The great television shows of the modern era are expected to make just about ten episodes a season, and audiences are forgiving if they take an occasional year off to make that happen. But back in 2008, The Office was forced to make up for a strike-shortened season four by grinding out twenty-eight episodes in their fifth season. Making matters worse, they had to do that while building in a long break to allow Steve Carell to film a movie. It was a brutal slog of a season for everyone involved, even though they miraculously pulled off a stellar run of episodes. They got the season off to a nice start by bringing Amy Ryan onto the show as Toby’s HR replacement Holly Flax. She quickly became Michael Scott’s love interest.
Anthony Farrell: We were in a place where the Jan thing had run its course and we wanted to see Michael in a better place. Jim and Pam were together and so we were trying to figure out another love story, another way to keep people invested. When we were discussing people to replace the Jim-and-Pam thing, Michael came up, and, I think, rightfully so. We were like, “Yeah, let’s do it with Michael. We just need an amazing person to put up against him.” Everyone at the show was a huge fan of The Wire, so any time we had another character, it would be like, “Well, what about so-and-so from The Wire?”
Brent Forrester: The Office writers were obsessed with The Wire, Mike Schur in particular. They couldn’t believe how great the show was.
Amy Ryan: I had just been nominated for an Oscar [for the gritty thriller Gone Baby Gone] and I knew I was going to get a bit pigeonholed with playing hard-drug-addicted-mom kind of roles. And I said to my agent, “If there’s any chance that people would take our phone call, it is now. I want to do comedy. Can we call The Office?” There was a little bit of coincidence in [the] timing since I’d known Paul Lieberstein from years earlier when we both worked on The Naked Truth with Téa Leoni, but [we] hadn’t really been in touch in between that show and The Office. But a lot of the Office writers were fans of The Wire, so I think my name was being thrown around in that time. It just happened to sync up with my agent calling them saying, “Is there anything that Amy’s right for on the show?”
Brent Forrester: We were asking ourselves, “What actress could come in here and be the great love interest for Steve Carell in this incredible character of Michael Scott that he’s created?” I remember Paul Lieberstein and a couple other handpicked writers were being shown a tape of Amy Ryan in the main conference room. It wasn’t even an audition for The Office. It was an audition for some other show that they had gotten their hands on. I saw everybody just standing and staring and just riveted. I don’t even know to this day what the scene was, but I remember she had her back to the camera and she kept looking over her shoulder. She was delivering lines out of context. In just that, it was one of the most riveting auditions I’d seen. It didn’t surprise me at all when everyone just went bananas for her and cast her in the show. I remember she was instantly riveting to all of the writers and Carell as well. There was no testing period for her that I recall. It was just like instant home-run casting.
Amy Ryan: They didn’t have me read for the role. They invited me and I think hoped for the best. It’s flattering, but at the same time, not auditioning is sometimes stressful because you’re hoping nobody made a mistake, including yourself.
Michael’s instinctual aversion to human resources initially causes him to despise Holly, but as soon as they begin speaking he realizes she’s the perfect match for him. She’s goofy, lovable, and shares his juvenile sense of humor. A look of pure rapture comes across his face when he breaks out his Yoda voice while helping her fix a chair and she responds with a Yoda impression all her own.
Brent Forrester: She had the thing that you saw in Michael Scott at his best, which was a big heart, and to some degree she had the same bad taste that Michael has with comedy. She was just exactly on his level. That Yoda moment by the chair was it. That was the moment where you’re like, “Oh my God. These two are perfect for each other.”
Amy Ryan: I did not have a Yoda voice. Star Wars is not my chosen movie that I would go to in terms of quoting things. I probably had to Google Yoda. I knew who Yoda was of course, but I’m sure I Googled scenes of Yoda just to make sure I could somehow get it in there.
Justin Spitzer: For Holly, we talked about creating the perfect woman for Michael without it being the paint-by-numbers perfect woman. You don’t want it to just be Michael as a woman, but someone with like a goofy sense of humor feels right.
