The Best of ‘The Office’: 10 Most-Viewed Clips From the Show (VIDEO)
In the 10 years that The Office has been off the air, YouTube viewers have watched clips from the NBC workplace sitcom billions of times.
That’s no hyperbole. The Office’s official YouTube channel — launched months after the show’s 2013 finale — has accumulated more than 2.5 billion views.
And the 10 most-viewed clips from the channel include some of the show’s best bits — including the intricate pranks Jim (John Krasinksi) pulled on Dunder Mifflin coworker Dwight (Rainn Wilson) as well as more chaotic scenes from the show. (Two words: “Save Bandit!”)
As we hit the 10th anniversary of The Office’s series finale on May 16, these are the YouTube clips fans can’t stop replaying.
10. “Asian Jim”: 13 million views
“I was just stoked that, number one, I got to be on the show, and number two, the scene was super funny. But I never expected it to become a bigger thing than what it was,” actor Randall Park said about this Season 9 cold open in a 2022 Esquire interview. “Cut to many years later, I’m walking down the street, and somebody yells ‘Asian Jim!’ out of their car. … And it turned out that this clip, this one scene from The Office had gone viral all over the internet, and it’s kind of cemented me as a way bigger part of The Office than it actually was.”
9. “Parkour Parkour”: 15 million views
Paul Lieberstein, who wrote and directed this Season 6 premiere and its famous cold open, told the actors to “mess up the room as much as possible,” as costars Jenna Fischer (Pam) and Angela Kinsey (Angela) recalled on their Office Ladies podcast in 2022 (via Mashable). And after a less-than-hilarious first take, Lieberstein had the idea of the actors shouting “parkour” after ever move. “[Lieberstein] said that ended up being the thing that gave it this really weird energy that was very funny,” Fischer said on the podcast. “I thought that was great, actually, because I thought a lot of the comedy came from that dichotomy between their very confident parkour and their horrible skills.”
8. “Spontaneous Pranks That Drove Dwight Insane”: 15 million views
One Office fan estimated the costs of all of Jim’s pranks on Dwight, calculating that the mischief set Jim back an amount just shy of $6,000. “Jim’s most expensive prank was when he and Pam learned Morse code so that they could talk about Dwight since they said they took night courses and hired a nanny,” that fan wrote on Reddit. “I estimated this cost to be $3,120, based on how long I thought the course should be, and the average salary of a nanny in the U.S.”
7. “Best Intro Ever”: 15 million views
The Season 7 premiere’s lip-dub to The Human Beinz’s “Nobody But Me” wasn’t exactly the one-shot masterpiece it appears to be. The cast and crew filmed the sequence with five takes that were seamlessly spliced, as Fischer revealed in a 2022 Office Ladies episode. “We cut when Angela slams Darryl’s [Craig Robinson] office door, and then we cut on the whip to take four as the camera moves by Phyllis [Phyllis Smith] dancing and heads into Michael’s [Steve Carell] office as he performs the magic tricks with his wand,” she said, per Decider. “And then we whip out back to take five as Andy [Ed Helms] yells, ‘Streamers!’ and then we stayed in take five until the end.”
6. “The Best of Jim Lying to Dwight”: 15 million views
In a 2022 interview with LADbible, Wilson said that Krasinski was a “great collaborator” on set. “I knew that right from the get-go, because he would always have the best ideas,” Wilson added. “He would always have those extra ideas that a lot of actors don’t really think about. … A lot of the best work that I ever did on the show was courtesy of John Krasinski giving me pointers and ideas and tips and direction, which I welcomed.”
5. “Jan’s Boob Job”: 16 million views
“When she comes back with a huge boob job in order to get Michael back again — it was just so stupid,” actor Melora Hardin told Entertainment Tonight in 2016, naming Season 3’s “The Job” as one of her favorite moments from The Office. On Office Ladies (via Showbiz CheatSheet), Fischer noted that Hardin’s onscreen enhancement was the result of contoured makeup and a “gazillion little cutlets.”
4. “The Best of Creed”: 18 million views
During the filming of Season 2, actor Creed Bratton made a pitch to go from background player to supporting character. He gave producer Kent Zbornak an audition tape, a six-and-a-half minute confessional filmed in the style of The Office’s talking-head cutaways. “It was typical Creed,” Zbornak told Esquire in 2022. “It was unique, it was quirky, it was insane, it was vulgar, but it was absolutely funny.”
3. “Fire Drill”: 35 million views
The Office’s Season 5 episode “Stress Relief” scored the coveted post-Super Bowl slot in 2009, and the writers crafted a cold open wild enough to hook viewers. “We knew it would start with Dwight setting off the fire alarm, and [producer] Greg [Daniels] was in a place where he was like, ‘We need it to be bigger and crazier,’” writer Halsted Sullivan told Vulture in 2020. “So we just started adding all sorts of crazy s**t happening with the mayhem and the melee, like them using the photocopier as a battering ram and cats falling out of the ceiling. A lot of it wound up getting shot.”
2. “First Aid Fail”: 38 million views
That same episode, “Stress Relief,” is credited with saving a woman’s life. When a passerby found the woman unresponsive in her car in 2019, he recalled the scene in The Office in which the Dunder Mifflin employees learn that the tempo of The Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” the right tempo for chest compressions, and he resuscitated her, as the Arizona Daily Star reported at the time.
1. “Jim’s Pranks Against Dwight”: 52 million views
To celebrate The Office’s streaming debut on Peacock in 2021, the show’s YouTube channel released a prank cut from The Office’s 2013 series finale, in which Jim and Pam get Dwight to think he’s a character in The Matrix. The deleted scene features security guard Hank (Hugh Dane) as Dorpheus, brother of Morpheus, played by Laurence Fishburne in the film series.
