Last nights Season Finale of ‘The Office’ ends in the epic “Office Wedding Dance’ (above). Leave it to ‘The Office’ to transcend mediums and spoof this popular viral in a way as… touching as the original. In fact, it’s probably more touching. We’ve been rooting for Pam and Jim for five seasons. We know the Dunder Mifflin crew in an intimate way that only television (At least, for the moment) can create.

I wrote about the original JK Wedding Dance previously and it’s now more important than being Sony’s #8 music video on YouTube (And I bet that will rise the ranks for a few days following the Office spoof). It’s a new kind of Traditional and New Media merge – One of content and ideas rather than technical or distribution paradigms. It sets a precedent that it’s ok for TV to copy the Web. Audiences will get it.

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Think about that for a second.

It’s the reverse of how it was and what we are used to – People on the web spoofing or coping what is on TV. The Wedding Dance video has 27 million views. Last nights ‘The Office’ had a 4.5 Nielsen Rating according to Variety . That means 4.5% of the 114.9 million ‘television households in the United States’ or 5.17 million viewers. We can safely assume most people watching last night had seen the original Wedding Dance and would ‘get it’. The characters in ‘The Office’ got it and reference the RK video on multiple occasions. YouTube videos are part of our lexicon and have been for some time now. It’s wide enough to work on network TV.

I can’t think of many other times a popular TV show has spoofed a web video. TV characters frequently reference YouTube. Arrested Development spoofed Star Wars kid (14 million views in 3 years) but last nights ‘The Office’ takes it to a totally different level.

Does this further legitimize Web Video?

At the very least, the RK Wedding video is the gift that keeps on giving to Sony. And to think – They almost took it down due copyright infringement.