We read all 186 scripts and counted who talks. 261 people have a name and at least one line. Stanley is in 165 of the episodes and says about four lines in each one.
We also make a daily word game called Long Story Short. It gives you one sentence. You keep five of its words.
Every named character in the show, biggest part first. Click any of them.
Each row is a person. Each column is one episode. A mark means they talk in it. Point at any square to see which episode. Click a row to open that person.
Words that belong to one person. We counted all 186 episodes.
Those are words people said again and again. Our game goes the other way. It gives you one sentence, once, and you keep five of its words so it still means the same thing. Today's is up.
We took every two, three and four word phrase in the show and checked who said it. A phrase counts if one person says it four times or more, and says it more than everyone else put together.
How many episodes someone is in, against how much they say when they turn up. Point at any dot.
How many words they use in one line. The people who use the most all joined late. The ones who use the fewest were there from the first episode.
Everyone with 200 lines or more. Orange means they turned up after episode 100.
The scripts do not only say what people say. They also say what people do, in little notes. There are 10,706 of them. This is what everyone in that office does with their body.
How many people in America watched each episode. Point at a bar for its name.
The first thing each of them ever says, and the last. Somebody had to write every one of these, then cut it short enough to fit. That is the whole job of our daily game.
Now go and cut a sentence down to five words. It takes about two minutes and there is a new one tomorrow.
Play Long Story ShortWhere this comes from: the written scripts of all 186 episodes of The Office in America, which come to 55,130 lines. We fixed the names by hand. Michael was spelled nine different ways. David and David Wallace were the same man filed twice. Robert California was hiding under "Robert", and Todd Packer under both "Todd" and "Packer". We left out 259 people with no name, like Waiter and Man on Phone. We left out 102 notes that mean a group is talking, like "All" and "Warehouse guys". And we left out 27 things that are not people at all, like Kevin's computer and Jim's voicemail. Fans typed these scripts up, so a few shouted lines are missing.
Viewer numbers come from Wikipedia. The photos are of the actors, from Wikimedia Commons, free to use, and the photographers are credited in this page's code. We are not connected to NBCUniversal.
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