Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

On March 24, 2005—a couple of months after George W. Bush was inaugurated for his second term as U.S. president and just days before the premiere of Grey’s Anatomy (a show that, as of this writing, is still making new episodes)—The Office pilot was finally unleashed on the world. It was a Thursday, and our little show was sandwiched between ratings juggernauts The Apprentice and ER.

JENNA FISCHER: Brian, do you remember coming to my house and watching the pilot?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Yes, I do.

JENNA FISCHER: Most of us were there, I think. Greg said maybe we should all watch it together. I’ve got a big living room, so I said, “Why don’t we all come to my house?” It was the beginning of us all gathering together to watch the show every week.

Before we got the DVD of our pilot so we could watch it on Jenna Fischer’s floor, Greg Daniels and Ken Kwapis actually had to edit and deliver the episode to NBC. How hard could that be?

If you thought the “everything that makes it harder makes it better” credo ended when the cameras stopped filming, you’re kidding yourself.

KEVIN REILLY: You guys just went off and made the pilot, and the dailies were looking great. There were no issues. And then the edited episode was delivered.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: What did you think?

KEVIN REILLY: It was very . . . slow. I could see the show in there, but it needed a lot of sculpting. You could see the comedy, you could see the characters. That was not a concern. But man, we sure were defying people’s patience.

TERI WEINBERG: The rhythms were not like any kind of comedy on TV at the time. We took pride in those super long pauses, where nobody was talking and the fourth wall wasn’t being broken. We were defying the conventional broadcast comedy rhythms and tropes by just being a fly on the wall in one of the most boring places on earth, a paper company.

GREG DANIELS: Pretty much everything I like or have worked on is character comedy. If you’re going to go with character comedy, the audience has to learn who these characters are, right? And that takes time. They don’t start with a bang usually. So I wasn’t thrown or worried when we started slow.

KEVIN REILLY: This is where Greg and I forged our relationship, because it could have been brutal. At least I thought it was a creatively fun thing. Many of these pilots are screened after two cuts. If we had done that, it would’ve been dead, just dead. But I think he did fourteen cuts of the pilot, right? It may have been sixteen. You’d have to ask Greg, but it was definitely double digits.

GREG DANIELS: Ultimately, in the edit room, which lasted forever, we did twenty-three cuts.

KEVIN REILLY: Really? Wow, okay. I think that’s where I saw his true gift. With each edit, it just got sharper and sharper. He was hunting for the essence of it in every scene.

GREG DANIELS: I ended up losing a bunch of stuff, like the thing with [Michael’s] testicles . . .

In a deleted scene, Michael tells Pam that he thought he found a lump in his testicles that morning but it turned out to be nothing, and then he awkwardly changes the subject to Pam’s smoked turkey sandwich.

GREG DANIELS: But there were some good things that got added, like Michael’s WORLD’S GREATEST BOSS mug that he bought from Spencer’s Gifts.

KEN KWAPIS: One of the reasons I was so happy with how Greg cut the pilot is he didn’t cut it for tempo. Or in other words, he didn’t make it more up-tempo. It still had weird pauses, where if it was any other television show, they’d either add canned laughter or three more jokes in that space. Or music. There’s nothing, no music or anything. If it ever aired, it’d be the driest show on a broadcast network.

“If it ever aired.” That was a big if. And before that decision would be made, there were test audiences who had to see it. Test screenings are rather common in Hollywood, for both movies and TV shows. Audiences from both coasts are selected for an advance screening, and they share their thoughts on comment cards.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Do you remember how the pilot tested?

GREG DANIELS: Um . . . I’m guessing not good.

The test screenings in early May 2004 were so awful that the media reported on it. “America Remakes The Office, but No One’s Laughing,” announced a Guardian headline.

TERI WEINBERG: The pilot tested worse than I think any other pilot had ever tested on NBC besides Seinfeld. Typically, if something tests really bad, it’s DOA. And if it’s not DOA, good luck trying to convince your network that it’s a pilot that they should bet on.

GREG DANIELS: What they told me about the testing was: “We’re going out to a mall and grabbing a bunch of people. You can have one question to disqualify people.” I really thought about this, and the disqualifying question I picked was “Are you a fan of [the ABC Jim Belushi sitcom] According to Jim?” [Laughs.]

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Oh, that’s so mean!

GREG DANIELS: I know it’s mean. But I didn’t want The Office to be a conventional sitcom, so I had to pick something.

GREG DANIELS: I had prepared Kevin for this. I knew we weren’t going to test well. Everything that I liked never tested well. Seinfeld didn’t test well. The Mary Tyler Moore Show didn’t test well. Cheers didn’t test well.

A review of the screening on Ain’t It Cool News—which, in 2004, was a go-to website for entertainment news—was especially harsh, remarking that “the lady next to me said she found it ‘depressing’” and “a guy from The Daily Show tries to fill Ricky [Gervais]’s shoes and can’t.”

