In a decision that most everyone involved lived to regret, they shot a pilot for The Office in 2004 that was essentially a re-creation of the UK Office pilot. Ken Kwapis was hired to direct.
Ben Silverman: Our first move was to emulate the British show and be a little slavish to it.
John Krasinski: The pilot was pretty much word-for-word the British show, which I know we weren’t all super excited about, but we could understand why we had to do it to see how it stacked up against the other show.
Paul Feig: I had heard that Ricky’s deal with them was that they had to shoot the exact pilot from the British Office to the script. I was kind of like, “Ooh, that seems kind of dangerous.”
Ricky Gervais: I thought it was odd they just redid our pilot. I don’t know why they did that. I thought there was no point to it. It got better when they went on their own.
Larry Wilmore: It’s a great pilot, but it’s very difficult because that script was specifically written by Ricky and Stephen for Ricky’s voice. I thought Greg still did a good job but had kind of an eerie feeling watching it, almost like there were ghosts doing it.
Greg Daniels: The pilot was shot a lot like the original UK Office, which I felt was necessary to test NBC and see if they really had the stomach for a show of this nature, since the dominant show of the time was Will and Grace, which has a completely different sensibility.
It was also an opportunity for the cast to learn their characters and adjust to the mockumentary format.
Creed Bratton: Greg Daniels sat everybody down the first day and said, “We’re going to shoot this without a laugh track. We’re going to have long silent pauses, very uncomfortable pauses. I don’t know if people are going to like it or not, but we’re going to give it a shot. We’re going to assume that there’ll be some intelligent people that will find this amusing.”
Melora Hardin: At one point, my cell phone rang just before we were going to rehearse a scene. I was like, “Oh, so sorry!” and I clicked it to silent. Ken said, “Oh, no, no, no. Don’t do that. Leave it on. I want someone to call you in the scene when we’re rolling. I think that’s great. Just leave your cell phone on.” I was like, “Really?” He’s like, “Yeah, yeah. If they do call, answer it.” Most people would be like, “Turn your fucking phone off.” That was super fun. I knew immediately when he said that, I was like, “Oh, I’m gonna love this guy.”
Peter Smokler was brought on as the director of photography. He only worked on the pilot, but he played a crucial role in setting the look for the rest of the show.
Ken Kwapis: He was also the DP on This Is Spinal Tap, so he had his mockumentary bona fides by the time he came to The Office. He was really helpful in setting the style.
Peter Smokler: The DP for most sitcoms sits on a dolly and has an audience behind him. But I was a documentary cameraman and that’s how I filmed Spinal Tap, The Larry Sanders Show, and eventually The Office. Greg Daniels had really only worked on animation up until that point, so he really leaned on Ken to make it come alive.
Carey Bennett: When we finally got everybody on set I realized that three different people had white shirts on, would never happen in a real show. As a costume designer, you’re trained to make it look like a painting, basically. You are doling out your colors in a specific way. And I was kind of in a panic since we were getting ready to shoot. I said, “Oh my God, Ken! Three people are wearing white shirts!” He stopped me and he goes, “You know, I think because this bothers you, it’s correct.”
John Krasinski: At the beginning of the day before we started, Ken did about forty-five minutes to an hour of just letting us work, not only to get us in the mood of just being in one place for a very long period of time, but also to capture moments for cutaways, which helped tremendously. There were a lot of moments where I didn’t even know he was shooting.
Ken Kwapis: Everyone was on the call sheet all day, even if you didn’t have a scene during the pilot. Everyone got their own desk and they personalized it. Every day of the pilot started off with us shooting general views. I wanted to see the Dunder Mifflin staff at work. People who didn’t have dialogue, Phyllis Smith, for example, would be on a fake phone having an imaginary sales call.
Jenna Fischer: The Wite-Out moment of mine [from the opening credits] was just picked up during one of the morning sessions where I just made it my business to white some things out some day. . . . Angela would pass me little sticky notes over the wall during the day. They’d say things like, “I’m having a cat party for my cat Sprinkles. Would you like to come this weekend?”
Ken Kwapis: Finally after a half hour or so of just shooting people at work, we would segue into a scene.
Steve Carell: Ken Kwapis set a great tone right from the beginning. He essentially cleared the set of everyone but himself as the documentarian, the cameraman, and the sound man. It was just us. So he created this environment of these people in an office and this documentary crew. I think that really helped the tone and the mood. I think we all felt that we were sitting in this office and we were being followed around by a camera crew. You kind of got lost in that.
John Krasinski: Ken would be very hesitant to talk to you [out of character] in the talking-head [interviews] when we were alone with the camera. For like ten minutes he was asking me, “So, did you go to college in Scranton?” I was like, “Oh, we’re actually acting now.”
Rainn Wilson: Ken would never say action because he didn’t want it to seem like a set, so he’d go, “Ooookay. Let’s go ahead.”
