At this point, most people who have seen The Office have seen it multiple times. It’s just one of those shows that’s comforting to put on like a nice, well-worn sweater. But maybe you’re looking to experience your favorite NBC sitcom in a new, immersive way. Maybe you’ve always wanted to tune in to the lives of your favorite paper company employees via a modern interoffice messaging app. Well, as of yesterday, you can now put yourself right in the middle of all the Dunder Mifflin Scranton antics as they play out live on Slack.
Developed by the online creative collective MSCHF, this new public Slack channel is recreating all 201 episodes of The Office in real time, Monday through Friday, 9-5. Due to the limitations of the app, everything that isn’t dialogue is represented in the form of emojis or GIFs. There’s certainly a little something that’s lost in the translation, but it’s fun to see how they manage to digitally represent an action like “mugging to camera.” As of writing this article, they’re still in the first half of season 2, so you can easily scroll back and find your favorite moments from “Performance Review,” “The Client,” and “The Fight.”
For those unfamiliar with Slack, the workplace messaging app allows you to create separate channels for different departments and send private messages to co-workers. While much of the action on The Office Slack is taking place in the #general channel, MSCHF really went above and beyond with this project and created additional channels for #accounting, #sales, and even the #party_planning_committee. It’s up to users to join each of these channels and follow the action of the episode as it jumps from scene to scene.
It remains to be seen whether a rival server will be created for the Stamford branch in season 3 or if there will be any attempt at justifying how the “Fun Run” from season 4 is happening over Slack. We’ll just have to tune in to find out.
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