Aaron Shure: After he’d had such a hard time with Jan, who was kind of a cold fish, we thought it would be great to give him a sort of a kindred spirit. Someone who would have similar nerdiness to him. Amy is so guileless in real life too. She really is that sweet and nerdy. And so it was to have Michael Scott have the same reaction that the audience had of like, “Oh my God, she gets me.” She was just a total pro and played off of Steve beautifully. That chemistry seemed real to me.
Brent Forrester: You never really were rooting for Michael and Jan to be together. It always felt like a toxic relationship. What was fun about it was how awful she was to him. But with Holly, of course, you really did root for them to get together. You just really felt like suddenly Michael Scott is in an actual romantic comedy and you want him to find happiness with this woman, which was an incredible achievement by the two of them.
Jeff Blitz: How could you find someone who felt like a partner to a guy who felt like he shouldn’t be partnered with anyone? Her approach to the character was she has such a good heart that she sees that Michael is coming from a place where the things that he wants are good, and that when he fucks stuff up in the world, that’s not the important stuff to her.
Amy Ryan: She’s a great dork. I mean, I think there’s a lid for every pot. She’s not like Michael Scott, but they definitely are cut from the same cloth in many ways. I think she’s good at her job, but she is a playful dork. And honestly, this isn’t an exaggeration, I would come home feeling like I had worked out in the gym every day ’cause my abs were sore because I laughed so hard during filming. Getting to laugh at work just made me so happy. I’ve been literally crying for my supper all these years in these heavy dramas. It felt so good to go home happy.
Behind the scenes, however, major changes were coming to The Office. Parks and Recreation was picked up by NBC as a six-episode test run late in the 2008–9 season. It was created by Greg Daniels and Michael Schur, and they both left to work on it midway through season five. Schur would never come back beyond brief cameos as Dwight’s dim cousin Mose, though Daniels ultimately found a way to divide his time between the two shows. In the early days of Parks and Rec, however, it ate up most of his time. Paul Lieberstein and Jen Celotta became co-showrunners of The Office.
Jen Celotta: Greg is obviously phenomenal, and he created the show, and the show was always better with Greg around. He’s just fantastic. But I felt confident when Paul and I were made co-showrunners. We’d been there for a while, and we were excited, and we were ready for this challenge. When we started doing it, we had the awareness that Greg was still involved and he’d hear what we were doing, and give us notes, and give us thoughts, and so it didn’t feel scary.
Kelly Cantley: We called Paul and Jen “the Committee.” With Greg, you could say to him, “Hey, Greg, I need you to think about this thing and I don’t need an answer now, but I need an answer Wednesday to save money or Thursday to make it possible.” And then you’d circle back and he’d give you an answer. With Paul and Jen, it was different, and I can’t tell you how it’s different. I have worked with both of them since, and I really like them. I like them as much as I like Greg, they’re just different to work with.
Jen Celotta: For the most part, Paul and I did similar things. There would be two rooms; Paul would run one room and I’d run another room. I think he was in editing a little bit more than me, but both of us spent a lot of time in the writers’ room, a lot of time in editing, and kind of a decent amount of time onstage as well. He was a little bit more savvy about the kind of produceral budget and money things, where I wasn’t. I was happiest in the writers’ room, but there was so much work to be done that we were both doing too many things all the time.
Aaron Shure: Greg would float in and out and he would often be in editing. It was always exciting when he would show up.
Randy Cordray (Producer): Greg had been grooming Paul Lieberstein and Jennifer Celotta to take over the show when he left for Parks and Recreation. Greg was still around sometimes though. That meant that to get anything done I had to get three people to sign on it. I needed three people’s opinions on everything. I had to go chase down Greg. I had to go chase down Paul. I had to go chase down Jen. And frequently I’d see Paul and he’d say, “Well, what does Jen say?” I’d say, “Well, I haven’t seen her yet.” He’d go, “Well, go ask her.” I’d go ask Jen. “What does Paul say?” I’d say, “Well, he said to ask you.” She’d go, “Well, you’d better check with Greg.” So this went on and on and was a bit of a difficulty for me, but it’s all in a day’s work. It’s what you do.
Jen Celotta: That’s hilarious to hear now, though it must have been frustrating at the time.
At the same time, longtime Office director Paul Feig was hired to work on the show full-time.
