KEY EPISODE 6

“Dinner Party”

The writers’ strike kept The Office off the air for five months in late 2007 and early 2008, but they came back with what’s arguably the greatest episode they ever produced: “Dinner Party.” There had been a slow buildup to it throughout the season as Michael tries to get Jim and Pam to a dinner party at his condo, but when he finally gets them there in this episode he’s unable to hide the sad and outright toxic state of his relationship with Jan. Written by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg and directed by Paul Feig, it’s The Office at its most brutally cringey and its most hilarious.

Gene Stupnitsky: We kind of talked about “Dinner Party” as Who’s Afraid of Jan Levinson-Gould? That was the inspiration for it. And just the world’s worst dinner party, the most awkward dinner party—with your boss. We had set it up earlier, where Michael kept asking Jim and Pam for plans, and they kept having excuses.

Lee Eisenberg: We set it up so in the cold open Michael pretends there’s an emergency. They’re all gonna have to stay late that night, so everyone has to cancel their plans. Michael Scott is always the fool, but in this moment he outsmarts Jim and Pam because he so desperately wants to hang out.

Greg Daniels: In the very beginning, the episode was called “Virginia Woolf” in my notes, and the idea was to have Jim and Pam have this super-uncomfortable night seeing all the awkwardness of Michael and Jan’s relationship and watching it melt down in front of them, in a comedy version of the Albee play. From Michael’s point of view, he and Jan are the central romantic relationship and Jim and Pam are the funny sidekick couple. There was an early talking head where Michael says: “Things are good with Jan, but not as much fun as when I’m hanging out with everybody at the office. I want Jim and Pam to be in my life. They are my Rubbles or Mertzes. I want Jan and Pam to be friends.”

John Krasinski: Because the writers had written such good stuff for “Dinner Party,” it was like tons of gunpowder being in one room.

Ed Helms: It’s such a crucible for the relationships. It’s a tight, contained space where so many relationship issues are bubbling around between Jim and Pam, Andy and Angela, and of course Michael and Jan. That pressure-cooker aspect and the decorum of the dinner party, the sort of need to rise to a different sort of social construct, as opposed to just being coworkers in an office, just kind of heightens everything. It’s just a boiling-hot crucible of comedy.

Gene Stupnitsky: The table read started off very slow. Not a lot of laughs. Little by little, it just starts building, and I never experienced that before. The laughs kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. I remember I was just sweating through my T-shirt. It was the greatest feeling I’ve ever had.

Lee Eisenberg: There’s nothing more satisfying than having Steve Carell barely able to get through his lines. It’s like a live show. You’re seeing someone experience it right in front of you for the first time, which is great.

Angela Kinsey: When we read it, we were laughing hysterically, hysterically.

John Krasinski: There were definitely episodes where I remember the electricity that went through my body in the form of laughter, “Dinner Party” being one of those episodes for sure.

Mary Wall: One of my favorite parts of my job is that I basically just kept track of the laughter at the table reads. Any time there was a laugh in the room, I put a check mark next to where it happened. The bigger the laugh, the bigger the check mark. During the one for “Dinner Party,” the check marks were going off the page.

Ed Helms: Sometimes table reads are quick and easy and sometimes they’re a bit of a slog, and that one had just so many laughs already built into it. Gene and Lee just had such a grasp of the voice of the show and of these characters that we knew that, yes, we’re onto something special here. This is going to be a blast.

Gene Stupnitsky: Most scripts get rewritten, and I think this was the only one ever done that didn’t. The only thing that was changed was that in our first draft Jan hits the neighbor’s dog and kills it on purpose.

Lee Eisenberg: We decided that maybe that was going too far.

Greg Daniels: It did better at the table than anyone had expected considering we were pushing the characters hard, and I remember thinking, “Wow, people love these characters so much they are willing to go with them anywhere.” The cast really sold the script and protected the characters. Starting with Steve and Melora, they brought so much humanity and depth behind the comedy that you never felt the characters were being laughed at or disrespected.

