Steve Carell was almost entirely written out of the first season of The Office because the American adaptation was suffering from abysmal ratings and NBC was just weeks away from…

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Steve Carell was almost entirely written out of the first season of The Office because the American adaptation was suffering from abysmal ratings and NBC was just weeks away from pulling the plug on the struggling workplace comedy. The network only decided to renew it for a second season because Carell's movie The 40-Year-Old Virgin became a massive summer blockbuster, suddenly making him a highly bankable comedic star. Without that completely unrelated cinematic success, Michael Scott would have remained a forgotten, painfully awkward David Brent clone in a short-lived mid-two-thousands television failure. The survival of the most heavily streamed sitcom in human history literally hinged on a crude movie about a middle-aged man getting his chest waxed. It is a sobering reminder to struggling artists everywhere that your magnum opus might only survive if you temporarily sell out and do a goofy studio comedy to appease the corporate overlords