MIKE SCHUR: In the history of television, the same story gets repeated over and over and over again. A pilot airs and it’s the lowest-rated pilot in the history of TV, blah blah blah. It’s true. Jerry Seinfeld has a letter with the ratings for Seinfeld’s test screening framed and hung on his wall.

Jerry Seinfeld and cocreator Larry David actually had the framed test-screening letter hung above a toilet. “We thought if someone goes in to use this bathroom, this is something they should see,” Jerry told TV Guide. “It fits that moment.”

MIKE SCHUR: Cheers was the lowest-rated pilot that NBC had ever aired to that point.

During its first season in 1982, Cheers was at the bottom of the Nielsen ratings, just barely beating out soon-to-be-canceled shows like Zorro and Son and Ace Crawford, Private Eye.

MIKE SCHUR: Greg warned NBC that it was going to test terribly. He was like, “It’s a mockumentary. People aren’t used to that. It’s washed-out colors and fluorescent lighting. The boss’s unlikable. It’s going to test terribly, and you have to ignore it.”

GREG DANIELS: It is firmly in the pattern of Mary Tyler Moore and Cheers and Seinfeld. I told them, “It’s classic NBC comedy, and it’s gonna work, but don’t worry about the testing.”

MIKE SCHUR: And then it tested terribly, and they didn’t quite ignore it, but he had primed them to look at the results in a different way. It’s very gutsy to tell a network that the thing they’ve spent millions of dollars on is going to bomb.

TERI WEINBERG: I think part of the reason it tested so poorly is it was something people had never seen before. They come to this testing, they get paid seventy-five or fifty dollars or whatever, and they judge your material based on twenty minutes and tell you if it’s good or bad. We didn’t care so much about testing.

BEN SILVERMAN: I get a call from NBC that the testing came in and it’s horrible. And I’m like, “You’re testing this next to old Friends episodes.” I said to Greg, “I told you. I knew no one would like it.” I’m depressed, you know, but challenged.

KEVIN REILLY: When things are going well and you have a hot hand, the network either doesn’t push back or you have the ability to go, “Well, that’s great, Brian. That’s fantastic input,” and then just ignore it, right? But I had not established credibility with NBC yet. People knew me, they liked me, they had recruited me for the job. But at this point, I was advocating for things that don’t look like what they’re supposed to look like. So that gave other players more power to come in and say, “Let me tell you why this isn’t going to work.”

KEVIN REILLY: Every room was giving it a 1 or a 0.5. Nobody liked it. Except one room.

A special screening room was set up just for the assistants and associates. In other words, the young people.

KEVIN REILLY: It was the only room I was interested in. There were like forty people in there. I went in and said, “What do you guys think?” And they told me, “Not only is this the best thing we’ve done, it’s the only thing we’d watch that’s currently on the air.” That’s all I needed to know.

TERI WEINBERG: If it wasn’t for Kevin Reilly, The Office would not have had a life. I really do believe he put his career on the line for us.

Thanks to Kevin Reilly and a roomful of NBC assistants, our show had a glimmer of hope of surviving. But it was far from a done deal. On May 16, NBC was set to announce the new lineup.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: When did you find out we’d been picked up?

JENNA FISCHER: May 13 came and no one said anything. There’s this thing called upfronts in New York in mid-May, where they announce to all the advertisers what their new season is going to be. They weren’t telling us if we’d been picked up and I had to go to a friend’s wedding in San Diego that weekend. Then I got the call on May 15 that we were picked up but only for five more episodes, and NBC would love me to be in New York for the announcement the next day.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The next day?

JENNA FISCHER: Right? They weren’t going to provide me with an airline ticket or a hotel room, but if I could get there, they’d love for me to be there. So I was like, “Fuck yeah, let’s go to New York!” I drove to the Long Beach Airport in my wedding outfit and booked my own flight, found my own hotel. Same thing with John, Rainn, Steve, and B.J. We were all there for the big announcement.

A typical season for a network show is twenty-two episodes, though sometimes a new and unproven show will get thirteen episodes at first. We got six total (the pilot plus the five-episode pickup) for our entire season.

JENNA FISCHER: The message was pretty clear. “We’re only picking you up for five more because we don’t totally believe in this show or you. So we’re gonna do it very reluctantly, if we ever air them, ’cause we’re not even sure.” It was such a hesitant pickup. But we were celebrating like we’d gotten five seasons.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We didn’t even have a date for the premiere yet.

JENNA FISCHER: That’s right. It was maybe midseason, maybe never. We’re not sure. We’ll see how it goes.

KEVIN REILLY: Greg had made some money on King of the Hill, so he was willing to cut his rate and take the shorter order. He could have stood on principle and said, “I’m not doing it. I’m not doing six,” and the show would have been dead.

BEN SILVERMAN: I felt like NBC didn’t give a shit enough to even pay attention to it. It was kind of like, “Oh, that thing will run itself out. Let them keep playing in their sandbox for a little longer.”

