12 Most Rewatchable Episodes Of The Office

When the American version of "The Office" premiered as a humble mid-season replacement in early 2005 on NBC, fans of the original British version — spearheaded by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, among others — were probably a bit miffed. It's rare that remakes like this are good, but somehow, the American "Office," run by Greg Daniels and led by star Steve Carell, turned out to be really great (at least, after its touch-and-go first season). These days, it's one of the most popular sitcoms in recent memory. Not only did it help pioneer the "mockumentary" style which was then adapted by other hits like "Modern Family," "Parks and Recreation," and "Abbott Elementary," but it made stars out of its lesser-known performers like John Krasinski and became a beloved small-screen classic.

People rewatch "The Office" all the time, and anecdotally, it's probably one of the biggest "comfort shows" of this modern age (Peacock, the streaming home of "The Office," even offers supersized episodes for "superfans" so that people can enjoy even more of the show). So which episodes of "The Office" are the "most" rewatchable? Here, we've compiled 12 of them — out of 201, so there's plenty of competition — in no particular order.

The biggest "issue" with the first season of "The Office," such as it is, is that the first episode tried to copy the British show too faithfully instead of striking out on its own. Thankfully, Greg Daniels and his crew course-corrected so quickly that the remaining five episodes turned out to be pretty great, and with all due respect to gems like "Health Care" and "Hot Girl" (which features Amy Adams in a role she'll reprise in a later episode), the second-ever episode, "Diversity Day," is one of the show's most enjoyable outings.

After he performs an explicit Chris Rock routine for his captive employees, Steve Carell's well-meaning but utterly inept boss Michael Scott rallies his subordinates at the Scranton branch of paper company Dunder Mifflin and decides to throw a seminar about diversity. (This is, by the way, after a human resources employee from the larger company played by Larry Wilmore hosts a seminar that Michael simply doesn't like.) "Diversity Day" features some jokes, specifically by Michael, that toe the line of being incredibly offensive, but because the joke is on him, the episode still works all these years later ... and Michael's strategy of putting "races" on people's foreheads with note cards is messed up but undeniably hilarious.

Season 2 of "The Office" is when the show really hit its stride in a big way, and while there are a handful of episodes from this season featured on this list, let's lead off with one of the clear standouts: "The Injury." One morning, receptionist Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) answers a call at the titular office from Michael and learns that he hurt his foot in the dumbest, funniest way possible. See, Michael likes to wake up to the smell of bacon cooking, so he arranges it on his George Foreman grill next to his bed; after stepping on it, he ends up with a griddled foot.

On his way to pick up his beloved boss, assistant to the regional manager and all-time suck-up Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) ends up crashing his car and sustaining a concussion, which makes him weirder than usual but also makes him treat Pam with much more respect than he usually does. Michael, however, is peeved that everybody seems to be more worried about Dwight than his foot — which he bubble-wraps — and even though the throughline where Michael starts insisting he's newly disabled might not age well, it's important, again, that he's the butt of a joke. Truly, the idea of someone burning their foot on a George Foreman grill is just unbelievably funny, and "The Office" came up with it in its second-ever season.

Special events are a big thing on "The Office," and the show structures plenty of episodes around office Christmas parties, employee weddings, and other festivities; still, one of the best and most rewatchable episodes that focuses on a "fun" workplace event is the Season 2 standout "Casino Night." 

In this season finale, Michael decides to throw a casino-themed event at the Dunder Mifflin Scranton warehouse to benefit charity; in true Michael fashion, he invites his boss Jan Levinson (Melora Hardin), whom he recently kissed, and his relatively new paramour Carol Stills, a real-estate agent who sold Michael his condo (played by Nancy Walls, Steve Carell's long-time real-life wife). Elsewhere, salesman Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) grapples with his long-simmering crush on Pam, even though she's engaged to warehouse worker Roy Anderson (David Denman), and Dwight, after being tricked by Jim and Pam, genuinely believes Jim has telepathic and psychic powers.

"Casino Night" is a perfect storm of chaos and ends with one of the best season finale cliffhangers in recent memory — a kiss between Jim and Pam that leaves both characters in flux until Season 3 — and is definitely one of the show's very best episodes. Plus, it's endlessly enjoyable; maybe the funniest throughline is watching self-professed poker champion Kevin Malone (Brian Baumgartner) repeatedly lose to his colleagues.

"Dinner Party" isn't just one of the most rewatchable episodes of "The Office" — it might just be the show's best-ever installment, and it's undoubtedly one of its most famous half-hours. 

After Michael — who, at this point in Season 4, is sharing his condo with the recently fired Jan — tricks Pam, Jim, Andy Bernard (Ed Helms), and Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey) to come to said condo for a couples' dinner party, leaving a disappointed Dwight in the lurch, they all arrive to discover that Jan hasn't even begun preparing the osso buco and it's going to take hours. (After a tense interaction with Jan, who mistakenly believes Pam and Michael had some sort of workplace fling, Pam utters this immortal line: "I don't care what they say about me. I just want to eat. Which I realize is a lot to ask for... at a dinner party.")

