NBC developing Office spinoff starring Dwight Schrute

If you love The Office, but don't actually like all those annoying scenes that actually take place in an office, then this will bring a smile to your weird-ass little face. Deadline reports that Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), the former acting manager of Dunder Mifflin, Scranton, will be receiving his own spin-off, which will take place on the oft-mentioned Schrute family beet farm. NBC executives are currently developing the series, which will potentially premiere mid-season fall 2013.

The show is being exec produced by Wilson and Office showrunner/executive producer Paul Lieberstein, who also plays HR rep Toby Flenderson. The series will purportedly follow Dwight and "multiple generations" of the Schrute family as they live and work together on the beet farm/bed and breakfast. "At its base it will be about a family farm struggling to survive and a family trying to stay together," a source close to the network said. 

Although The Office has not yet been renewed for a ninth (ninth! God, we're old) year on NBC, industry insiders expect that it will return in 2013, which would mean that Dwight would appear on The Office before switching to his spin-off mid-season. Nonetheless, I'm not sure that there will be enough hardcore Office fans left who'll get excited about a spin-off, even if it takes place on what someone on TripAdvisor called "a tastefully rustic beet farm with an excellent table making class" (yes, a fictional locale from an NBC TV series has its own page on TripAdvisor, which I'm sure would be considered meta and po-mo if I knew what either of those words meant). Only time and future Nielsen ratings will tell if viewers still consider the antics of a moon-faced, self-important Battlestar Galactica fan uproariously funny; or if NBC is just trying to, as Cousin Mose says on the farm, squeeze juice out of a dead beet.