RAINN WILSON: No one does six episodes for a first season, especially back in those days of network television. Network television only makes money when they have over a hundred episodes and they can syndicate it. They want to shoot as many as possible. So it was really weird that they found some money in the budget to shoot six under-the-radar episodes of The Office.

BEN SILVERMAN: And they put us on after The Apprentice, which was very strange at the time. We aired later than normal because they thought The Apprentice being set in a workplace environment was the right match for the show.

It wasn’t the best news, but it wasn’t like NBC had passed. We were making more episodes of this show we loved, and as Greg reminded us . . .

GREG DANIELS: Let’s make these five count. If this is all we get, let’s say what we can say with this show.

KEVIN REILLY: At that point I was thinking, “The rebuild of NBC is going to happen and this is going to be one of those pieces.” I looked at the rest of the stuff on our plate, and it was all shit.

The New York Times, for one, agreed. In TV critic Alessandra Stanley’s review of our pilot in March 2005, she noted that while she thought it “pale[d] in comparison” to the British Office, it was “still funnier than any other new network sitcom.”

KEVIN REILLY: It’s not like I could go, “Wow, I’ve got ten other great shows to choose from.” It was just, “Look, this is going to be a slog, but it’s going to be worth it.”

TERI WEINBERG: Every single one of us who was involved in the first season, we came to work each day and said, “If we’re only making six total episodes, let’s make the best episodes that we know how to make. Let’s come in here and do the work and do it with love and do it with everything that we have and do it for ourselves.” We all showed up on that lot every single day—I’m getting emotional about this—and made an incredibly beautiful show. It was for all of us, whether you were in the cast, whether you were in the crew, whether you were in accounting, whether you were in props, catering, whatever. Everybody came and it was like we were on our own island.

“Serial Killer–Level Writing”

The Writing Staff Convenes

Greg decided the time was right to bring in new writers—specifically writers willing to do double duty as writer-actors.

GREG DANIELS: I spent my small writing budget beautifully. For upper level, I brought on Paul Lieberstein, who had written some of the best King of the Hills; Larry Wilmore, creator of The Bernie Mac Show; and Lester Lewis, from The Larry Sanders Show, who was brilliant with story and character. I snagged Mindy Kaling as a staff writer, whom I had seen on stage in her play Matt and Ben while talent scouting with my wife. And for mid-level, I hired Mike Schur, who was coming from SNL and had married a fellow SNL staffer like I had. Mike’s brain felt like a slightly better-oiled version of my own.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: What was it like meeting Greg?

MIKE SCHUR: We had a shocking amount in common. We both went to Harvard for the Lampoon, both wrote at SNL and met our girlfriends and then later wives there.

Greg’s wife, Susanne—who’s also Paul Lieberstein’s sister and currently the global head of original content for YouTube—was answering phones for Lorne Michaels. Schur met his wife, Jennifer, the daughter of Regis Philbin, in January 1998, when she was a writers’ assistant on the show.

MIKE SCHUR: My son was born with red hair and Greg’s son, Owen, also has red hair.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: That’s just eerie.

MIKE SCHUR: So instantly, I was in love with Greg. I wrote to my agent and said he was going to teach me how to write. I deeply and truly believed that was the case. During that first season, the only permanent writers on the staff were me, Mindy, and B.J. And none of us had ever written a sitcom. I think B.J. maybe had written a few episodes of a Bob Saget sitcom or something.

Novak penned two episodes of the short-lived WB series Raising Dad (2001–2002).

MIKE SCHUR: I had only written at SNL, and Mindy was a playwright and sketch performer. So Greg essentially led a graduate-level class on sitcom writing.

GREG DANIELS: As a showrunner, the faster you can train writers to write like you, the faster you have some valuable help. I would download as much of my beliefs about writing as I could, and try to counter the aesthetics of most sitcoms with other artistic ideas, like how a cracked pot is more valued in Japan than a perfect pot because the crack gives it character and backstory. I invented terms to make the ideas memorable. It was probably an awful lot of pontificating.

MIKE SCHUR: I had a notebook and was like jotting things down. Greg would say things like, “Well, what makes a good story?” And then he’d start talking about the basic building blocks of storytelling: motivation, stakes, twists and turns, escalations, stuff like that. I realized, “Oh, this is a class. I’m in a class now.” And I remember turning the page in my notebook that I was sketching dumb pitches on and starting to take notes like I was in college.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You were thinking this subconsciously?

MIKE SCHUR: No, no, I was writing as if Greg were the professor in a biochemistry class. This is not a joke. I still have my notes and I still go back and look at them to this day. That was probably August of 2004, and I still have moments trying to write something where I’m like, “Why doesn’t this make sense?” And I’ll go back and look at what Greg said off the top of his head. That’s one of ten thousand examples of why the show worked, because Greg was that thoughtful and thorough about everything.

Schur remembers one brainstorming session in the writers’ room where he suggested an episode involving a stray dog wandering into the Dunder Mifflin parking lot and getting adopted as the office pet.

