell as a Japanese version of his character Michael Scott, leading an entirely Japanese-language episode with no subtitles.
“It’s like, ‘They stole the show from me, but I stole it from the Japanese version,’ but then all the actors in the Japanese version are white people,” explained Schur. “It sort of didn’t track to me somehow.”
Schur said it was “a very big deal” when any of The Office stars hosted SNL, noting he “loved the first time” when Rainn Wilson hosted in 2007, parodying the workplace mockumentary in his opening monologue. “I was like, ‘They’re nailing this. Everyone’s nailing it,’” he recalled.
Based on the 2001-’03 BBC series of the same name, The Office ran for nine seasons on NBC from 2005 to 2013.