The entire experience is as excruciating as it is hilarious, from the song Jan plays written and performed by her former assistant (whom she obviously seduced) to the destruction of Michael's teeny-tiny plasma TV to the barbed way Michael and Jan keep calling each other "babe." This is "The Office" by way of Edward Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" and it's fantastic.

Anyone who loves "The Office" knows that things got a bit dour after Steve Carell's departure from the series in Season 7 — and we'll come back to his exit before long — but thankfully for the show's fans, the series finale, simply titled "Finale," absolutely stuck the landing. 

It wouldn't feel complete without Carell returning as Michael, which he does to celebrate the long-awaited wedding between Dunder Mifflin's second set of star-crossed lovers besides Jim and Pam, the weirdly compatible Dwight and Angela. Other characters, like B.J. Novak's Ryan Howard and Mindy Kaling's Kelly Kapoor, even get to wrap up their storylines after being largely sidelined towards the end of the series, and despite the lackluster lead-up to the show's final outing, "Finale" feels joyful, refreshing, and absolutely pitch-perfect.

After the wedding, the employees of Dunder Mifflin gather in the office to share memories — and in a narratively brilliant turn, they're all excited to watch the in-universe documentary they've been filming this whole time — and any fan of "The Office" gets to feel gratified that their favorite characters get such a gorgeous send-off. Seasons 8 and 9 of "The Office" aren't great, but thankfully, the series finale is.

Another two-part season finale on this list, "The Job" radically shakes up the entire conceit of "The Office" in a smart way: it pits Michael, Jim, and Jim's girlfriend at the time — Karen Filipelli, his coworker during his brief stint at Dunder Mifflin's Stamford branch played by Rashida Jones — against each other for a major corporate job at the company. When they head to New York City for the interview, a new problem presents itself: the job is Jan's, and she's being fired for constant erratic behavior and her poor job performance.

This is rewatchable enough on its own, but throughout the rest of the two episodes that make up "The Job," we also get to see Michael fail to successfully break up with Jan after she gets breast implants, Jim grapple with the knowledge that Pam is not only single but returns his feelings after all this time, and Dwight's brief attempt to take over the office as manager when he assumes Michael will definitely get the corporate job. (He does this by painting the office walls black, for starters.) The final moments where Jim asks Pam out on a date — and we find out that Ryan, a temp, got the corporate job — are truly perfect.

By Season 5, "The Office" was already a massive phenomenon — and when it returned for that season with the two-part episode "Weight Loss," it rewarded its most loyal fans for sticking with the show during its bumpy first season with one of its most highly anticipated events ever. While Pam spends most of the episode in New York City taking a months-long graphic design course, Jim keeps trying to find ways to bridge the literal distance between them — and during this two-parter, he meets her at a gas station that's precisely halfway between Scranton and New York and proposes to her in the rain right in front of the gas pumps. 

Wait, so why is the episode called "Weight Loss" and not something like "The Proposal" or "Gas Station"? During Pam's stint at art school, Jim, Michael, the rest of the office, and new HR rep Holly Flax (a pitch-perfect Amy Ryan) join a wider challenge throughout Dunder Mifflin to lose the most weight of any of the branches. As they all struggle to cut calories and exercise to potentially win a paid vacation, Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker) actually improves his physical health ... and Kelly buys a "tapeworm" from office oddball Creed Bratton (Creed Bratton) to try and jump-start her weight loss only to be hospitalized. (In one of Creed's many great confessionals, he looks directly into the camera into the camera and says, "That wasn't a tapeworm.")

The first wedding featured on this list of rewatchable "Office" episode is that of Phyllis Lapin (Phyllis Smith) to refrigerator magnate Bob Vance (Bobby Ray Shafer), which gives the rest of the characters ample opportunity to misbehave. 

Pam, attending the wedding solo, is understandably miffed wheh she realizes that Phyllis stole all of her wedding ideas, down to the "P" and "R" initials (which stand for "Pam and Roy," but also "Phyllis and Robert") and the dress itself, and Jim tricks Dwight into searching the festivities for wedding crashers thanks to the movie "Wedding Crashers." (What this ultimately means is that Dwight ejects an elderly man with memory problems who turns out to be Phyllis' uncle.) Michael, hellbent on making the wedding about him, also wrecks the ceremony and reception simply by being himself; in a confessional, Phyllis reveals that she only asked him to be involved by pushing her dad's wheelchair down the aisle so she could get a six-week honeymoon.

