The Office will be leaving Netflix. In a statement Tuesday night, NBCUniversal has announced that it will remove the beloved 2000s sitcom from Netflix in 2021, and head exclusively to the company’s forthcoming and as yet unnamed streaming service.
The Office is leaving Netflix in 2021
It will be headed to NBCUniversal’s new streaming service.
Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
“The Office has become a staple of pop-culture and is a rare gem whose relevance continues to grow at a time when fans have more entertainment choices than ever before,” Bonnie Hammer, chair of NBCUniversal’s digital enterprise, said in a statement. “We can’t wait to welcome the gang from Dunder Mifflin to NBCUniversal’s new streaming service.”
Although The Office stopped airing in 2013 after nine seasons on the air, it’s built up an enormous new fanbase in its time on Netflix, which currently serves as the exclusive streaming home for the TV series. “I believe it’s the No. 1 most-popular acquired show on Netflix,” NBC Entertainment chair Robert Greenblatt told New York Magazine last fall. “There are millions of streams of those episodes.”
“According to two sources with knowledge of Netflix’s private viewership numbers, The Office is the most-watched television show on the streaming service, period,” reported the Daily Beast in December.
As Emily Todd VanDerWerff explained for Vox in January, we can expect to see more and more beloved TV classics leaving Netflix over the next few years and go to platforms owned by the companies that already own the rights to the TV show, the way NBCU owns The Office. (NBCU is also an investor in Vox’s parent company Vox Media.)
“As more and more media companies increasingly view Netflix not as a way to make money off their older shows while getting those shows seen, but as a competitor, the value of those shows only goes up,” VanDerWerff wrote. “And once new streaming services from Disney (which will soon control all of the assets of 20th Century Fox) and Warner Media launch later in 2019, using popular programs like Grey’s Anatomy (Disney-owned) and Friends as a lure to attract new subscribers will only become more tempting.”
All of which would explain why NBCU seems to be counting on The Office to be a tentpole for its new streaming service. But what does this mean for you, someone who just wants to relax with your beloved workplace sitcom every night? How much are you going to have to shell out for it on top of your Netflix subscription?
When NBCU’s streaming service launches in 2020, it will be free to anyone with a paid TV subscription. Otherwise, the service will cost about $12 a month, and whichever version you’re using, there will be three to five minutes of ads per hour of programming. Details on the service have not yet been finalized, so the final subscription price might be a little more or less than $12, but you can expect the price tag to be around there. Comparatively, Netflix subscriptions start at $8.99 for the most basic plan, while the most popular plan costs $12.99.
If your main priority here is just to watch The Office whenever you want to, and you aren’t already promised free access to the forthcoming NBCU service, $12 a month might strike you as a hefty price tag. That’s $144 a year just to watch Michael Scott say “that’s what she said” any time you want, and you’ll still have to watch commercials.
There are other options outside of streaming, most of which involve owning the series rather than renting it. You can download the series on iTunes for $69.99, which is less than half of what it would cost to subscribe to NBCU for a year. The complete series DVD set has a list price of $99.98 and is currently available on Amazon for $76.99, about 53 percent of the cost of a year’s subscription to NBCU.
And until the end of next year, you’ll be able to keep streaming The Office on Netflix. After that, you’ll have to make your new plans for 2021.