Paul Feig: I actually thought I was going to direct at least half of the episodes, but what ended up happening is there were so many people that had it in their contracts that they could direct an episode by that season that I became the guy who was on the set making sure that the new people knew how to direct the show, which was fun.
Randy Cordray: Paul Feig was there to supervise these new directors to not make mistakes or not go into areas that were not The Office, to be on the set and maintain the overall quality and style and look of the show, and make sure that newcomer directors were not departing from that style.
Brian Wittle: I think Paul was hired as an extra person to fill Greg’s shoes. Greg trusted Paul in that way.
Oscar Nunez: Paul Feig ran our show for a little while.
Justin Spitzer: I wouldn’t say that Paul Feig ran the show. I think the idea was that he would be an on-set producer. And so he was on set all the time, which was great. Usually the writer would be the sort of on-set producer. But I’m sure if Paul was there he was able to make those key decisions that especially a lower-level writer couldn’t have made. He’d be in the writers’ room sometimes but I don’t think that was his main role.
Kate Flannery: I don’t know what Paul’s title was at that time, but he was definitely running the show. And then Paul Lieberstein and Jen Celotta later that year. It was about as comfortable as it could be with Paul Feig. Greg was really smart about not bringing in someone from the outside. Everything was very insular in a great way.
The cast and crew needed all the help they could get to churn out twenty-eight episodes.
Randy Cordray: We shut the show down from December twenty-second that year, 2008, through February second of 2009. And this was to give Steve Carell basically six weeks to go honor an obligation to be in a feature film.
Mary Wall: We went from getting six episodes to barely knowing if we were getting picked up to doing like twenty-eight. It’s a privilege to be in that position, to be trusted to do that. But yeah, that’s a lot of work.
Jen Celotta: That schedule meant we had to do nineteen episodes in a row at one point. This is when Paul and I were running things. I told Paul at one time, “I feel like I’m in a horror movie and I’m the only one that sees the monster.” Then later, halfway through the season, he’s like, “I see the monster, I see the monster!”
Paul Feig: It was grueling on the writers. I just remember being like, “Holy shit. How do we get through this?”
Lee Eisenberg: Looking back at seasons two through four of The Office, to me, they’re pretty perfect for comedy. There’s episodes I like more than others obviously, but I think that that’s as good to me as network comedy can be. But if you were to task those same writers to do thirteen, I do think the quality would’ve been higher. It’s really hard to put together a show. You’re breaking an episode. You’re rewriting an episode. You’re editing an episode and you’re shooting an episode. That’s all happening concurrently. There just aren’t enough man-hours.
Aaron Shure: There were a few times that season where you’d be driving home listening to Morning Edition on NPR. We made pacts in the writers’ room to all work out and just keep our physical selves going.
Halsted Sullivan: I joined in the middle of that season. It was like being thrown into the fire. There was no freshman week where you’re beginning to know your dorm-mates and putting up posters. It was brutal from the second I got there. And I think for people who had been there from the beginning, it was extra brutal. But I will say these twenty-six-episode seasons, especially in a world where I’ve been on thirteen-episode shows ever since, the idea of twenty-two right now is crazy. And then, adding four more when you don’t have any more pre-production in the beginning, it becomes exponentially harder.
Gene Stupnitsky: At first you’re like, “I would do anything to be hired on this show that I love so much.” We were obsessed with it. And then by season five you’re just like, “I don’t have a life. I wanna go on a date. I want to see my friends or meet them for dinner. I want to go home.” You can’t do anything and you start to resent it. At first you’re like, “I would give my pinky finger to work on this show. . . .”
Lee Eisenberg: But then it becomes a job. I think that even for all the actors. The coolest thing about the show was it broke a million actors. It broke a ton of writers. But then at a certain point, you’re not basking in the gratefulness that you were hired five years ago. You’re resenting the fact that somebody wrote a bad script and now it’s midnight on a Friday and you’re like, “We might have to come in on Saturday?”
Ken Whittingham: Everybody started to get a little tired because they were doing so much, especially Steve. I remember Steve asking me at one point in season five, “Ken, how long do you think this show is gonna go?” And I said, “As long as you wanna do it.” And he just kinda had this look like, “Oh man!” I could just tell that he was very tired just because everybody was pulling him on so many levels. They were pulling at him for movies and God knows what else. I think he was really starting to be drained by about season five. He wanted to finish out and he loved the cast and didn’t want to let anybody down. But I could see that it was starting to wear on him a little bit.