Lee Eisenberg: We always got notes from the network, and sometimes those could be really contentious, but Greg Daniels always handled them really well and at that point we had a pretty good trust and a good shorthand with the network. So the writers got called in to the office to hear the notes. Greg gets on the phone and the executives are on the other line, on speakerphone. Only the writers have read the scripts so far and this is, you know, before the table read, and they get on the phone, and they go, “This script is really, really dark.” And Greg said, “Yeah.” And there’s a pause and they said, “It’s really dark.” And Greg said, “Yeah. It is.” And they go, “It’s really dark.” And he goes, “Yup.” And then he goes, “Okay, anything else, guys?” And they said, “Uh . . . nope.” They hung up and that was it. They didn’t offer any other notes.

Greg Daniels: By that time we were the number one comedy on NBC, so we had earned some leeway. I maybe had to use up some chits to protect this episode, but I had a bunch of chits in the bank. I think we did a little to redeem Jan, like she didn’t intentionally run over a dog, she spray-painted it, but other than that I was pretty confident it was going to be a great episode. Jan and Michael were never supposed to work out, so I think there is an element of relief and hope that they break up. There are some nice moments, like Dwight taking to Michael at the end, or Jan trying to glue the Dundie back together or Michael trying to take the blame with the police, so it wasn’t too dark in my opinion.

Jim and Pam are the first couple to arrive and they get a tour of the house. Andy and Angela come next, followed by an uninvited Dwight and his elderly babysitter Melvina, played by Beth Grant.

Greg Daniels: [The idea was] Jim and Pam would stumble across all these things like the camcorder on the tripod by the bed that would be reveals of what Jan and Michael are like in private. Then we opened it up by including another dysfunctional relationship in Andy and Angela, and after initially thinking the comedy with Dwight would be how upset he was at being excluded, we found a way for him to show up in the most weird couple of all. One of my earliest ideas about Michael’s character before the pilot was that he would refer to Target as “Tar-jay,” and one of the early ideas about Michael and Jan’s relationship was that they were the kind of people who called each other “babe” all the time. We tried to figure what was in character for Michael and Jan, knowing that this was a star-crossed, opposite-of-soul-mate type of thing from the beginning.

Lee Eisenberg: Michael so wants to be friends with Jim and Pam, and the idea of having people over at his house for a dinner party is something I feel like he’s dreamt about for years, with having a girlfriend and being proud of her and all that. He still tries to push through in spite of the fact that Jan is clearly on the edge and in spite of the fact that their relationship is crumbling. He’s trying to put on this façade. At the beginning of the episode, you kind of know that the relationship isn’t great, but then, as you continue to watch it, it’s like, “Oh, my God. He’s trying to get investors in her candle company. Oh, my God. They hate each other! Her assistant wrote a song about her.” That’s the peeling-of-the-onion of it.

Beth Grant (Melvina, Seasons 4 and 9): I had just done No Country for Old Men and I’d worked with Greg Daniels on King of the Hill. When the strike ended, he called me and said, “We want you to play Rainn Wilson’s date and former babysitter.” I was like, “Oh, my God, from the beet farm?” Needless to say, I said yes very quickly. I heard they improv’d a lot, but when I read the script I was like, “My goodness, they don’t need any improv on this. This is just fabulous.” It almost read like a [Harold] Pinter play because it was so literary.

The interiors and exteriors were shot at an actual condominium located at 7303 Bonnie Place in Reseda.

Lee Eisenberg: When Paul Feig came aboard, we scouted the location with him and it was this pretty nondescript condo. Paul said, “I want to paint the walls here, I wanna do this and I wanna do that.” At the time, we had pretty much just been on the office set, and when we did locations, we were on a location for half a day. You know, at a grocery store or something. We never knew that you could kind of transform a place like that.

Paul Feig: My first episode was “Office Olympics,” which, ironically, involved finding Michael’s condo. It was fun making it look the way that it would look when he was buying it. And so I always felt very connected to the condo, because we shot a lot of episodes in there. It’s around Woodland Hills, where we shot a lot of Freaks and Geeks, and so I’ve already had a really great connection with the Woodland Hills area, just because it looks kind of Midwestern.

