Dwight needed just a few adjustments when the second season began, but Michael Scott was a very different story. The writers knew he came off as intensely unlikable in the first season, and their primary goal when they started off the second one was to find a way to fix that.
Jason Kessler: On day one Greg Daniels came in and said, “Michael’s got to have heart.” That changed the entire show.
Lee Eisenberg: Greg created a manifesto, like the Unabomber, about how to make Michael less of a dick. The change was he went from being an asshole to being pathetic.
Jeff Zucker: When you’re watching a show on television, you wanna have somebody who you are rooting for. And even if they are not the perfect character, you wanna be able to spend time with them, and so there was a conscious decision to soften the character of Michael Scott a little bit.
Larry Wilmore: Steve has a very sweet quality and that hard edge, I think, just didn’t play right. He can do it because he’s talented, but I think it was working against him ultimately. If you look at Gervais in the original, any time he got a comeuppance it was due, because he was a horrible human being. He was so bad. He just made you laugh because he needed attention so desperately and he’d go to any depths to get it, whereas Carell’s character, it wasn’t that he needed attention, he needed love. And that was a big distinction. When the character needs love you can play that a little differently than when the character just needs attention.
Alan Sepinwall: David Brent was driven by a desire to be famous. Michael Scott was driven by a desire to be loved. And that is a very big difference. You couldn’t have done a hundred episodes with David Brent. That would be unbearable. By the end of twelve episodes, it was kind of unbearable. They had to soften Michael Scott to make him work.
Kevin Reilly: What we were really looking for was the method to his madness. We wanted this to sustain for years at twenty-two episodes a year. To do that, we had to find more dimension to his character.
Jen Celotta: I love to understand the why of human behavior. You can see somebody that’s acting in a way that seems frustrating or unlikable, but once you understand the why, then your perspective can be flipped. With Michael, it was understanding that he wanted to be friends with everybody that he worked with and the understanding that, to him, this was his family and he had their best interest at heart. You had to understand that he was insecure.
Kate Flannery: They learned how to write for him from watching The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Paul Feig: I remember everybody in charge of The Office going, “How do we do this? How do we take what everybody loves about Steve in that movie and make it work for us on the show?”
Jen Celotta: I had seen 40-Year-Old Virgin when I’d gotten the job. I saw his ability to play such a layered role. I was like, “Oh God, he’s can play such depth. He can play such pathos. He is capable of doing anything we throw at him.”
Larry Wilmore: He shot 40-Year-Old Virgin after he shot the first season. He lost a lot of weight for that movie, so physically he looked a little different.
Mindy Kaling (Kelly Kapoor/Writer, Seasons 1–9): Steve came in at the beginning of the season having lost weight and was the handsomest we’d ever seen him.
Larry Wilmore: He had his hair slicked back like a used-car salesman that first season.
Kim Ferry: He had a Gordon Gekko look. [His hair] flipped down and it was really tight. He was trying to be slick and cool, but to me that made him not seem as likable in a way. It was just too extreme. When I met Steve the first thing I said to him was, “I just don’t like your hair the way it was. It’s not flattering. I don’t really want to offend anyone, but I think we should definitely do something to change it.” And he said, “Absolutely, I want the same thing.” So we talked about it and we tried out a couple styles. I just tried to soften up a little bit and just make it a little more flattering. He just needed some height and some volume and we got it.
Larry Wilmore: Even a hair choice was a way to soften him up.
Alan Sepinwall: He’s easier to look at, which is a really superficial thing, but it made a difference.
Michael’s newfound vulnerability was first seen very briefly in “The Dundies,” but it became more pronounced two episodes later in “Office Olympics.”
Paul Feig: I remember going to the very first table read of the second season because they read four scripts in a row, and I was going to be directing one of them. “Office Olympics” was going to be my first one. They’d been reading the “Dundies” script, but they still hadn’t quite softened up Michael yet. They made him less aggressively mean, just less of a total asshole, but the dynamic was still kind of floating. When I did the “Office Olympics” we stumbled into this thing that really worked. The whole episode was kind of a vulnerable episode for Michael because he’s freaking out that he’s going to buy this condo. He has a panic attack, and he accidentally pulls the burner off of the stove. He goes out on the patio, he can’t breathe. That was humanizing for him.
The script didn’t call for anything else to show Michael’s human side, but Steve Carell found a little moment in the end to really emphasize the big change to his character.
Paul Feig: We shot the scene at the very end where they give him the yogurt lid at the awards presentation as a medal. They’re basically making fun of him. It was supposed to be just kind of like he’s taking it seriously, and he thinks it’s great, and everybody else is laughing behind his back. But Steve made this decision that as they’re playing the national anthem [he would] tear up. His eyes got red and started watering. Suddenly it was like, “Oh my God, this poor guy.” He was so vulnerable and you see how desperate for anything good to happen to him and any kind of approval or validation. I remember I was like, “Oh my God. This is great! Let’s do it again, really go with it!” Then Greg was really excited and was like, “That’s it, that’s it!” That was the turning point. I was like, “Oh, we can actually make Michael a nut, and overbearing, and ridiculous, and all these things, but we can find moments where he’s vulnerable and human.” As Greg and all the writers started to analyze, it was like, “Okay, let’s give him a victory every once in a while.” I remember Greg saying, “We can have it where he actually is smart a couple of times.”
