There's a ton of creative overlap between the TV worlds of Mike Schur and Saturday Night Live—starting with Schur himself, who got his start in TV with a six-year stint on the writing staff of the long-running NBC sketch show. But that doesn't mean the Office writer embraces everything the series has done since—especially as it applied to his own work.
This, per Entertainment Weekly, comes from an appearance Schur made recently on The Lonely Island And Seth Meyers Podcast, where Seth Meyers invited his old friend to build a canon of SNL digital shorts. Inevitably, that conversation ended up on the topic of "The Japanese Office," which ran as part of the show's May 17, 2008 season finale, hosted by Steve Carell. Featuring a cameo from Ricky Gervais, the short starred Carell, Bill Hader, Jason Sudeikis, and Kristin Wiig, all speaking Japanese, and doing culturally Japanese things, but doing clear impressions of the characters from the American The Office. If that sounds kind of confusing in hindsight, Schur agrees: "It didn't feel right to me in some way."
Confessing he "Doesn't quite understand the premise," Schur added, "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." Schur said that "I remember being a little bit rankled" when the sketch aired, comparing it unfavorably to an earlier monologue Rainn Wilson had done which also heavily referenced the series, and saying it "didn't scratch the itch of seeing the show reflected in the way that I hoped it would be reflected."
This isn't the first time "The Japanese Office" has come up in conversations on the podcast; per EW, short director (and Lonely Island member) Akiva Schaffer talked about being "concerned at the time" about the sketch's casting choices in a recent episode, but says he opted to give final decision to its co-writer, Marika Sawyer, who's Japanese-American. "I would just keep looking to her and go, okay, I'm here to bring your dreams to life.... I think everyone was looking to Marika being like, 'This is your baby. Let's go. We're gonna support it.' But it was her thing." (Sawyer was also the one who coached the cast on pronouncing the Japanese dialogue.) That podcast episode actually has a ton of context and background for "The Japanese Office," with co-writer John Lutz (speaking for Sawyer, who opted out of the episode) explaining that the idea was originally a "fake pitch," something SNL writers throw out during initial meetings with hosts basically just to get through the meeting. Schaffer adds that all involved were "aware that this is a tightrope being walked," including noting that he was weirdly grateful when Gervais pitched adding in the short's final line, when he pops in to say "It's funny because it's racist," as a way of defusing some of that tension.