Justin Spitzer: It was hard. It was a lot of crazy-late nights. I remember that point where we figured out the whole Michael Scott Paper Company was really exciting because we latched on to an idea that generated four episodes and they weren’t super hard to break. Season five, at that point we’re at the place in the run where it feels like, “Okay, we’ve done every story there is to tell, every available story.” So we’re like, “Oh my God, there’s this whole new thing, and it’s generating a few different stories!” We would always talk about that afterward. We’d be like, “We’ve got to find another arc like that.”
Halsted Sullivan: It was a grand experiment that worked. And we were able to breathe life into the middle of a very long season. The way for us to make it manageable was to sort of take off chunks and make them mini arcs.
The six-episode Michael Scott Paper Company arc began with Dunder Mifflin hiring a strict, no-nonsense vice president named Charles Miner. He was played by Idris Elba of The Wire.
Anthony Farrell: I remember sitting in Greg’s office with Paul and Jen and me pitching, “I think Michael should have a black boss, someone he can’t mess around with. Someone he tries all of his jokes with; nothing works. He just cannot get any traction on this new boss.” And then Paul goes, “Yeah, like a Stringer Bell type,” and I was like, “Yeah!” And I could see his wheels turning from that moment and then he made it happen.
Idris Elba (Charles Miner, Season 5): I didn’t even have to audition. They were all really big fans of The Wire and they were like, “Please come and do it.” I was like, “You know I don’t do much comedy.” They were like, “Oh, no, you’ll be fine.”
Jenna Fischer: Idris was so awesome, but unfortunately I was in the Michael Scott Paper Company most of the time he was on set. But he is really handsome. All the girls were aflutter.
Kate Flannery: He was so interesting because he was always in character and he spoke with an American accent the whole time so he wouldn’t accidentally slip out of it during a scene. And I loved how tough that character was on Jim. I thought that was hilarious.
Brent Forrester: One thing about bringing in Idris Elba was how funny John Krasinski was able to be once we brought him in. It was Mindy again who really identified this before anybody. She was like, “Watch how funny it is when Jim eats it in front of Idris Elba and looks like the jerk and the goof and he’s not the funny guy. He’s just seen as a jerk.” I thought it was super effective. It was a gear that I had not seen from John, usually who’s always great but Mr. Cool. He was suddenly not Mr. Cool. It was just so fun.
Gene Stupnitsky: Everyone loved Jim and we were really into the idea of a guy who just didn’t get him and put him on the back of his heels. He cannot win this guy over no matter how charming he is and no matter how hard he tried.
B. J. Novak: What I love about this arc is you get to see Jim play comedy stories because he’s just a guy whose boss hates him for some reason. John is a really gifted comedy actor and we’ve come to think of him as a romantic lead because of the Jim/Pam story, but when he’s allowed to be funny he’s just so excellent. And then Michael/Pam are such a good pairing. Instead of Jim/Pam and Jim/Dwight and Michael/Dwight, now you get this Michael/Pam dynamic and this Jim/Idris dynamic and some Dwight/Andy.
Ken Whittingham: Idris stayed in character the entire time, which I was very impressed with. Every once in a while you could hear a little bit of his English accent, but almost never. I never have seen anybody do it that well.
Andy Buckley: I’m one of the few people who still hasn’t seen any of The Wire. Even back then people were talking about how it was one of the greatest shows ever. That day I got to the set people were saying, “Stringer Bell is here! Stringer Bell is here!” I walk in and he’s actually in Michael’s office doing his vocal warm-up exercises because obviously he’s doing that American accent as a guy from Pittsburgh and he’s not that. It was pretty darn impressive.
Idris Elba: I loved working with those guys, John Krasinski and Steve Carell. It was the height of the show’s popularity when I came on. I wasn’t really there to do the comedic role, I played pretty much the straight guy, but I really enjoyed that. I learned a lot about the process of how they make those shows. There was a script, but there was a certain amount of improvisation and they were always trying to trip each other up and make people laugh. It was like, “I’m going to say something that’s really ridiculous and it’s not on script and it’s going to be a surprise,” and then you have to keep a straight face. They were the best of the best.
