KEY EPISODE 12

“Finale”

The finale begins with a time jump of an entire year. The documentary has already aired; Dwight is firmly established as regional manager and he’s dramatically increased business, even though he had to fire Kevin for gross incompetence, Stanley has retired to Florida, and Creed has vanished because the police were after him for crimes he committed in the 1960s. But the cameras are back for a reunion panel at a local theater just before Dwight marries Angela at Schrute Farms.

Halsted Sullivan: We talked a lot about great endings of great shows like Six Feet Under and Bob Newhart. What are the resonant endings? We wanted to say goodbye to these people who had become friends and know that everyone was in a good place.

Ken Kwapis, the director of the pilot and many of the best episodes, was brought back.

Ken Kwapis: I was thrilled to get the invite. In a way, I think for the cast my being there reminded people of the beginnings of the show. I think Greg just wanted me there to make everyone feel like we were bringing the whole process full circle. At the table read Greg said, “Ken was the country doctor who birthed this puppy and now he’s come back to put the old dog down.”

Brent Forrester: All the actors were invited to come in and pitch whatever they wanted for the end. That had not been encouraged early on. In fact, I remember season five, six, seven when Paul Lieberstein was running the show, he felt it was important not to invite too much pitching from the actors because they could overpower the writers with their tremendous personalities. That’s a truism of television, by the way. Generally the writers and actors are balkanized. The reason is that the writers, we’re just too meek relative to the actors. Their personalities are too strong. We get overwhelmed by them. But we invited them in and said, “Pitch us everything that you want to do. What’s your dream?”

Owen Ellickson: It was a sort of a creative challenge on a scale I have not come close to encountering at any other point in my career. It was a weird thing in that if you watch seasons two, and three, and four, you would not say each of these eighteen people should get a least 4 percent of the finale. It ended in a way that was sort of more egalitarian than the show itself had been for most of its life.

Kate Flannery: My idea was that maybe Meredith falls in love with a cop and that way like she’ll never have a problem with DUIs.

Brent Forrester: Creed had this beautiful song called “All the Faces” that he wrote years ago that deserved to be a hit and he had never recorded it. Early on, I remember him coming into the office and asking about it.

Creed Bratton: I played Greg “All the Faces” and said, “I think everybody should be in Poor Richard’s and we get a close-up of their faces while I’m singing this song.” I didn’t hear a thing about it. Then we were at the table read and at the end of the script I look and there it says, “Creed sings his original song ‘All the Faces.’” That was the second or third time that I cried. I had to pull it really together. People were seeing me over there with my head down when everyone’s laughing and stuff like that. I was so emotional. It was a huge, huge gift to me. I also said to them, “I think it would be great if we could bring Devon Abner back again,” because Devon and I stayed friends and we’d see each other on occasion too. I wanted to help him out.

In the episode, Dwight gives Devon his old job back after firing Kevin. He doesn’t have any speaking lines, but he’s back in the bullpen in several scenes after being gone since early in season two.

Devon Abner: I was in New York doing another play when I got a call. They said, “If you can make it out here tomorrow, we’ll give you a couple of weeks on the show, but you have to pay your own airfare.” The residuals I made from that one where I got fired were a lot of money since I wasn’t an extra in it. I thought, “What the hell. I’ll gladly do that if I have another shot at one of those.” I used frequent flyers, got out there the next morning, and stayed at a friend’s house. I remember Creed said to me, “Hey, do you have some lines?” I said no and he said, “I’m going to get you lines.” I said, “No, that’s okay,” because as long as they [paid] me as a principal, I would get the residuals. It was a lot of fun and I’m very grateful they thought of me.

Devon wasn’t the only old face back on the set for the finale shoot. Despite telling almost nobody, Steve Carell agreed to film a couple of quick scenes at Dwight’s wedding.

Halsted Sullivan: There was a lot of talk about how to bring Michael back, and I think it was just as much Steve’s idea. He wanted to come back but was like, “I don’t want it to be all about me. The show has gone on for two years without me.” But of course Michael would come back for Dwight and Angela’s wedding. He had moved on with his life, so it wasn’t gonna be Michael coming back and doing shenanigans.

