Rainn Wilson sat down with Fox News Digital this week and said something accurate: “I do feel like you couldn’t make The Office today. I think that would be too hard to be as politically incorrect as the show was. And I do, I do kind of miss that.”
He is correct. The Office ran from 2005 to 2013 on a premise no network would greenlight now. Michael Scott was a casually racist, sexually harassing, tone-deaf middle manager. The humor came from cringing at him, but the cringe required depicting the behavior with full specificity. Wilson called out the Benihana Christmas episode on a prior podcast appearance, describing it as “jaw droppingly kind of horrific” by current standards: Michael Scott and Andy drawing on an Asian woman with a Sharpie because they could not tell her apart from their other date. “They’re clueless and in their cluelessness they’re racist and insensitive,” Wilson said. “And that’s Michael, Dwight and Andy.”
The show was enormously popular. It still streams enormous numbers. The Paper, its 2025 Peacock successor, was renewed for a second season and critics have called it “safe” and “bland” by comparison. The audience showed up for the original. The successor plays it safe. Comedy that observes without moralizing built the audience. Comedy that moralizes lost it.
Wilson is right that the culture shifted. He is less right about his own role in that shift.
This is the man who co-founded Climate Basecamp, attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, and shipped a literal iceberg to the COP26 conference in Glasgow so delegates would watch it melt as they walked in. He told The Hollywood Reporter he was “greatly disappointed in the fact that so few celebrities” speak up about climate change “because essentially they’re afraid of turning off a large portion of their fan base.” Wilson made clear he was not afraid of that. He built an entire activist organization because, as he admitted at the 2025 TIME Earth Awards, “I was tired of yelling into the giant wind turbine of climate denialism.”
Last year, conservatives briefly praised him for pushing back on MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle about left-leaning media bias. Wilson was on Ruhle’s podcast when he said left-leaning outlets were “being Cleopatra, Queen of Denial” on immigration and Biden-era failures. Fox News covered it. Then Wilson went straight to Instagram to repudiate the coverage: “I guarantee this post won’t make to Fox News. Recently I was LAUDED by the Right-wing Pravda Billionaire-funded News-o-sphere for mildly pressing the brilliant MSNBC journalist and economist Stephanie Ruhle.” He needed his audience to know he was still on the correct team, even while making a point they agreed with.
That is Rainn Wilson in full. He ships icebergs to climate summits. He calls Fox News a Pravda operation. He spends fifteen years in the activist class that built the pressure making writers afraid to put a Michael Scott on television. Then he tells Fox News Digital he misses what The Office was.
The culture that killed comedy did not arrive from nowhere. The institutional reflexes that make networks afraid to greenlight an uncomfortable protagonist, the social penalties that fall on writers who depict racism as satirical rather than as evidence of the writer’s racism, the activist frameworks insisting that cringe comedy causes harm — these were built by people who went to climate summits and called right-wing outlets Pravda and spent years cheering on the enforcement mechanisms that now govern what gets made.
Wilson was part of that. He misses what it produced when he wasn’t.
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The good news for Rainn is that he's helped destroy the entertainment industry. Hollywood is dead. Los Angeles is Detroit. He'll get less and less opportunities, and he'll watch Krasinski continue to outshine him. I watched The Paper and it's not bad. It's just not great.
What did you expect? Self-awareness? Accountability? A spine?