Why's Gen Z obsessed with The Office? (video)

Sonia Saraiya (VanityFair.com, April 26, 2019); Billboard, May 3, 2019; Billie Eilish; Crystal Quintero, CC Liu, Seth Auberon (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly
Billboard sent Rainn Wilson (a.k.a. "Dwight Schrute" on the TV series The Office), to singer Billie Eilish’s house to surprise her and to quiz her on some show-related Office trivia.It looks like cool Billie Pirate Eilish has been watching a lot of Die Antwoord videos and borrowed some moves and fashion ideas ("Bad Guy" Duh).

Netflix viewers spent 52 billion minutes on the show The Office. Billie Eilish sampled an episode on her debut album. Angela and Kevin are Instagram influencers. What gives?

Billie Eilish is a 17-year-old pop singer with light eyes, wispy blue-gray hair, and an infectious, moody debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, released about a month ago.

She’s got a pout worthy of a supermodel and a bone-chillingly vacant stare, and you might have seen her with a live tarantula positioned in or around her mouth.

COMEDY: The Office

(HKT) The comedy The Office: best moments from all seasons

Eilish is fearlessly fashionable and devastatingly hip. She’s also obsessed with The Office, NBC’s American remake of an offbeat two-season British series that debuted four years after she was born.

Eilish samples the show on "My Strange Addiction," the ninth song of the album; she told MTV News that she just ripped the audio off of Netflix. In 2017, Eilish used the series’s theme song to open her concerts. 

She’s not alone. The Office has rare reach among today’s viewers, almost 15 years after the show debuted and six after it ended. On Tuesday, The Wall Street Journal published a rare breakdown of Netflix viewership, via data compiled and analyzed by Nielsen. The study found that... More