Rusty Mahmood: It was a huge, huge secret. We had fake script pages and even the cast didn’t know. We didn’t know for sure if it was going to happen because we were negotiating it to the last minute. When he came, he had a little more gray in his hair and a little different look. It was so emotional that I think I remember Rainn crying.

The big reveal comes halfway through when Dwight is about to walk down the aisle and Jim tells him he can’t serve as his best man. Dwight is confused and hurt until he turns around and sees Michael standing in the doorway. “Michael,” he says. “I can’t believe you came!” He briefly holds back a grin before delivering an inevitable, “That’s what she said.” Michael—now happily married to Holly and the father of young kids—has just one other quick scene at the wedding. “I feel like all my kids grew up,” he said, “and then they married each other. It’s every parent’s dream.”

Ken Kwapis: It’s so wonderful that even though the character feels more mature . . . it’s a relief to know that he’s still capable of such a dunderheaded comment.

Jen Celotta: They didn’t even tell the network Steve was coming back. I’ve never ever heard of anything like that happening.

Steve Burgess: Greg talked to Steve and Steve said he would come back, but he really didn’t want to promote it and didn’t want the show to be Michael Scott comes back to The Office. He wanted The Office to end without this big promotion of him coming back, and Greg agreed. His pages were numbered and collected, and anything that had Steve Carell’s dialogue on it was only given to the people who needed to see it, and then it was collected again afterward so that no extra pages could get out.

Ken Kwapis: Some of the cast members didn’t know until the morning. They were in the makeup trailer and suddenly Steve walked in to get his makeup done. It was like, “What the . . . ?” Everyone was flabbergasted.

Kate Flannery: Most of us found out maybe ten minutes before he got there. I’m so relieved because if I had known before and I somehow let it slip, I would never have been able to live with myself.

Robert Shafer: I was standing there talking to Phyllis and Creed and all of a sudden I hear Steve in the background. I said, “That sounds like Steve.” They both nod their head and they smile a little bit and go, “He’s here!” I wish our State Department was as tight with secrecy as the writers and producers of The Office.

Matt Sohn: It was such a pleasure to have him back after his two years of being gone, and to kind of feel that old energy again.

Alysia Raycraft: Steve was camera ready when he arrived. He just wore what he already had, but as how Michael looked at the end, which was a little more tailored and a nicer suit. And it was everybody’s favorite camp counselor was back. Everybody wanted to have a minute with him. I would see him throughout the day laughing and hugging different people.

Ken Kwapis: Greg made the perfect choice for him to just show up at the wedding. It just made the wedding scene that much more festive and celebratory and emotional.

Steve Burgess: We had a bunch of extras at the wedding and I talked to them and said, “This is our giant secret. You guys are now part of our family. You have to keep the secret. You have to not tell anybody that Steve’s gonna be on the show.” And then I think the dailies were kept in a vault that was somewhere different than at Universal, so that there was no chance that there was any leak there. It was a major amount of secrecy and I kept telling Greg, “They’re gonna fire me. They’re gonna fire me.” Greg kept saying, “What are you worried about? We’re done after this week anyway.”

Jen Celotta: It was edited down to time with a different scene so that nobody would know.

Steve Burgess: We basically didn’t tell NBC that Steve was back on the finale until the day before it aired. We were worried that there were leaks at SAG and leaks at NBCUniversal and all that, so Steve signed his contract for the week and I kept it in my desk drawer until the day before we aired and then I turned it in and sent it through the system. But the NBC executives kept asking when could they see a cut of the finale, and Greg kept putting them off, and putting them off, and finally the day before it aired they said, “We have to see it before we air it.” So we brought them into the edit bay and I sat there with them and as soon as Steve came on and they saw Steve on it I got really dirty looks from the NBC execs because they didn’t know he was gonna be there. Somehow we pulled it off and we’re very proud of that fact. I got a text from Steve Sauer, Steve Carell’s manager, during the airing of the finale. He said something to the effect of, “What the fuck? We pulled it off! Amazing.”