Lee Eisenberg: We talked a lot about the decor. There’s that kind of Andy Warhol picture of Jan. What does the bedroom look like? You don’t want to point to the jokes too much. You try to kind of throw away as much as possible. There are just little touches, like the beer sign in the garage, and Michael having that hand-shaped chair. We talked about this idea that Michael buys a lot of things that he sees late at night on TV, so he has a Bowflex and he has a Soloflex. He has an Ab Roller. He never uses any of them, but his garage is filled with that stuff. We talked about him having a tiny, tiny flat-screen TV that’s fourteen inches. That was written in the script. He’s very proud of it, because it’s a flat-screen.

Paul Feig: It was such a rich story line to play with, production-wise, because of all this stuff. The whole candle business was just so funny to us. It was also the challenge of “How do you get the joke across that the room just absolutely stinks of candles?” Krasinski was so brilliant at conveying just how badly the room smelled. You can’t put a big flashing red light on and so it really came down to a ridiculous amount of candles and then John’s performance.

John Krasinski: Paul was always and still is one of my favorite collaborators to work with because he just so understood the idea of using us as the tool to help him get wherever he needed. He is such a brilliant director, and one of the things he knows how to do is get the best out of everybody. So he’s very nice for saying that, but I’m sure that part of it was him telling me to do that.

Jenna Fischer: We loved any time that we got to go on location, because we spent most of those ten years in [the main Office set]. I mean, we were excited every time we filmed in the parking lot. So the fact that we actually went on location was super-duper exciting. It was like the kids got to go to Disneyland.

Ed Helms: It’s always fun to kind of go on field trips, especially if it was a little bit of a smaller group. Those locations are always a little more social because you don’t have your same comforts to go back to, your trailer and the lot. You just wind up socializing a bit more, and those group scenes are the same way. You wind up just sitting there at the dinner table with all these wonderful people and you’re just kind of killing time between setups and shots and making each other laugh. They were fun bonding experiences, in a way.

Melora Hardin: It was a tiny condominium deep in the Valley, and so it really was uncomfortable. You really couldn’t get away from anyone. You had your dressing room, but it was, like, a block away, because they couldn’t park it right there. It was perfect for the episode, it really was. I kind of used that a lot and used the heat. It was just scalding hot, I remember. I mean, the place was air-conditioned, but it was hot outside. It was just scorching.

Paul Feig: Since the episode all takes place at night, we had to tent the place so that it looked dark outside. So that just adds an extra layer of insulation. You can have air-conditioning hoses running in, but, you know, we do long takes. When we start to shoot a scene, ’cause it’s the mockumentary style, we turn on the cameras and then we never turn them off until we finish the scene. So it was a little bit of an ordeal in that way.

Greg Daniels: Yes, I remember that too. The condo is pretty cramped just for four couples, but you have to consider all the crew right behind the cameras and the hot lights. I remember the camera operators getting jammed in the tight halls. Plus we often had air-conditioning ducts running in to cool stuff off, but you couldn’t run them during the takes because of sound, and we had long enormous takes with very little breaks between.

Angela Kinsey: It was a very small condo, which I thought was great. It was a very small living room, and we were all sort of wedged in on the sofa together and more people kept arriving. It was definitely a great foundation for this awkward comedy setting. You know? This very awkward dinner party in this very small space.

Paul Feig: To shoot the testimonials, they had to be crammed inside this little bathroom. We just shoved a camera in there that we could barely fit in the room. I was, like, up on the sink and the cameraman was sitting back on this tiny countertop. It just gave it that feeling of there’s no escape, like they’re just trapped in this place. Also, our director of photography and cameraman had come from Survivor. That’s the genius of Greg Daniels. We’d set the scene up and then they would just shoot it the way they would shoot a reality show.

Breaking was always an issue when filming The Office, but they rarely blew as many takes by laughing as they did during this one.