"Phyllis' Wedding" also gives us more insight into the Jim-Pam-Karen love triangle — when Jim sees a lonely Pam reconcile with Roy, he throws himself harder into his relationship with Karen — and, on top of everything else, provides yet another perfect moment courtesy of Kelly Kapoor. When she shows up to the reception in a white dress and a tiara, she claims that she only wore white to a wedding due to an "emergency." Cut to the confessional, where Kelly says, "I look really good in white."

Remember when we mentioned that Amy Adams played a small role on "The Office" before she became one of her generation's most acclaimed performers? That role, Katy, is on fine display in the Season 2 episode "Booze Cruise," where Michael arranges for the entire office to go on that titular booze cruise.

Two immediate problems: it's in the middle of the winter on the freezing cold Lake Wallenpaupack in northeastern Pennsylvania, and Michael tries to trick his employees by telling them to pack bathing suits and snow boots when they don't need either of them. Adams' Katy joins Jim as his date, though she finds herself disappointed by how sullen he becomes when Roy and Pam finally set a wedding date after years of being engaged with no end in sight; meanwhile, Michael keeps finding himself overshadowed by the boat's charismatic Captain Jack (Rob Riggle).

"The Office" excels at small details and touches that are "accidentally" filmed by the in-universe camera crew — in this episode, one of those standout moments is Meredith emerging from a private cabin topless except for a life vest after a dalliance with Captain Jack — and "Booze Cruise" is as heartfelt as it is funny, especially thanks to a scene where Michael tells Jim never to give up on love. The cruise might be horrible, but this episode is great.

After seeing all the ways that Phyllis' wedding went wrong, Jim and Pam take a different approach in Season 6 and hold a destination wedding in Niagara, which gives this two-part episode its title; unfortunately for the happy couple, the entire office decides to actually show up. Jim and Pam's wedding also takes place while Pam is in her second trimester of pregnancy — she finds out she's expecting their first child in the Season 5 finale "Company Picnic" — so in many ways, it's not what they dreamed about ... but it turns out perfectly when the couple runs away and quietly gets married on a boat in the falls in private before returning to their disastrous ceremony.

In classic fashion, the Dunder Mifflin employees have, against Pam's wishes, organized a flash mob dance to Chris Brown's "Forever" before Pam walks down the aisle ... but because she and Jim are already married, they don't really care. "Niagara" is sweet, funny, and heartwarming, and it also has a side plot where Andy tears his scrotum during a dance contest. What more could you want?

As was previously mentioned, Steve Carell made the very personal decision to step away from "The Office" and his role as Michael Scott during the show's seventh season — and the series gave him an absolutely wonderful send-off. Though we know, before the Season 7 episode "Goodbye, Michael" that he's set to depart, Michael does something incredibly clever: he tells everybody that he's leaving for Colorado — where he's moving with Holly to help take care of her ailing father — one day later than he actually is. That way, nobody makes an awkward or weird fuss, because they all think they have another workday to spend with Michael — and it gives Michael, a sympathetic character despite his many flaws, a gentle and peaceful exit.

Jim is the only one who figures out that Michael is leaving earlier than he claims, which gives the audience a truly tear-jerking moment between the two of them as Jim tells Michael that he's no mere boss, but a trusted friend. The most famous scene in "Goodbye, Michael," though, is the one where Pam — who's out of the office running errands during Michael's actual last day — runs to the airport to catch Michael after being tipped off by Jim. As the two remove their microphones to say a final farewell, "The Office" creates a truly beautiful and human moment, and honors Carell's incredible work as Michael in the process.

Even though Michael can be unbelievably odious on "The Office," he has moments of sweetness and vulnernability — performed so perfectly by Steve Carell — that you can't help but root for him, and that quality is on great display in the Season 3 standout "Women's Appreciation." After a shell-shocked Phyllis arrives at work and reveals that a strange man flashed her in the parking lot, Dwight goes into overdrive as he tries to find the perpetrator — including ordering all of the women in the office to dress more conservatively — at which point Pam outsmarts him by making a "wanted" poster that looks exactly like Dwight with a mustache. 

While trying to make the office's women feel better about the awful thing that happened to Phyllis, Michael decides to take all of them to a local mall as a treat. Some, like Kelly, are thrilled. Others, like Angela, hate it, though Angela does tell the camera that she can swing by the American Girl Doll store as she prefers to buy apparel made for "large Colonial dolls" because the selection at GapKids is "too flashy."

The crux of the episode, though, is Michael's difficult relationship with Jan; as he tells the women, he likes "cuddling and spooning" while Jan likes videotaping their intimate moments and showing it to her therapist to "improve his form." As Michael seeks counsel from the women of the office, they open up to him in return, proving that while Michael can be an incredibly difficult boss, he's a flawed but kind person who genuinely loves his employees — perhaps too much, actually.

"The Office" is streaming on Peacock now.