Michael also doesn’t get along with Charles Miner, and he quits after going to the corporate office in New York and complaining to David Wallace.
Lee Eisenberg: We’d been building up to this. Michael applied for the job that Ryan ultimately got and he felt undervalued. Putting in Charles Miner was this type of thing where it’s like, “Is Michael gonna go out on his own? Is he going to stand up for himself?” When he quits he says to David Wallace, “You have no idea how high I can fly.” Which is such a cheesy line, but it worked. David Wallace was saying, “Michael, you’re a nice guy. . . .” He was placating him. He was like, “I’ll be your fake friend but you’re not gonna get this other thing.” Michael had the agency to stand up to him. Dunder Mifflin was his life and the fact that he had enough self-worth to say fuck off felt very satisfying, at least to us.
In a scene straight out of Jerry Maguire, he makes a grand exit speech and asks for someone to join him in starting a new paper company. Much to Jim’s shock, Pam agrees to join him. They recruit Ryan from his new job at the bowling alley and start a rival paper company down the hall from Dunder Mifflin.
B. J. Novak: It was a big challenge making it funny that Michael would have his own paper company and still making it realistic that Pam would believe in it.
Halsted Sullivan: The Michael Scott Paper Company run is probably one of my favorite times at The Office. It was a great mini arc. And I feel like that’s another thing I learned at The Office. What happens if you actually move the star outside of the office? It’s not like killing Ned Stark [on Game of Thrones], but on other shows, you would never do that. You’d never take your main characters and take them out of the heart of the show and put them on their own planet.
Warren Lieberstein: It was a lot of fun because it was another way for us to show that Michael Scott was a smart guy and not just a buffoon. He could go out and start a company all by himself that could be successful. Weirdly, we probably spent too much time researching how he could do all this: How much money would he need to start this up? What kind of investment could he get? Where could he get the suppliers from? We figured out all these mechanics of how he could do it and then none of that got onto the show.
Brent Forrester: It took us a while to realize how vital the boss character is in an office comedy. Michael Scott was a great boss for an office comedy because he could create chaos by his personality. Then similarly, to bring in a boss who’s more powerful than Michael was a great story generator.
Halsted Sullivan: With a character like Michael Scott, who’s sort of in everyone’s business and a very nontraditional boss, what happens if you bring in a very traditional boss? When Michael is in the office, everyone else seems like . . . I don’t wanna say the sane ones. But everyone else seems like the well-behaved ones. But then you realize, when you have a very strict disciplinarian boss, how Michael has pulled them toward his own way of thinking and goofing off and having fun at the office. What happens when Michael’s not there?
B. J. Novak: We were worried about this arc since we struggled sometimes with Pam in New York and Jim in Stamford for the episodes to feel whole and not just have people itch for it to go back to the office. When we started this arc we were more confident because we knew we had Michael and Pam and Ryan [together]. It just wasn’t one character going off to a new place, but we were still nervous shooting so many people out of the office. . . . [But] I think it’s the most successful of the arcs, in my opinion, where we move people around.
The Michael Scott Paper Company manages to undercut Dunder Mifflin and steal many of their biggest clients. That means selling paper at a huge loss, but it does force David Wallace to buy the company rather than compete with them. All of this is happening while the US economy and the stock market are in a state of free fall. That led to chaotic days for Andy Buckley as he tried to balance his fake responsibilities as the head of Dunder Mifflin with his real-world responsibilities as a financial consultant at Merrill Lynch, where he continued to work despite being on The Office for the past three years.
Andy Buckley: The day the stock market was down 750 points just happened to be a day where I was in scenes from seven a.m. to seven p.m. It was the whole negotiation where we’re gonna buy the Michael Scott Paper Company from Michael, Pam, and Ryan. They would say, “Okay, let’s cut. We’re gonna take five minutes.” I’d then pick up a phone and call as many clients as I could to try and calm their nerves over the market crash. It was an absolutely crazy day where both worlds were colliding. And of course I can’t sit there and say to them, “I’m sitting here all day doing scenes with Steve Carell and Idris Elba. I wish you guys were here,” when people’s world was collapsing.
