In the seven years that she’s been blogging about The Office, Jennie Tan has missed exactly one new episode—to attend a destination wedding she still rues wasn’t scheduled for a rerun week.
Otherwise, Dunder Mifflin dominates her Thursdays from the second she leaves work early to prepare for the surge in online traffic that begins with the Office’s East Coast broadcast. By the time she has moderated comments, transcribed quotes and watched the goings-on in the fictional Scranton, Pa., paper company for her own pleasure, it’s well near midnight.
But that’s in a normal week. This Thursday, May 16, is the last Office ever, and Tan, ’84, is bracing for an outpouring from fellow fanatics that could keep her busy till dawn, even if she has to push back tears to keep her server from crashing. “I don’t think I’m going to sleep that night,” she says.
In a world where any fan can blog about anything anytime, Tan’s OfficeTally site stands out not only for its popularity, but also because the love goes both ways. The show’s writers, actors and executives regard Tan as highly as she regards them—an affection going back to the show’s early days when her blog was seen as a key in expanding anemic ratings.
In other words, Rainn Wilson (who plays Dwight Schrute) doesn’t text just anybody with a Tumblr.
“She started a website just as a fan and she’s become part of our Office family,” Jenna Fischer (Pam Beesly), told thousands of Office devotees at the show’s farewell celebration in Scranton earlier this month, beckoning Tan to stand with the cast.
The Office producers invited Tan to the taping of the finale, her sixth visit to the set; gave her her own trailer; and cast her in a speaking role, seven lines she got the midnight before shooting. (It remains to be seen if it makes the final cut.) (UPDATE: Tan appeared as a blogger who asked Pam about her love life at the Q&A session with the cast.) Tan—who did some acting with the Stanford Asian American Theater Project—appeared as a featured extra in the show’s 100th episode.
Such a future would have seemed unlikely the first time Tan chanced on The Office during its first season—in time to see one of the show’s signature cringing moments: Steve Carell (Michael Scott) fake-firing Pam who, unaware of the joke, bursts into tears. Tan quickly changed the channel.
But after several passing encounters, the comedy’s quirky hooks began to sink in. At the time, the show’s stars were active on MySpace, and Tan fired off a message complimenting writer and actor B.J. Novak for one of his jokes. He replied with his appreciation and suddenly Tan, a technical writer in real life, began to see a way to combine her communication skills with her growing obsession.
She knew so little about web publishing she had to contact an earlier Office blogger to find out how to begin. But from the start, she locked onto the concept that has remained core to the blog’s popularity, which has reached as many as 50,000 page views a day.
The name, OfficeTally, described the blog’s original focus. After each episode, readers could grade the show on a scale from 1 to 10, providing running ranking for each. It has proved to be an ingeniously simple way to involve fans and obsess insiders: On Tan’s most recent visit to the set, a writer introduced himself and rattled off the rankings for the shows he wrote, she says.
Over the years Tan has bolstered the site with Office-related links, contests, chats, memes and whatever news tidbits her constantly extended antennae pick up. Extrapolation and commentary, the mainstay of many TV blogs, aren’t her thing. Neither is gossip. But nobody gets advance video clips up faster. “No matter where I am, I am looking at emails, I am looking at news alerts, I am looking at Twitter feeds,” she says. “As long as I am awake I am watching for news on The Office.”
Part of her secret boils down to chutzpah. From the moment she emailed Novak eight years ago, Tan has been unafraid to contact the principals, asking writers to, say, take questions from her readers, or producers to let her report from the set. The only thing they can do is say no, she says. Usually they say yes.
Her ultimate advantage, though, is pure love for her subject. It motivates her to spend more than 20 hours a week on an endeavor whose advertising covers expenses, but little more.
She’s not an uncritical fan. On her last visit to the set, she talked to anyone who would listen about her dislike of the plot arc involving a boom operator and Pam. But that’s an inconsequential blemish compared to the boundlessness of her affection, which of course raises the question of what comes next.
A couple years ago, executive producer Greg Daniels flew Tan down to the set of another show he was working on, Parks and Recreation, setting up a tantalizing opportunity to blog about another show. But she felt two blogs at the same time would have killed her and now thinks it’s too late to start with that show, the only one she loves nearly enough to even consider as a sequel to OfficeTally.
In future weeks, it’ll be nice to have more time to rest and sleep and possibly entertain thoughts of other plans on Thursdays. But she’s dreading the end. No matter how funny Thursday's farewell manages to be, Tan will surely do as much crying as laughing. “I don’t even want to think about it.”
At least she bows out knowing she was beloved by the people she admires. “Thank you, Jennie,” John Krasinski (Jim Halpert) said on a recent press call. “You totally changed everything for us and we really owe you a huge debt of gratitude.”
Sam Scott is a senior writer at Stanford.