MIKE SCHUR: Greg got really excited and was like, “Oh, I had a similar idea!” And he brought out a spiral notebook and he flipped through it. Flip, flip, flip, page after page of like serial killer–level writing.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Like really tiny and neat handwriting?

MIKE SCHUR: Yeah. Filling the entire page, margin to margin, things underlined. And he goes, “Here it is.” His idea was about a stray dog that gets adopted by the office, and they’re all caring for it. He was like, “Dwight could have this relationship with the dog, and Michael would be really sad ’cause the dog didn’t seem to like him. And then Jim and Pam would kind of take over care of the dog, feeding it or whatever, and then at night there was a question of who would take the dog home.

And Pam would take it home one night and Jim would take it home another night, and the dog would sort of become almost a surrogate domestic animal for Jim and Pam. And then Roy would come in and Roy would bond with the dog and then the dog would go home.” He laid out an entire story from beginning to end, where this plot device of a dog just related to every single character in the office. He got to the end of his eight-minute-long pitch and there was a beat and I remember going, “I feel like we should do your version. [Laughs.] It seems like maybe you’ve thought this out.”

Armed with these little details and Greg’s magical notebook, the writers embarked on creating script number two, our first original episode.

“Asleep in a Woke World”

The Making of “Diversity Day”

The second episode of our first season, “Diversity Day,” was written by none other than B. J. Novak.

OSCAR NUÑEZ: It was an excellent script from a very young seventeen-year-old. B. J. Novak used to come to the set on his skateboard.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Wait, he was seventeen at the time? Are you sure?

OSCAR NUÑEZ: No, I’m just saying that for comedic effect. But he was young.

OSCAR NUÑEZ: So young. How much did I hate him? I hate him so much, and still do. I’m kidding, of course. B.J. is so talented and it was a really, really good script.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I remember reading the script for “Diversity Day” and thinking, “Boy, I don’t know if audiences are going to give our show a chance, but I hope they do because we’re doing something really cool and risky.”

“Diversity Day” was our first episode not based on something written by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. We were looking to make The Office uniquely our own, and uniquely American.

GREG DANIELS: In England, for whatever reason, ambition is looked at very poorly. So to make the Tim character likable—

GREG DANIELS: —they made sure he didn’t seem too ambitious. That was a way they signaled to an English audience that he was super likable. But it’s different in America.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We like ambition.

GREG DANIELS: Exactly. A lot of times, people were like, “If he doesn’t like his job so much, why doesn’t he just quit or get his shit together, right?” It was something we had to adjust for.

What set “Diversity Day” apart, however, was how it took on a lighthearted, comedic topic, one devoid of any controversy or potential landmines whatsoever: race in America.

RAINN WILSON: If there was a new show coming out today and they had a “Diversity Day” episode, with characters saying things like “try my googi, googi” to an Indian person and jokes about Asian drivers and Arabs being too “explosive,” there would be a lot of angry people on social media saying it was inappropriate. There would be a huge backlash against it.

BEN SILVERMAN: “Diversity Day” is still one of my favorite episodes of TV, let alone on The Office. It is so funny and dangerous and different in a real and non-PC way. I don’t know if you could even say any of the things we said in that episode anymore.

The plot, in a nutshell: After Michael Scott tries to entertain his coworkers by retelling a racially charged Chris Rock stand-up routine—“N—s vs. Black People” from Rock’s 1996 HBO special Bring the Pain—Dunder Mifflin corporate mandates a sensitivity-training course. Michael sabotages it with his own group exercise, in which the entire staff wears forehead flash cards listing different races, like Italian, Jamaican, and . . . Martin Luther King Jr.?

GREG DANIELS: Tom Wong, our writers’ assistant, was the one who suggested the thing with the cards. He had that exact thing happen to him in some workplace training. We were like, yep, we’ll take that. That’s great.

It goes from bad to worse when Michael instructs them to try guessing the races listed on each other’s heads by using only stereotypes.

ANGELA KINSEY: I think my card said “Jamaica,” right? When we shot that scene, I remember looking around and thinking, “I’m not seeing this on TV right now.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: That episode has one of my favorite jokes in the entire show. When Michael asks Oscar if he prefers a term that’s less offensive than “Mexican.”

OSCAR NUÑEZ: And he was so serious about it. Everyone just had to bite their tongues so they wouldn’t laugh, because Steve was being so earnest.

GREG DANIELS: I’m fascinated with the idea of an Ur story, like the most representative story to explain a character. Ur was the biblical town that Abraham was born in, and I use the term in writing to mean the one episode that is the most foundational and representative of all the themes that the show is using. On King of the Hill, it was Hank’s unmentionable problem, where he’s constipated and he has to have a colonoscopy. The fact that people were talking about his constipation was the worst thing that could happen to Hank. “Diversity Day” was an attempt to find that super representative story of Michael. How is he going to respond when the worst happens to him?

