The Office – Picture: NBCUniversal
It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise but Netflix has finally announced when every season of The Office will be leaving Netflix in the United States. As we’ve predicted and reported several times, they’re leaving in full on January 1st, 2021. Here’s a bit of a recap as to why The Office is leaving Netflix and where it’s headed next.
The Office as you no doubt know is a popular NBC sitcom that ran on the network from 2005 to 2013. Although the show was incredibly popular on the air, it arguably took on a whole new form on Netflix where it’s become a juggernaut.
All 201 episodes across its nine seasons are due to depart on January 1st, 2021.
The show continues to be one of the biggest hits on Netflix US’s top 10 lists. At the time of publishing, the series had featured on the top 10 list (introduced in early 2020) in the US for at least 169 days with an average position of number seven.
Last year, Netflix and NBC announced that the show would eventually be leaving Netflix. It follows a number of high-profile sitcom exits for Netflix including Friends in January 2020 and Parks & Recreation a little earlier this year.
As we suspected, the series comes up for renewal on January 1st, 2021 and as it’s not being renewed, will depart.
We're sad that NBC has decided to take The Office back for its own streaming platform — but members can binge watch the show to their hearts' content ad-free on Netflix until January 2021
— Netflix (@netflix) June 25, 2019
Netflix reportedly offered a substantial sum ($90 million according to some reports) to keep the series streaming on Netflix but NBCUniversal eventually turned down the money to make it one of its headline shows for its new Peacock streaming service which launched in July 2020.
Other regions of Netflix saw the title removed five years ago including Netflix in the United Kingdom where the series eventually moved over to Prime Video.
The good news is that there are some alternatives to watching outside of Peacock. Not only will many places be selling the boxsets on sale for Black Friday, but you can also actually find a wealth of content from the show on the YouTube channel. It’s not quite full episodes but there are enough clips on there that you can put on shuffle, it essentially replicates the role of the series as background noise.
Will you miss The Office once it departs Netflix on January 1st, 2021? Let us know in the comments.