In the weeks building up to the finale, Daniels and the entire cast repeatedly lied and said that Carell wouldn’t be returning.

Claire Scanlon: Ken Kwapis and Greg Daniels would do interviews and Ken would just lie with aplomb and after the interview Greg’s like, “Don’t you feel guilty about lying?” And he’s like, “No, not even a little bit. It’s for a good cause.”

John Krasinski: I lied to Letterman! I have to apologize to him for that at some point. It was just one of those things that we all vowed and had to protect.

Steve Carell: I lied for months to the press, to almost everyone, really. And I felt terribly for the cast and for Greg Daniels, because they all lied, too. [But] I didn’t want it to be a big thing. I did it out of respect for the show and for the actors. My only hope with it was I didn’t want it to be about Michael coming back. I didn’t want the story to be about him in any way. I wanted it to be more of a tip of the hat to the show.

A tougher job was wrapping up everyone’s story line in just fifty minutes, but they did manage to give Ryan and Kelly a happy ending by having them run off together and by giving Ryan’s baby to Nellie, fulfilling her dream of becoming a mother. Darryl finally gets together with his warehouse-worker crush, Val; Andy gets a job in the Cornell admissions department; Erin meets her birth parents; Oscar runs for state senate; and Pam surprises Jim by selling their house so they can move to Austin and he can work at the sports agency.

Ken Kwapis: It was such a massive production. I think the screenplay for the finale runs about seventy-five pages, maybe more. Then on top of that, there were like forty pages’ worth of alternates and other ideas. There were so many stories to wrap up.

Halsted Sullivan: We were writing up until the last minute. We were even in a trailer just down the hill from that wedding banging out scenes because Greg would come up with ideas and be like, “Let’s do this.” In the end, fifty minutes of the show aired, but I think we had ninety minutes of show.

Near the end, everyone gathers in the warehouse for the unveiling of a massive mural created by Pam. They take a group photo, and in the final breaking of the fourth wall, Greg Daniels poses with them, along with many writers, producers, and members of the crew.

Brent Forrester: One thing that really stuck out to me about the finale was the way Greg was using the finale itself as this way of making a yearbook for himself. The final episode, Greg ends up shooting, of course, all of the actors in the show that he’s loved, including Carell, who comes back for Dwight’s wedding, but also the way he put in all the crew. Even his own manager appears. His wife appears. Writers appear. I appear asking a question in the audience during the reunion panel. All the people asking questions in the audience are writers. Greg was trying to capture on film the faces and voices of all the people that he loved in the making of The Office. It was so touching to me the way that, even more than plot, it was driving the episode.

Mary Wall: Everyone who ever worked on the show was in that scene pretty much. And then someone would be crying because it was their last talking head. So Greg would go and light another talking head. It’s like, “No, it’s not your last one now. Now you have a new last one!”

The main cast then goes up to the office to share some memories and final thoughts. “It took me so long to do so many important things,” says Pam. “It’s hard to accept I spent so many years being less happy than I could have been. Jim was five feet from my desk and it took me four years to get to him.” Andy was equally reflective. “I spent so many years at Dunder Mifflin thinking about my old pals, my college a cappella group,” he said. “The weird thing is now I’m exactly where I want to be. I got my dream job at Cornell and I’m still thinking about my old pals, only now they’re the ones I made here. I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

Halsted Sullivan: That Andy Bernard quote has probably been said back to me more than any other thing. It’s those tiny moments that resonate that people remember. In rewatching it, I always got choked up.

Matt Sohn: That last day there were a whole lot of tears. There was a whole lot of having to cut and bring makeup in and a whole lot of hugging and scenes dragging on and on. I remember Ken Kwapis being at a point where he was like, “Okay, guys, we’ve got to hold it together because we just need to get through this day. This is a long enough day as it is, let’s just wrap this up and finish things up so that we can be done.”