Michael may have been a very different character from David Brent, his British doppelgänger played by Ricky Gervais. But they had a similar cultural blind spot in common.

RICKY GERVAIS: David Brent was fascinated with difference, and he had that terrible white middle-class angst about anyone thinking he was sexist or racist. So he overcompensated. He was basically a good person, but he panicked around difference, around disability or color or anything like that. We’re laughing at that white angst and people getting it wrong. He’s trying to do the right thing but he’s not equipped to do it.

So “Diversity Day” wasn’t about racism, necessarily. It was about one very misguided man trying not to be racist and getting it very, very, very wrong.

STEVE CARELL: But he’s trying.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: He’s trying really hard.

STEVE CARELL: It’s why I bristle a little when people try to compartmentalize Michael as a racist. He’s a person with an enormously good, kind heart who lacked a great deal of information about the world around him. He was as asleep in a woke world as you could be. [Laughs.]

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: But trying his best.

STEVE CARELL: Trying his best! There’s a difference between being intolerant and being ignorant. Sometimes intolerance and ignorance go hand in hand, for sure. But I think he was a very earnest and decent human being. He just didn’t . . . get it all the time, you know?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Do you always search for the good in any character you’re portraying?

STEVE CARELL: I think you have to, because otherwise you’re just demonizing or judging them. And if you’re doing that, you’ll play it differently. You don’t want to editorialize about them.

OSCAR NUÑEZ: I think Michael Scott got away with so much stuff because he was genuinely coming from a place of innocence. He would say these ignorant things and you would hate him. And then something horrible would happen to him, and you’d feel sorry for him and be like, “Oh, he’s not such a bad guy.” Then he’d do something horrible again, and again, and again. That was the cycle of the show. It’s a wonderful formula.

“Diversity Day” didn’t just clarify Michael Scott’s personality. It was when the entire cast became more than just background players.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Pretty much everybody had a moment or a joke in “Diversity Day.” And it’s also when they started the rivalry between Michael and Dunder Mifflin’s HR rep Toby Flenderson, played by the newest staff writer to join the show, Paul Lieberstein.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN (“TOBY FLENDERSON,” WRITER, DIRECTOR, PRODUCER): We needed someone to come in and do one line, and Greg had this idea that he wanted to break down the wall between the writers and actors.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Were you excited?

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: I was such a writer in my head and I was really focused on the script. We were up all night writing until four in the morning. I stumbled onto the set the next day, and I didn’t really know my line very well.

TOBY: Hey, we’re not all going to sit in a circle Indian style, are we?

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: I didn’t know Steve was going to improvise at all. I didn’t know he would make more of it than it was. He came back with—

MICHAEL: Get out.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: I was so tired, I didn’t even know how to respond.

TOBY: I’m sorry?

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: And, you know, he took it from there.

MICHAEL: No, this is not a joke. Okay? That was offensive and lame. So double offensive.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: We’ve talked about Michael not being mean on purpose. I guess we have to exclude Toby from that. ’Cause he did not have that relationship with anybody else. Yeah, he hated me. [Laughs.]

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Steve’s face any time he was looking at you, he almost looked like a different person.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: It was like I’m a Nazi, and he thought he was doing a service to the world by hating me.

Throughout the episode, Jim tries in vain to close a big sale, which would’ve been worth 25 percent of his commission. He loses it to Dwight, and just as he’s poised to wallow in self-pity, something happens.

GREG DANIELS: I said to B.J., “Here’s what I want, something like this. Something like Jim’s had a terrible day, and they’re in this horrible, boring meeting. Pam falls asleep and her head falls on his shoulder and it’s this precious memory for him. It totally turns his day around. Try to find something like that.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: He took you literally?

GREG DANIELS: Well, he came back and was like, “I tried. I couldn’t find anything better than that.” It just felt very relatable. We did 201 episodes, but the second one might’ve been the best.

“The Least Flattering Haircut for His Head”

The Actors Find Their Characters

For the rest of season one, despite thinking that we only had four more episodes left, we kept on working, building our world and fleshing out our characters.

JENNA FISCHER: As a theater geek, this was a dream job for me. I wrote a three-page essay of Pam’s backstory, some of which I got from the script or from the British show and some that I made up myself. I had a whole backstory written, explaining why Pam is with Roy and how they met, all of which I just invented.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: How was Pam similar to Jenna?

JENNA FISCHER: Well, like Pam, it took me a long time to figure out how to speak up for myself. I spent many years sitting at a receptionist desk wishing that I was doing something else, daydreaming about becoming an actor. I could really relate to that feeling of wanting something more. But unlike Pam, it would not have taken me three years to tell Jim that I had feelings for him. [Laughs.] I’d have dumped Roy much quicker.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Why did it take her and Jim so long to get together?

