Unless I’m mistaken, its legacy is that it fucking rules.

Check, check, check! You forgot Trainspotting though!!

Perhaps to an internet pop culture writer, not struggling to meet the very basics of existence is equivalent to caviar.

I, too, wondered what the fuck was up with using the phrase “caviar problems.” 

It’s kinda weird (and soul-crushingly sad on many levels) that two of the biggest cult movies of the past 20 years were both Mike Judge movies that spent about a combined three weeks in theaters but have ended up being maybe the most referenced 1-2 punch of movies of the last decade, Office Space and Idiocracy.

He’s basically the office supplies equivalent of that guy at Decca Records in 1962 who turned down the Beatles.

I was there and can confirm this, along with (in my circle at least) Pulp Fiction and Dazed and Confused.

I’m glad they pointed out the part about the guys having to trudge through a draining ditch to get anywhere to eat. The absolute last things those suburban office complexes are designed for is pedestrian traffic, as anyone who has ever been near one can attest. 

I fit this profile and have never seen The Matrix. The other 2 I own to this day. You forgot, however, the obligatory inclusion of the Boondock Saints which speaks to a very primitive and simplistic view of righteousness and moral superiority.  I own that one as well.

Something Office Space and King of the Hill have that none of their successors share is a real sense of suburban America. As good as The Office (USA) or anything else cited in the article are, they still feel like shows made in California and written by people who went to ivy league schools. Judge really knows how to…

Not so little known fact... Mike Judge originally went to Boston Stapler to ask if he could use their stapler in the film (at no charge to Boston Stapler), Boston refused to allow it.

Yeah, “the horror of capitalism” just isn’t what Office Space is about. It’s more specific and, in a way, more subtle than that. These are the guys who are supposedly in good shape. As you say, Peter’s not being financially crushed. This miserable beige cubicle-scape and equally beige one-bedroom file-drawer of an…

Well there is... oh, um no, never mind.

Seriously, there’s nothing “caviar” about his lifestyle. It’s the typical small-to-mid-sized-city/suburban crappy corporate job existence. It’s crappy chain restaurant problems. He’d probably be making maybe $40-50k today.

How “horrifying” capitalism really is? I mean, sure, but look at the alternatives...

I was a child in the 90s, so my recollection is definitely suspect, but the whole “end of history” feeling really did seem to apply. Things were going fine and the only people who worried about the kinds of things you laid out were labelled as cranks. 

Every high school boy in the early 2000s was legally required to own Office Space, Fight Club, and the Matrix on DVD.

I disagree. I never got the idea that living in a pretty normal (read crappy) apartment and driving a normal car to work at a job with little real purpose is cavier problems. Office Space still seems a lot like normal entry level jobs.

Good things do happen! I mean, look at me!

Barney Miller, another good workplace comedy.