On all The Office media I'm consuming 8 years after the show's ended, and what it means for modern media

 This might be getting out of control, but whatever.

I've written in the past about how much The Office content I've consumed, as audio files, as videos, as 'extended shows', deleted scenes, webisodes, fan theories, there was even a time when I was reading the script to keep myself occupied and entertained.

This is not about that. Not anymore.

It's about the fact that the neo-Office era has officially begun. There's two official podcasts of the show that I listen to, one hosted by 'Kevin', it started a few days ago, and the other by 'Pam' and 'Angela'. They're both great in their own ways. And there's the Michael Scott Paper company podcast which is doing quite well, listen to that as well. Then of course there are The Office forums, 'analysis' videos, and references to it everywhere.

There must be at least a dozen, possibly quite a lot more unofficial 'rewatch' podcasts of the show out there, all decent and reasonably popular.

What does that say about the media landscape today?

All the big episodic tv shows have their podcasts accompanying them. Other shows that ended a long time ago, like Scrubs have similar official rewatch podcasts, and they're coming up with new ones every week. Shows that are in progress have started doing it, and going back to cover their older series when they're all caught up.

A little bit of the credit goes to the pandemic obviously, when actors comedians, creators have nowhere good to take their creative juices, they'll do radio, and cover a topic that's already popular, for the built-in fans. Some of it is due to the times...podcasts were growing quite fast already...The Good Place has had the podcast since the very start even though they had nothing to do with the pandemic. And a little bit can be attributed to the fact that podcasts can act as a cheap form of advertising in a fiercely competitive and disjointed economy thirsting for attention...the more channels you use to reach out to your potential viewers, the better the retention is.

None of it is surprising. It's...impressive...how much meta-content can be created on a limited piece of creative work. Wonder how the future generations are going to be looking at this.