‘SNL’ and ‘The Office’ Alum Talks Regret Over ‘Japanese Office’ Sketch: It ‘Didn’t Feel Right’

It’s been 16 years since Saturday Night Live did a Japanese take on The Office, and Michael Schur, who is a former writer on both shows, wasn’t much of a fan of it. The Office star Steve Carell and Ricky Gervais, who created the British version of the sitcom that the American Office is based on, appeared on the May 17, 2008, episode of the long-running variety sketch series, doing the digital short, “The Japanese Office.”

Gervais appears at the beginning of the sketch to say that the British Office was based on a Japanese version, complete with Carell playing a Japanese version of his character Michael Scott along with SNL cast members as other The Office U.S. characters. And it was entirely in Japanese.

Via Deadline, Schur shared on The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast that the sketch “didn’t feel right to me in some way.” He continued, “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. And when [Carell] did ‘The Japanese Office,’ I remember being a little bit rankled. 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. It sort of didn’t track to me somehow.”

Even though the sketch didn’t do too well with Schur, he did say that any time any of The Office stars hosted SNL was “a very big deal.” At the very least, he “loved the first time” Rainn Wilson hosted in 2007, where he parodied the NBC sitcom in his opening monologue. Schur recalled, “I was like, ‘They’re nailing this. Everyone’s nailing it.’”

Saturday Night Live has parodied a lot of movies and shows throughout its 50-season run, and as with any sketch, they can be either a hit or a miss and sometimes even a tad controversial. Such is the case with “The Japanese Office” sketch. Luckily it didn’t seem to do anything with the American version, since that went on for nine seasons and now there’s another show in the works at Peacock. Just as long as there’s not another sketch on Saturday Night Live for an international version, it shouldn’t be too bad.