The last line goes to Pam. “I thought it was weird when you picked us to make a documentary,” she said. “But all in all, I think an ordinary paper company like Dunder Mifflin is a great subject for a documentary. There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that kind of the point?” The final image is Pam’s drawing of the Dunder Mifflin building, which transitions into the exterior of the place.

Ken Kwapis: A lot of people were in tears throughout the whole episode, but those scenes in particular were very emotional because they didn’t even feel like scripted scenes so much as it just felt like the gang sitting around reminiscing. There was a scene that we ended up cutting, where they realize that poor old plant that’s sitting in the middle of the bullpen has been there as long as any of the employees. They decide to take the plant out and plant it in front of the building. That was a possible ending for the finale, where they go take the plant out and I think they’re chanting, “Planty, planty.” Then Greg originally thought it would be nice to then just cut to a shot of the building the following morning where you just see that plant as the sun’s coming up. I love the idea of the plant because it’s a little unexpected thing to end on, but Pam’s painting is perfect.

Halsted Sullivan: Pam’s line about finding beauty in small places came from Greg, because that’s basically what the whole show was about. It’s finding beauty in the small things in this office in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with very few windows.

Steve Burgess: I think the last scene that we shot was Pam taking the picture off the wall. [That’s true, at least according to the call sheet for the day.]

Mary Wall: Pam taking the photo off the wall was definitely the last shot. It felt so final to everyone there. Greg was standing off by the camera and Ken Kwapis was shooting it. And he shot it a few times, and I think everyone was exhausted, that whole crew. They had worked so hard that week. I mean, I don’t even know how much they could emotionally process, because of how hard they worked that week. And even with all of that, there was sort of the feeling like no one wanted to yell cut on the scene. At one point, Ken just looked over at Greg and gave a look like, “I’ve got the scene. You can keep shooting it, but we have it. We have good cuts of this. We’re good to go.” And usually, the director will yell cut or wrap. But Ken was like, “Well, Greg, you want to say it?” Then Greg said, “That’s a wrap. That’s a series wrap on The Office.”

Ken Kwapis: As I remember it, the last shots that we did were just everyone walking past Pam’s painting heading out toward the elevators. We did it a few times. Each time, the whole cast would walk past and exit and they’d end up huddled off-screen near the elevator. Then we’d go again and we did it a few times. Finally, I said to Greg, who was standing next to me, “I think we got it.” Greg suddenly looked very emotional and a little flustered, and he said to me, “What do we do now?” I remember saying, “Well, go out and tell the cast we’re done.” That how we ended. I’m sure there was just a lot of complicated emotions, but I will tell you personally that at the end of that shoot, I was so tired. That was a mammoth episode of television to shoot. It basically was a feature film. Nine days. We started on Wednesday, March sixth, and we finished on Friday, March fifteenth, 2013.

Mark Proksch: It was definitely bittersweet. A lot of the actors were already going on to new projects that they were really interested in, but gosh, they cut their teeth on this show. It made them all famous and it gave them their careers, really. And so there were a lot of tears. I remember a lot of crying taking place. They even cried during my last scene and I was only in nineteen episodes for the last three seasons. Having them crying in my last scene was very, very sweet and definitely a testament to how much of a family the show was.

Brent Forrester: I remember people taking bets about when they would cry during the last episode, when other actors would cry. All kinds of bets were being taken.

Teri Weinberg: I could cry just talking to you about it. We had to say goodbye to our baby. But it was also a joyful thing, because we had the gift of being together for those ten years since we started to develop the show. We watched babies be born, we watched people fall in love. People got divorced, people lost partners, people had deaths in their families, all of those milestones in people’s lives. Man, it was a hard last episode to shoot.

Kelly Cantley: It was really bad! It was like saying goodbye to eight years’ worth of summer camp with some of your favorite people.

Kate Flannery: I just remember afterward the actors went into John’s trailer and we all had a quick toast and a drink. But I felt like Greg didn’t want it to end. I felt like it could have ended two hours before, but he just wanted to shoot it in a different way and then a different way and/or just a little more. I felt nobody wanted it to be over, to the point that we were late to our own wrap party, which was all the way across town. We all had to book it over there. It was just so crazy.