JENNA FISCHER: Well, when we meet Pam and Jim, they’ve already been working together for a couple of years and then it’s still three more years after that before they figure some stuff out. But in my backstory for Pam, her parents were so enthusiastic about Roy. He’d been in their family for a long time. Pam’s parents owned an appliance store in town and Roy worked there in high school, and that’s how this weird, mismatched couple met.

In the “Sexual Harassment” episode, Roy comes in wearing a sweater and he does a little dance and he’s joking with Pam’s mom. That’s the guy we don’t see too often, but Pam’s family sees him that way, and their families are very meshed. So it’s not easy for her to get out of that relationship and just go to Jim. There’s a lot to untangle.

Angela Kinsey created a backstory for her character, head of accounting Angela Martin, simply based on the layout of The Office.

ANGELA KINSEY: Of all the desk pods in the main bullpen, there’s only one that has a glass partition. Do you realize that? It’s Kevin and me, and in my backstory, Angela probably requested it. [Laughs.] Like, “Kevin, I need a partition.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: But you could see through it. Why wouldn’t she request a partition where we couldn’t see each other?

ANGELA KINSEY: I needed to be able to see you for work, but I didn’t want to breathe in your air. [Laughs.]

Rainn drew some inspiration from Mackenzie Crook, who played Gareth Keenan (Dwight’s British equivalent) in the original BBC show.

RAINN WILSON: I got to steal all of his best stuff. Like how Dwight always says the most ludicrous, preposterous stuff with a total deadpan straight face. I frankly stole that from Mackenzie. Another thing I stole from him was the haircut. I read an interview with Mackenzie where he said he’d gone to a local barbershop out in Slough or some suburb of London, and he got the least flattering haircut for his head. I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror, figuring out the most ridiculous haircut I could get.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I think you found it.

RAINN WILSON: I have a huge forehead, so I wanted to frame my forehead perfectly with these little Venetian blinds, these draperies of hair, to highlight the enormity of my carapace. So the combination of the haircut with those glasses—which, by the way, I really do think Dwight has influenced popular culture, because now all the hipsters wear Dwight glasses.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You were the first hipster.

RAINN WILSON: Yeah, I really was. I was a hipster nerd in those glasses, and now everyone who goes to Intelligentsia Coffee in Silver Lake is wearing the same glasses.

“Like a Raccoon in the Light Next to a Garbage Can”

The Dance Between the Cameras and the Actors

The “Diversity Day” episode was also when we started to realize that the limitations of our physical space might be a productive constraint, creatively. Ken Kwapis set up the episode so that everyone was kind of cornered into the conference room, even though that made it way harder to shoot.

KEN KWAPIS: There was a lot of discussion about whether or not we should move the training session out into the bullpen, because otherwise the whole episode was going to be stuck in the conference room. We’re trying to prove to the network that this is a viable show, and we’re going to set our second episode inside a small room? But I remember having a strong gut feeling that it would be funnier if everyone was trapped in a small space, because it made it more challenging to shoot. Sometimes the cameras were in people’s faces a bit too much.

Randall Einhorn, as our director of photography, was the one who made sure our show looked like a real documentary.

RANDALL EINHORN: One of the rules was, if we were doing a scene and we needed to shoot it from multiple takes, we would never show a place where a camera should have been to get the rest of the coverage.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: If it’s a documentary, if Steve is standing in his office and someone is filming Steve and then we cut, we can go back and then we have a camera that’s shooting over Steve to the people in the bullpen watching. You should see a camera man standing behind them. So when we did that shot, what you’re saying is we had to purposefully make sure that we didn’t show the spot where the camera should be.

Another rule was that they couldn’t include any complicated shots that only a highly skilled cinéma vérité cameraperson could have pulled off.

RANDALL EINHORN: Find another way. It made everything so much more challenging and interesting and cool.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: This wasn’t entirely new territory for you, right? You’d been doing mostly reality shows at that point?

RANDALL EINHORN: I came from outdoor adventure and then ended up in a fluorescent office. [Laughs.]

Rainn used to make fun of my Australian accent, which I don’t hear. Do I really have an accent?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You do. I’m sorry but it’s true.

RANDALL EINHORN: Rainn would be like [in a thick Australian accent], “Mate, there I was in the outback. It was beeeeeautiful. I caught a wild boar, mate.”

His mysterious Australian accent by way of midwestern upbringing aside, Randall had something that The Office desperately needed, and executive producer Ben Silverman was the first to realize it.

RANDALL EINHORN: I was DPing some extreme sports stuff with snowboarders Shaun White and Jeremy Jones in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Ben came to Jackson Hole and decided I was the guy to shoot The Office because I can shoot outdoor, extreme sports.

BEN SILVERMAN: I knew we needed somebody from that world to shoot in that stylistic way, but also so that we wouldn’t set everything up as slowly as a traditional scripted comedy.

RANDALL EINHORN: It always feels false to me when I see a camera right next to people who are having a very intimate conversation. I told Greg, “I think the camera should be a very, very long way away so that the audience has to lean in to get what’s going on. They feel privileged by it. And it reads as more honest.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I remember you shooting a scene and being like, “The shot is too pretty.” And you would pull a plant over, so there were leaves in the corner of the screen. Like you were trying to block it.