Jenna Fischer: I couldn’t stop laughing when we shot the scene where Jan catches me eating. It was insane. There’s a scene where they’re giving us a tour of the house, and Steve explains that he sleeps on the little chaise longue at the end of the bed, and we could not get through that scene. Every time he went to explain that that’s where he slept, the way he delivered that was so funny, and then he would, like, curl up. . . . We couldn’t get through it. The biggest one was when he’s showing us his flat-screen television. And it’s so tiny. We laughed so hard, like, tears were streaming down our faces.

Melora Hardin: I don’t remember that there was anything particularly funny, but we just got on a laughing jaunt, and we literally could not stop. Every time they turned on the camera, either [Fischer] or me would just be absolutely in fits of laughter. It probably took the longest of any of the other scenes, because we had to literally take a break and walk away to stop laughing. And I don’t even know what we were laughing about. I think we were hot and exhausted.

Beth Grant: When I first arrive, I’m standing in the doorway holding a cooler. Steve went on this wild riff that just killed me. I was trying so hard not to break. Especially as a guest star, you don’t wanna waste everyone’s time and money. The dinner scene was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. I was physically dying inside from holding back laughter. I had to hold a beet on my fork and suck on it. I put everything into that.

Paul Feig: The thing with the bench on the edge of the bed was based partly on an experience I had when I was an intern working for a producer. I became friends with one of the women in the office and I would go kind of hang out with her occasionally. One day she took me to her house. She was living with a guy, and she was showing me around the house, and we look in the bedroom and there’s a little cot next to this king-size bed. I was like, “What’s that?” and she was like, “Look, you’re a single man. You should learn from this. This man I’m with has issues with someone being in his bed.” And so basically, after they had sex, she had to roll off onto this cot. I was like, “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” I can’t even remember if it was in the script or not, but we just had that bench and Steve had to roll off onto it. My favorite thing that I’ve ever contributed in the editing room was as we were editing I said, “Don’t cut when he gets on that bench. That has to last as long as it can before everyone [breaks].” And so we stood there with him curled up on that bench way longer than you should. Jan was just like, “See, he fits, he’s comfortable.” That just destroys me.

Melora Hardin: In the sequence where I sort of dance inappropriately, I purposefully did not do that in rehearsal, just so that John Krasinski could be particularly uncomfortable [when I tried to dance with him]. I waited until we were filming to do that so that he would be completely surprised and have to deal with it on camera, which is why it’s such a great, ridiculously uncomfortable moment. And he doesn’t get up from his seat. I’m a dancer, but I really tried to just dance a tiny bit off the beat. It was so much fun to just be a little bit wrong.

John Krasinski: That’s where the 10 percent of us getting to improv comes into play. The writers were always so supportive of those tiny decisions being up to you. I totally remember that moment. As soon as she started dancing, it was that thing, you could feel the energy in the room, and we were already at maximum, and it just felt ridiculous. It was amazing.

Nothing made them laugh like Steve Carell proudly showing off Michael’s tiny plasma-screen television.

Ed Helms: I had never laughed so hard as I did during that scene. I had my little trick: If I was really laughing, I would began to look at Steve’s ear. That was my trick. I couldn’t make eye contact with him because I would laugh, so I would either look at his chin or his ear or even something behind him and just focus on that, just so that I could get through something and keep a straight face. There was probably plenty of scenes where I’m stiff as a board, not even acting, so to speak, but just trying not to laugh.

John Krasinski: I think that’s probably the hardest I’ve laughed during the entire run of the show, and it’s very evident. I was not professional enough in those scenes because I cracked every time one of those jokes happened. One of the funniest things I’ve witnessed in my life was Steve showing us that flat-screen TV and saying, “When . . . when people are over you can just do this” [pulling the screen out from the wall]. The TV only moved, like, a half an inch. Sometimes Steve would get frustrated when we couldn’t keep it together because he didn’t think he was as funny as we thought he was and also he’s more professional than all of us. But on that one, he couldn’t come back. There was something in the room there that was like an untamed animal, and we were just getting demolished by laughter.

Ed Helms: Then there is this little side table that Michael hand-built that looks like it was built by a three-year-old. There are little throwaway jokes, but they say so much and they’re so dense. There are just so many beautiful elements like that.

Another great moment comes when Michael reveals that Jan has forced him to undergo three vasectomies because she kept changing her mind about whether or not she wanted children.