Another major plotline of season five was Andy’s finally learning that Angela is having an affair with Dwight. In the end, she loses them both.
Brent Forrester: We all just delighted over the Andy/Angela dynamic. Back in “The Merger” when Andy and Dwight had their first scene together, I was like, “This is the funniest, greatest thing in the show, just these two, their rivalry.” I think everybody felt that. Pitting them against each other was just one of the funnest comedy battles ever. Of course, to put Angela between them in this rivalry was endlessly funny.
The penultimate episode of the season is “Cafe Disco,” where Michael turns the former Michael Scott Paper Company office into a combination coffeehouse/dance hall. It’s wonderfully surreal, even though it’s straying from the naturalistic tone of the early seasons.
Warren Lieberstein: We had this space where the Michael Scott Paper Company used to be and I remember we wanted to do something with it. We were talking about, “What should it be? Should it be a café? Does Michael open up a small café? Or is it like a dance club?” And I think at that point it was me and Halsted and Brent Forrester. . . . It was just the three of us trying to figure out what the fuck we were going to do. And then Paul [Lieberstein] came out of B. J.’s office. We’re like, “We’re trying to figure out if it’s going to be a café.” And Paul just pauses and then he just looks up and then he’s like, “It’s a café and a disco.” He goes, “Michael, there are two things that he loves: coffee and dancing. Write that.” And then he goes back into his office. And then the three of us just look at each other and we’re like, “Okay, that’s it.” And then we were on our way.
Halsted Sullivan: I love “Cafe Disco” because everyone had their moment. There were lots of subtle jokes in there, like Angela walking under the limbo stick. We just had a blast writing it. Warren [Lieberstein] and I just sort of swung for the fences with that episode. And we were just like, “Really? He’s gonna have a disco downstairs and there’s coffee?” We had to think about the whole puzzle. It’s like, “Oh, what if there was a vent where it goes up through the bathroom and then Michael wants to restore order?” This was after Michael Scott Paper Company and Michael was like, “I need to reset this office and get everyone back to their old self.” And then we said to ourselves, “What are the stakes so it’s not just people dancing downstairs?” It then became, “Can he get Angela to dance?” He spent an hour trying to get that little foot tap from Angela because she was just not going to do that.
Jennie Tan: “Cafe Disco” is one of my favorite episodes. That had such a great ending when they’re all in there dancing in that tiny room and Bob and Phyllis are dancing. I think that is the hallmark of the best episodes of The Office, where everyone gets involved and they’re somehow supporting each other, rooting each other on.
The season ends with “Company Picnic.” It’s a packed episode where Michael reconnects with Holly, Pam demonstrates surprising volleyball skills, and Michael inadvertently tells the Buffalo branch of Dunder Mifflin that their office is about to be shut down. At the very end, Pam goes to the hospital to mend a sprained ankle and finds out that she’s pregnant. The audience doesn’t get to hear the dialogue, but you see Jim turn to the camera with a look of absolute shock and joy on his face.
Ken Kwapis: It’s an emotional moment for Jim, and John and I were discussing the right way to play it. I reminded John that Jim has now had this relationship for a few years with this camera operator. This is a guy, or woman, we don’t know who’s behind the camera, but Jim has developed a relationship with this person. So suddenly the way John played it, the reaction was very personal. It was very much about sharing this news with somebody who’s been in his life, this off-screen camera operator.
It’s a great episode, but it was also the twenty-eighth one of the season and by that point Jen Celotta and Paul Lieberstein were completely fried.
Jen Celotta: I crashed a little bit before the table read for “Company Picnic.” I was lying under the table in the conference room and only my feet were visible. All I could pitch were Creed jokes because my brain was gone. But Paul got us through the finish line and then we went to the table read and it went really well. Steve started telling Paul how great it was, but Paul said it felt like this shell came down over him. He saw like Steve’s mouth moving, but he couldn’t hear a word. It was like the end of finals at school. We had been running on adrenaline for so long and now that it was over, we just both completely crashed.