RANDALL EINHORN: We were trying to be hidden as if we were, you know, gleaning something that we were privileged to see. We did it all the time on Survivor. If people were having a conversation, we’d stay way back on the beach. It makes it feel more real.

GREG DANIELS: One thing that I noticed was half of the time when it wasn’t funny it was because we’d gotten the camera awareness wrong. We were in a situation where we should have been spying on them through the window blinds, but the cameras were right up in everybody’s face.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: So the comedy came from these characters forgetting that the cameras were there?

GREG DANIELS: Or being embarrassed that the cameras kept catching them in the act.

RANDALL EINHORN: If Michael wanted to close his office door, the camera would look through the blinds. If he closed the blinds, okay, we’ll come around to another window and find you. The camera was nosy and unrelenting. It wasn’t going to give you the space. It might let you think you have the space to go have a private moment, but it probably had another angle on you.

KEN KWAPIS: In the pilot, there’s a wonderful scene towards the end. Pam leaves the reception desk and there’s this long moment where Roy and Jim are just leaning, neither one of them saying anything. Then Jim finally says something innocuous and Roy just bolts out of there. It’s very weird, and it’s a scene where both characters are not aware they’re being filmed. It’s just delicious, especially for a character like Jim, who’s always so hyperaware of the camera, to catch him in an unguarded moment.

The camera even managed to catch characters at their most vulnerable when they were well aware they were being filmed.

KEN KWAPIS: That climactic scene when Michael Scott is trying to impress Ryan and he plays a prank on Pam and it backfires. We’re kind of spying on them but we’re in the same room with them. That is one of the most uncomfortable scenes to watch. I watched it not too long ago with some filmmaking students, and they were all marveling at the fact that the scene is so upsetting but also so funny.

STEVE CARELL: I remember when Amy Adams came in. [She first appeared as Katy, a handbag saleswoman, in the season one episode “Hot Girl.”] It’s sort of a tricky thing to figure out how to play to the camera. But she had it down. She was aware of the camera, but she played it very differently, because she was an outsider. She didn’t know. “What are you doing there?” Like, “Were you recording what I just said?”

KEN KWAPIS: That was one of the key strategies in how we shot. If we could land on you and you’re suddenly aware of the camera but you have nothing to say, right? You get these wonderfully long, weird pauses.

STEVE CARELL: You’re either being caught or you’re performing for the camera. For Michael, when the camera was documenting things that were more vulnerable, that he didn’t want the camera to see, you could show his fragility. I think the camera added a depth to all of these characters, because it’s a reflection, I think, of that public perception, what you want the public to see as opposed to what is the reality of the situation or the reality of the person, the character.

GREG DANIELS: I remember one episode where Michael was bragging to the camera, and then he got this horrible call, and he had to actually hide under his desk. The camera came around and caught him there, like a raccoon in the light next to a garbage can.

KEN KWAPIS: When Greg and I held the production meeting for the crew, we announced that the things that would get them fired on any other show, like a camera operator panning past the subject and then sloppily backtracking, wasn’t just acceptable but encouraged.

GREG DANIELS: I would sometimes say, “Okay, the problem with this scene is you know what you’re looking for.” And I would have the camera operator close his eyes and I’d spin him around and say, “All right, find it on action.” The scene would start and the camera guy would open his eyes and he’d be pointing the wrong way and he’d have to find what was interesting.

The result of those spins, when a cameraperson tries to figure out where he or she should be shooting, is called a “swish pan.” Or at least that’s what we called it. A typical TV show wouldn’t have allowed something so jarring in a final cut. But on The Office, they were commonplace.

RANDALL EINHORN: The reason we did so many of those swish pans is we were telling a story of Jim looking at Pam, but then we see Dwight looking at Jim looking at Pam, and then we catch Kevin looking at Jim looking at Pam. It just keeps adding up, all that math.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: As an actor, the lack of marks was discombobulating. Traditionally, there are marks on the floor that tell actors where to go. But on The Office, there were no marks.

KEN KWAPIS: There was also no regard for whether you were actually facing the camera at certain times. In a multicamera comedy, everyone is presented in a very frontal view. But for us, the idea was “Don’t worry about hitting that mark, we’ll find you. Wherever you go, we’ll figure out how to find you or we won’t.”

JOHN KRASINSKI: On episode two, I remember saying to Matt [Sohn, the cinematographer], “Just let me know where you want me to be.” And he was like, “No, no, that’s my job. Don’t tell me where you’re going to be. It will make it feel more alive.” I think it might’ve been our weird secret. We had camera people trained in the art of instinctively moving the camera to the point where people don’t realize. Randall and Matt would dive across a table, knowing full well that not only was injury imminent, but the take would only be maybe two and a half seconds before they smashed to the ground. I remember Randall would sometimes say, “I will not reposition myself for a better shot because then it will show that we were aware of what you guys were doing.” And I was like, “Wow, that is so next level.”