Ben Patrick (Sound Mixer): The show hit a different speed after that moment in “Office Olympics.” It was the precise moment where I knew we had something special. When he got emotional, it wasn’t just a comedy. Your investment in not just his character, but everybody who reacted to him, just changed.
Jason Kessler: Michael was the enemy season one. The entire office was banding against him as this terrible boss. As soon as we came in season two to start breaking the season, that note from Greg saying “Michael’s gotta have heart” changed it so much. It became “Michael wants us to be a family.” And that’s the core of the show. I mean, The Office is a workplace comedy that is secretly a family show.
Larry Wilmore: The Office, at its essence, isn’t a workplace show. That’s just what it looks like. The Office is a romantic comedy. That’s how it was set up. It’s really a love story. It’s a story of unrequited love. That’s true from Michael’s point of view too since he requires love. So it really is a love story at its core. It’s just that a lot of people don’t know how to give it or how to take it. So it’s not really a workplace comedy. It’s a love story disguised as a workplace comedy. That’s what is at its root. That’s what we really, really went after in that second season. That story line of Jim and Pam is about that, and I don’t think it was ever done better than it was that season. Even some of just the cutaways of Jim where you saw the unrequited, forbidden love just breaks your heart.
Paul Feig: They were always going to be kind of the Sam and Diane [from Cheers] of The Office, obviously, because that’s what it was on the British Office. That camaraderie was there, and it was really strong between John and Jenna.
Jen Celotta: I wrote the episode with the jinx [“Drug Testing”] when they’re out of Cokes and then they couldn’t talk to each other for the day. It was a delight to work with them and see how much they could convey with just these little looks to each other.
Creed Bratton: I could get emotional just watching John and Jenna just filming a scene because of that unrequited-love feeling they were conveying. It felt romantic. I could be across the room, glance up, and see the look. It was all in the eyes. They had a real special rapport.
Gene Stupnitsky: The amount of time that we spent on Jim and Pam versus how much screen time these little moments actually had was insane. We would spend hours and hours debating these tiny things. The fans on the Office fan site OfficeTally [used] this phrase squee. Whenever Jim and Pam had a moment, like when they were playing jinx all day and one of them finally spoke or Pam putting her head on Jim’s shoulder in “Diversity Day,” those are all squee moments.
Lee Eisenberg: We would actually unironically talk about squee moments in the episodes. We’d be like, “We haven’t had a squee moment in a long time. We need something. We need a squee.”
John Krasinski: I remember that one episode where we were on the booze cruise. When I saw the episode they had allowed that incredibly long pause when Jim wanted to say that he loved Pam and he couldn’t. I thought from then on I had full and total trust in anything [the writers] wanted to do.
Jason Kessler: If you look at season one, it really feels like Roy is going to be a main character. I think the writers realized that the Jim and Pam connection was so strong, even stronger, I think, than in the Dawn/Tim relationship in the British Office. I think that that kind of forced the Roy relationship to take a backseat. But I definitely remember each moment being obsessed over, and talking a lot about the Jim-and-Pam of it all.
Gene Stupnitsky: At the beginning, it was like a Victorian-era love story where Jim sees Pam’s ankle, and that’s enough to sustain him for, you know, like half a season.
Jen Celotta: I remember overall an enormous amount of discussion about how quickly to progress them. We wanted to have obstacles in their way that felt real. There was something very beautiful about them pining for each other. Even when you didn’t focus on it in a given episode, it was always there in the background.
Kate Flannery: John always had this sort of star quality to him. Jenna is a slightly unexpected heroine. She’s not the Jennifer Aniston. Her beauty is more subtle. There was such a sense of balance there.
Randall Einhorn: They had a very, very natural rapport and they just felt at ease together. They just felt safe with each other, which is paramount when you’re putting yourself out there like they were. There’s nothing worse than two actors that don’t get along trying to have a romantic scene. I’ve been in those situations and it’s just painful. It doesn’t look real. It doesn’t feel real. It was great that they felt so natural together because it came across really natural. You rooted for them. You wanted them to be together because of that. It felt like it should be great together.
During “Booze Cruise,” Jim foolishly tells Michael that he had a crush on Pam. Michael, of course, immediately tells the entire office. To limit the fallout, Jim tells Pam that he had a crush on her “years ago” in “The Secret” two episodes later.
Lee Eisenberg: The scene between Jim and Pam in the kitchen is one of my favorite scenes that we’ve ever written, where he’s like, “I used to have a crush on you but now I don’t.” Then Michael reveals the secret to everyone in the office. He’s so excited that Jim confided in him and he’s like, “I will hold on to that secret for as long as I can.” It felt so real and in character.