Jenna Fischer: One time Ken called cut and Leslie [David Baker] continued to make fake phone calls for about ten minutes. It was like he had to finish it up. He hadn’t finished the sale and he wanted to finish it.
Steve Carell: Jenna made me laugh a lot when filming the pilot. Whenever I came at her with something completely inappropriate, her face would register a combination of disgust and horror and anger, and yet she wouldn’t be doing very much, but her face would register five or six things at the same time without doing anything.
B. J. Novak’s character of Ryan Howard serves as the audience surrogate in the pilot as Michael Scott shows him around the office and introduces him to the entire Dunder Mifflin crew. The episode establishes Jim’s unrequited love for Pam, who is engaged to warehouse worker Roy Anderson, played by David Denman. It also establishes Jim’s rivalry with Dwight and the fact that Dunder Mifflin is facing financial hardships that may require letting an employee go. Near the end, Michael mock-fires Pam as she sobs uncontrollably. It’s an exact mirror image of a scene from the UK show, but it comes off as far less playful.
Ken Kwapis: Michael Scott humiliates Pam in front of Ryan. I think that felt more like the Ricky Gervais version. I remember Ricky once distinguishing between the character he created and the character Steve created by saying that his character was a jerk, but Michael Scott was a boob. We used that as an important way to classify things. We’d say, “Is that something a jerk would do or is that something a boob would do?” The firing was a thing a jerk would do.
Paul Feig: When I watched the pilot I was kind of like, “I don’t know, man, this is kind of hitting all the stuff that I was concerned about,” which is the brilliant Steve Carell really trying to imitate Ricky Gervais’s role. When they had the scene where he fake-fires Pam and she starts to cry, I’m going, “Oh man, I think American audiences are going to flee from this.”
B. J. Novak: Jenna probably had to cry, like, fifty times that day. This was a lot of people’s favorite scene and a lot of people’s least-favorite scene.
Steve Carell: My favorite shot in the episode is the pan-over and B. J. is shaking his head. If you look closely, you’ll notice that [we] have little, if any, makeup on and very little attempt is made to make us look good.
Alan Sepinwall: I watched the pilot and I really didn’t like it. I had known Greg a long time by that point and he said, “Alan, what do you think?” I said, “Greg, I don’t know. The moment when Michael fires Pam, I really kind of hated him.” And Greg took a step back and said, “Well, that’s not good!”
Many of the critics agreed with Sepinwall’s assessment.
The New York Daily News: “Compared to the BBC version, in which every portrayal of the four key character types is utterly perfect, NBC’s version is so diluted there’s little left but muddy water.”
The Washington Post: “Reality check: Carell, who was so brilliant on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, overdoes it at times and certainly is no match for the wonderful Ricky Gervais, his counterpart in the British version.”
Entertainment Weekly: “The curious pilot is so faithful to the BBC version, it’s almost Van Santian. [This is a reference to Gus Van Sant’s critically panned shot-for-shot remake of Psycho in 1998.] For aficionados, it won’t work: You can’t help but see Gervais’ roly-poly ghost in every scene.”
The Kansas City Star: “The first mistake NBC made was giving the Brent role to Steve Carell. He was a riot on ‘The Daily Show’ but is ill-suited for this part. Up until now I’ve taken Carell in small doses, like the white-collar worker he played in a series of 30-second shipping commercials. One gets the sense that was how he got hired for ‘The Office.’ Here, Carell crawls under your skin faster than Nancy Grace, which is saying something.”
The Los Angeles Times: “Lost in translation is the sadness behind the characters on the BBC series, the utterly dreary lives outside the office from which the comedy inside the office emanates. Yes, these poor blokes are being derided, but at the same time the show elicits your compassion for them. . . . There’s a menace to Carell’s character that I didn’t want to feel, a sociopathic, beady-eyed quality that’s too cartoon, and that gives the show a colder edge. This ‘Office’ will have to rely less on him as a guiding voice than ‘The Office’ relied on Gervais.”
USA Today: “The insurmountable problem for this version may prove to be Carell himself. He’s an amusing sketch comic, but he comes across as an actor doing a bit, not a person running an office. Worse, he makes the character too one-dimensionally unsympathetic. He captures Michael’s delusions of grandeur but misses the poignancy in his mad dash for popularity. But then that’s what happens with copies. Inevitably, something great gets lost.”
Ricky Gervais: I remember they tested it and Greg Daniels sent me a disappointed e-mail saying, “It scored very low.” I wrote back, “Congratulations! The [UK] Office tied with women’s bowling for the lowest test score ever and we didn’t change a thing.” And I said to him, “That’s a good sign. Anything to do with innovation suffers on the test score because people go, ‘That’s not what I expected.’ They mark it down because it’s not like the sitcom they thought it was going to be. You can’t let that stop you.”