GREG DANIELS: I’d give notes very differently to camera operators than I would on most shows. On any other show, it’d be, “Okay, I want you to pan over here and then on this line I want you to push in,” blah blah blah, whatever. But on The Office, I’d give notes to them like they were actors. I’d say, “You’ve been following this story and you know that this person, who’s never expressed any interest in that person before, but you’ve suddenly noticed that they’re eyeing them differently. Go for that.”

RANDALL EINHORN: Yeah, I definitely feel like the camera was a character on the show, and some of the best direction I ever got from directors was the type of direction you’d give an actor. “You feel this, you’re worried about this, you’re curious about that, but you know this.” The camera always had a point of view. It had an agenda. It had its own stories it wanted to tell. The attitude of the camera was, if it had a personality, “You’re not going to hide from me. I’m going to follow you. I’m going to use my zoom lens or I’m going to look at you through the window and I’m just not going to relent, because I’m a curious being.”

KEN KWAPIS: Every actor developed his or her own relationship with the camera, and some were more eager to acknowledge it. There are moments where it feels like Jenna wants to crawl under the reception desk. And John’s character, I think pretty quickly it’s clear that he wants to make a friend of the camera.

GREG DANIELS: Brian used to do something that was so useful. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this to you before, but we would have these scenes and they’d be funny scenes, but there was no point to edit. So we were like, “How do we get out of the scene?” We needed a button. And then we’d be like, “Kevin! Kevin’s done something. Yep, there he is.”

It could have been a glance to the camera or physical comedy like walking into a wall.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I’m very proud of that. I would give Matt Sohn a little nod at the end, like a wide receiver to a quarterback, and he would whip the camera over to me.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Wow. Let’s think back to what you just said. When the scene was going great, Matt would give you a nod and you’d think, “I’ll make it better.” You also said “like a receiver to a quarterback.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Yeah? And?

JOHN KRASINSKI: A lot of people tuned out on that one.

But Jim Halpert, played by the just-as-conceited John Krasinski, could always be counted on for the perfect double-take expression to the camera, breaking the fourth wall, to punctuate any scene.

MATT SOHN: I had this running joke that we’d throw to John and he’d give us the number four, which was a particular look he’d give us.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You called it the number four?

MATT SOHN: We had it numbered. There were a couple of looks that were John looks, depending on the scene. “I’m throwing to John right here for a number four.” Jim had the biggest relationship with the camera, because Jim played the everyday man. He was the one truly grounded, relatable person on the show. You could always find Jim for a look or a nod.

JOHN KRASINSKI: I remember Greg and I talked about this. I was the window to the audience. I was the character who, right when you were thinking, “This is getting ridiculous,” I’d look at the camera and go, “You’re right, this is ridiculous.”

We were all lucky to be making something we loved. There was just one problem. Nobody was watching. It wasn’t just that we weren’t a top-rated prime-time show. We weren’t even in the top one hundred.

JOHN KRASINSKI: I asked . . . um, what’s his name? The NBC executive that came every Friday and he was a super-handsome dude. I’m going to remember his name. He was so nice, and handsome as well. Jeff?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Jeff sounds right.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Jeff was the nicest guy. He would come down to the writers’ room, and he was a super-nice-dressed, handsome-ass guy. And I’d be like, “What’s up, Jeff?” And he was like, “I love this episode. This will be the last one.” [Laughs.] And I was like, “Oh.” And he was like, “Yeah, it’s just not getting the ratings and the network doesn’t get it. I love it, but this is going to be the last one.” He said that every week of the first season. And in the fifth week I said to him, “Can you make me a DVD so I can give it to my mom? So she at least knows that what I was doing out here was real and that I wasn’t living under a bridge somewhere?”

Like we did with the pilot, the cast still got together every week to watch the episodes live. It became a comforting ritual, a way to celebrate together what we’d accomplished. Maybe it wouldn’t get any further than this, we thought, but at least we’d have these memories of laughing together in Jenna’s living room and remembering to keep the front door closed so her dog didn’t escape again.

As it turns out, the handsome NBC executive who may or may not have been named Jeff wasn’t entirely correct about the future of The Office. We just didn’t know it yet.

TITLE	DIRECTED BY	WRITTEN BY	ORIGINAL AIR DATE
Pilot	Ken Kwapis	Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant and Greg Daniels	March 24, 2005
“Diversity Day”	Ken Kwapis	B. J. Novak	March 29, 2005
“Health Care”	Ken Whittingham	Paul Lieberstein	April 5, 2005
“The Alliance”	Bryan Gordon	Michael Schur	April 12, 2005
“Basketball”	Greg Daniels	Greg Daniels	April 19, 2005
“Hot Girl”	Amy Heckerling	Mindy Kaling	April 26, 2005

4

“Let Me Tell You Why This Isn’t Going to Work”