Rainn Wilson in the NBC sitcom "The Office," which ends Thursday. Stanford grad Jennie Tan, who at first frowned upon the show, has created a blog called "Office Tally" that has attracted 76 million page view.  "The Office” is one of those shows where you had to be there.  The NBC comedy wraps up its eight-year, nine-season run Thursday with a 75-minute episode, 9-10:15 p.m., and after more than 200 shows, there’s still no simple way to describe what we’ve seen.  To call it a sitcom about the lives of employees of a paper company in Scranton, Pa., part of whose responses come from their awareness that they are being filmed for a documentary, is sort of accurate, but not exactly comprehensive.  It doesn’t have the concise ring of “doctors in Korea” or “two waitresses in a Brooklyn diner.”  That absence of a single immediate premise might be part of the reason why “The Office” never finished a single season in TV’s top 50.  It’s almost certainly one of the reasons why that fact is of absolutely no concern to the people who did watch it.  Like John McCain, who as a presidential candidate joked to Jon Stewart that he was considering Dwight Schrute, Rainn Wilson’s character, as his running mate.  Or Emmy voters, who in 2006 crowned it the best comedy series on television.  Or Jennie Tan, a Stanford graduate who at first wondered how it even got on the air.  “The first episode I watched was the pilot,” says Tan, “and I can tell you honestly, the first time I watched the scene where Michael ‘fake fires’ Pam, I immediately turned the channel and thought, ‘That was so awkward and not funny. What the heck kind of show is this?’  “And then I thought, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before. Maybe I need to watch a little more before I make up my mind.’ Before you knew it, I had watched all of season one and a little bit of season two.  “‘The Fire’ (season two, episode four) was the turning point. It made me a hard-core fan for life.”  She isn’t kidding. On Feb. 4, 2006, she started a blog called “OfficeTally,” where at first she mostly invited fans to comment on each episode.  They did, and it grew. Tan, who goes by the handle "tanster," has posted more than 3,300 blog entries on the show and drawn 76 million page views. She has more than 26,000 Twitter followers.  She has appeared on the show and been referenced on the show.  She doesn’t run the only “Office” site, but she has earned the highest profile. Developer/executive producer Greg Daniels and star John Krasinski, who plays Jim Halpert, did a media call last week and couldn’t heap enough praise on Tan or the army of fans they say kept the show alive.  “We owe absolutely everything to the fans,” said Krasinski — and it’s true that if NBC had only paid attention to ratings, the six episodes that aired as a midseason replacement starting in March 2005 would have ended with “The Office” closing for good.
Its unlikely nine-season stretch defied ratings that never reached the top 50. Nevertheless, it has cultivated a devoted following of its strange, amusing brand of humor.