The other romance that began in season two was between Michael and Jan, even though they were destined for a far worse fate.
Melora Hardin: I remember a conversation around the time of the pilot where Greg Daniels and me and Steve Carell were having lunch together. I think Steve and I both said something like, “God, Jan and Michael are just so funny together.” I don’t remember which one of us made the point, but one of us said that there was a spark between them because they were both angry at each other and angry at the world. There was something really a little bit hot about them. We were talking about how, “God, if this show gets picked up, wouldn’t it just be crazy if Jan and Michael hooked up sometime?” I remember Greg Daniels saying that for him it was tricky. He used to say to me, “You’re this beautiful, strong woman who’s his boss. Why would you ever be attracted to him? We got to find a way to make that work. We need to find a way to make the audience buy that choice.”
They pulled it off by having a recently divorced Jan witness Michael land a huge sale with a representative for the county (played by Tim Meadows) during the course of a long, boozy dinner meeting at Chili’s. They make out in the parking lot at the end and speed off together into the night. It was the first time that Jan seemed a little unhinged.
Melora Hardin: Tim Meadows and Steve just kept cracking me up. I could not hold it together that day. They were just so frickin’ funny. We all knew that we were heading toward hooking them up. There was something so wrong and right about it that it was very appealing to me as an actor. I just love when things are a little bit off.
Many of the smaller characters were slowly fleshed out as fully formed characters in the second season, including Darryl Philbin.
Ben Silverman: Darryl is the smartest guy in the building, but he’s running the warehouse and Michael Scott’s running the office.
Michael would often come down to the warehouse to learn about black culture from Darryl.
Craig Robinson: Michael idolized Darryl in so many ways. Darryl treats Mike with kid gloves. He knows he doesn’t mean harm, but it’s like, “Yo, you go too far each and every time.” He tries to keep the kid gloves on him, but at the same time, he has to exercise patience.
Midway through the season, Dunder Mifflin CEO David Wallace makes his first appearance. He was portrayed by Andy Buckley, who had largely given up on acting by the time he got the role and was working as a financial adviser for Merrill Lynch.
Andy Buckley (David Wallace, Seasons 2–6, 8, and 9): I knew Allison [Jones] for years and one day I ran into her in our neighborhood farmers’ market. She said to me, “What are you doing these days, Buckley?” I said, “Well, I’m a stockbroker. I’m an adviser at Merrill Lynch and I’m married. We have a son.” She said, “If something comes up would you ever want to do something?” And I said, “Yeah, sure. If it was just a smaller thing or I didn’t have to leave town. I can’t leave town.” And I gave her my card.
Months later, he found himself auditioning for the role of David Wallace against Charles Esten.
Andy Buckley: I was like, “Oh man, they’re gonna hire this guy.” Luckily they hired him for the other part [of Stamford branch CEO Josh Porter]. Allison called the next day and said, “All right, they hired you, Buckley. They’re gonna give you glasses and they’re gonna gray your hair a little bit just so you seem a little older and perhaps more mature.”
And that was it. Buckley became yet another perfect comic foil for Steve Carell. Just weeks before Buckley’s debut episode aired, Carell beat out Larry David, Charlie Sheen, Jason Lee, and Zach Braff for the Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series award at the Golden Globes. Nobody saw it coming. “I really did not expect this,” he said after Pamela Anderson handed him the statue. “Thanks to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant for creating such a groundbreaking piece of television and to Greg Daniels for his talent, courage, and sheer audacity. . . . Thanks to my parents for not making me go to law school and finally, to the light of my life, my wife, Nancy.”
Melora Hardin: They didn’t have a big enough table for all of us to go, so most of us were upstairs. We were in the same building, but upstairs on the terrace or something. It was all decorated and fancy, and they had big TVs and I just remember just screaming and being so excited when we won.
Kate Flannery: When Steve won that Golden Globe, we all went crazy. We were working that day and nobody there knew who we were and nobody thought he was going to win. It was just amazing. We couldn’t even be in the room that night. We were only in the viewing party, but everyone went crazy.
Oscar Nunez: We were on the roof because only Steve and Greg Daniels and Nancy were downstairs. When he won we lost our shit, jumping everywhere until we formed a dog pile. People were like, “Oh yeah, that’s the Office people!” It was really cool.
Melora Hardin: It wasn’t very long before Steven came up and we got to all celebrate him and give him big hugs. It was very, very exciting. I still was in a haze. I was just so excited for him.
It was the clearest sign they’d had yet that the show was going to go the distance.
Jason Kessler: Everything really clicked in season two.
Matt Sohn: The show was truly becoming its own and breaking away from the English version.
Creed Bratton: In the second season, I remember driving out to Saticoy Street on Woodman and right before we make a left to go to the stages there was Steve’s picture up on a billboard for 40-Year-Old Virgin. It was like, “Wow! This is really weird.” Everything just coordinated and synchronized for him amazingly, like a comet.