Paul Feig: We shot that exchange, like, four or five times, and it was really good but it was super heavy. I remember we were all like, “This is a little . . . this isn’t as fun as we wanted it to be.” So I went over to Steve and said, “It’s awesome, we just need to make it a little more fun.” And so that was the take that’s in when he said, “Snip-snap, snip-snap, snip-snap.” That all came out of Steve being such an amazing actor and going, like, “Okay, I know how to take it and make it Michael craziness.” [The cast] were just laughing so hard and going, like, “God, this guy is such a fucking genius.”

Melora Hardin: There’s that scene when we’re all sitting in the living room and I’m telling this story about Michael running through the glass because he heard the ice-cream truck. He said something like, “Well, you know, she put the glass there,” and I said, “Yeah, I’m the devil,” and I put my fingers on my head like little horns. I just thought of it in that moment. Steve’s reaction, he almost cracks up. If you watch him, he’s laughing and saying, “Yeah, yeah, you are the devil!” He was sort of simultaneously almost losing it, because it was funny. When we cut, we all burst in laughter. It’s just one of those really alive kind of moments, and that kind of stuff happened all the time, where we’re just always improvising.

One of the great musical moments in Office history comes when Jan plays a folk song by her young assistant Hunter where he’s clearly singing about losing his virginity to her. Everyone at the party appears horrified when they pick up on this, though Michael looks pretty oblivious. It was written by New Pornographers guitarist Todd Fancey.

Gene Stupnitsky: We liked the idea that Michael was clueless and it was clear to everyone else that Jan took her ex-assistant’s virginity. He wrote it clearly about Jan and how she made him a man, and it was a terrible song. Watching Carell, just kind of looking like there’s nothing in his eyes, just kind of bopping his head along slightly. He likes the song. He has no clue.

Lee Eisenberg: I have a different read on the Carell thing, which is I think he does know and he’s just hoping against hope that he’s wrong. When he’s listening to it, on some level he does know that [Jan and Hunter] had something. We couldn’t remember exactly how it got to Todd. Basically, we wanted it to sound good. We had some relationships with some musicians, and some other people on the show did, and we sent out the lyrics to a bunch of different people. People we had actually heard of and bands we had heard of took the time to record it, kind of on spec, I think?

Gene Stupnitsky: There were some crazy versions. There were some metal versions.

Todd Fancey (New Pornographers guitarist): I got a call from my friend Alicen Schneider, who was vice president of music creative services for NBC. I was a huge fan of the show, and she said, “Do you want to give this a shot?” I said, “Sure, I’ll do it,” and the producers sent me the lyrics. I was living in Vancouver. I just went downstairs to my other apartment—I had two at the time—and boom. It came really quick. I wrote it on acoustic guitar. I went into a studio in suburban Vancouver and recorded it. My direction was “Make it sound kind of amateur. He’s a struggling musician.”

Lee Eisenberg: Todd’s version just made us laugh the most. We ended up going with that one.

Todd Fancey: A few months later, after the writers’ strike, the New Pornographers were on tour in Houston. I had almost completely forgotten about the song. I got a call on my cell from a production assistant on the show. They were like, “We really liked your version, but we want it to be smoother, more polished. And we need it to be Tuesday.” It was a Saturday. I hang up the phone and was like, “Shit. How am I going to do this?” So I booked a studio in Denver with these complete strangers and did a more polished version. I got it in by Tuesday and then they called and said, “We’re going to use the original one you sent. This new one is too polished.” I got a lump-sum payment, and every quarter I get money wherever it’s played.

Most important for the broad picture of the series, the episode marks the end of Michael’s relationship with Jan.

Greg Daniels: Once Jan had gotten together with Michael, I always felt like it would play out like some kind of Greek tragedy for her. She was so together and superior to him in the beginning, and this one weakness that got her entangled with him would eventually destroy her and drive her mad. That was the arc for her, and for Michael we were enjoying the comedy while protecting him where we could, like his strong desire to have children and his romantic yearnings, so that one day he could find someone else more appropriate.