Brian Wittle: At the time we were shooting six-day weeks and the final week turned into a seven-day week. The way it was supposed to be is that the wrap party was on a Saturday and we were not supposed to work that day. Friday was supposed to be the last day of shooting, but for some reason we had to add Saturday. They originally thought, “Well, it’ll just be half a day. We’ll be done at noon and everyone can go home and get ready for the wrap party. We’ll see everybody at the wrap party.” But it ended up being a twelve-hour day and we were still at work while the wrap party was starting. The wrap party was way on the west side somewhere, and we were in Van Nuys. I was working in a suit so I’d be ready to go.

Mary Wall: There [were] a lot of people pretty dressed up for the final scene because they were going straight to the party.

Kim Ferry: The wrap party was amazing, oh my God. They had contortionists and these crazy carnival people doing all these crazy acrobatics and stuff. Everywhere you went there was the best of everything. There was a whole lobster bar, there was a whole sushi bar, there was food everywhere, including a World’s Best Boss cake. There were drinks everywhere and they had this woman who was wearing this dress with a hoop skirt that had glasses filled with champagne that you would pull out of her hoop skirt and sip champagne. It was insane. Outside there was a red carpet for everybody and all the actors were coming in and doing paparazzi shoots. But what I loved is that it was just a party for the cast and the crew. It wasn’t a thousand different executives, it wasn’t all of the wannabes who would have wanted to come. It was us.

Alysia Raycraft: That was a huge, huge, huge event, and everybody was there. I think Craig [Robinson] led a Soul Train dance-off. That was fun. People were smashed. It was definitely a party and a genuine love fest. A lot of elegance. I remember seeing Emily [Blunt] with John, and God, the regal quality of those two is mind-blowing.

Creed Bratton: I hadn’t had a drink or marijuana puff for ten years prior to that, but I might have smoked with somebody outside that thing before I walked into that party. I might have.

Kim Ferry: Greg got up and was very emotional and spoke about the show and said some incredibly elegant, wonderful, kind, moving words to everybody and we were all losing it.

Brian Wittle: I remember one disappointing thing about it is that they put Greg up on this staircase to give this farewell speech. It was loud through the whole thing and you couldn’t really hear him. I don’t even think his voice was amplified, and you could tell he had written this big couple pages of stuff. He went through the whole time and the whole story and mentioned everybody by name. I remember just feeling really bad that he didn’t have a proper space to give that speech. It would’ve been as simple as if someone just gave him a speaker, which I’m sure they had at the club. They didn’t turn the music off, though they might’ve lowered it. I just remember feeling it was noisy and I could barely hear him and feeling bad, like, “This moment should be bigger than this.”

Matt Sohn: After the wrap party, there was also kind of a smaller, more intimate kind of drinks-and-dinner thing at the Chateau Marmont. It was just a happy and sad, very late night that I feel like went on until three or four in the morning of just hanging out with the rest of the cast and creators and a couple of the writers, and just talking about the last nine years and the amazing journey that we were all fortunate enough to be on together.

Kate Flannery: We were up until like four o’clock in the morning together at the Chateau and we had a little toast to Greg. There was like maybe fifteen of us along with some of the writers. I felt like Greg was so uncomfortable because it was almost like a funeral with the body there, but we got to thank him personally.

Clark Duke: This was way more private emotional stuff than anything from the wrap party, because that was gigantic. The more intimate stuff took place at the Chateau when it was just the cast and John rented a suite. The thing that really stands out in my head was that Krasinski’s iPod was hooked up and I put on that LCD Soundsystem song “All My Friends,” which is a really emotional song. And he reacted. He was like, “Oh, my God, you pulled that fucking song out. . . .” It was a real moment. Everyone was drinking and emotional. It was like three a.m. And it just felt like you were in a montage. I never hear that song and don’t think of that moment.