Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

Mike Schur knows what he’s talking about. Not only was he writing for The Office from the very beginning, but he went on to cocreate shows like Parks and Recreation and The Good Place. If anybody has cracked the formula for a successful TV show, it’s him.

But a billion things needing to go right? If you were a betting man or woman back in April 2005, no one could’ve blamed you for not wagering on The Office to make it.

JENNA FISCHER: We were a ratings disaster.

It didn’t seem to matter how different or smart or specific our show was, people weren’t watching. 11.2 million viewers tuned in for the pilot, but by the end of our six-episode first season, that number dropped by more than half, to just 4.8 million, according to Nielsen. The conventional wisdom was that we wouldn’t be back for a second season.

BEN SILVERMAN: Part of what’s great about the new wave of television is that a series has a chance to breathe and be discovered. At that time [2005], you didn’t have that luxury. This was a day and time when the heads of the networks read the ratings at four in the morning of what happened the night before.

Among those executives was NBC Entertainment president Kevin Reilly, one of the only people at the network who believed in The Office.

KEVIN REILLY: [The ratings] went down every week. I remember having to go to this affiliate where all of the station heads come in for this yearly meeting. I had really talked The Office up in our last meeting. That morning I remember thinking, “Please just stabilize. Let me wake up and please show me the rating that holds week to week.” And I wake up and of course it’s hit a new low. And I’ve got to go out and do the presentation. All they’re talking about is how they’re losing money and what’s going on with the network. It’s not good.

MIKE SCHUR: For you youngsters out there, you used to have to call a number and there was a “Here are the fast national ratings for Thursday, October 13, 1997.” And then they would read out the data, which is lunacy. It’s like driving a horse and buggy to the saloon, getting them that way.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I had that number. So every Friday morning, I’d call in from the makeup trailer and announce our ratings for the week to the rest of the cast. “Okay, guys, we got a 4.7.” We knew our show would live or die by those numbers.

BEN SILVERMAN: Exactly. That process and those reactive programming decisions were definitely fear invoking.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I had sheets from week to week so I could see what was happening. I’d be like, “Well, we were down a little bit last night, but March Madness is going on. So that accounts for why ratings should be a little lower.”

MIKE SCHUR: [Laughs.] Big AFC Championship Game or whatever.

JOHN KRASINSKI: The ratings were so foreign to me. I had no idea. So when they were like, “You got a one,” I was like, “One million people are watching!” And they’re like, “No, that’s not how it works.” Brian, you were one of the people who really guided me through this.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I loved interpreting the numbers for the rest of the cast.

JOHN KRASINSKI: I was like, “What is a one?” And you were like, “Let me tell you something. The lowest-rated ER ever was a seventeen.” And I was like, “Oof, that can’t be good.”

STEVE CARELL: It was a remake of a very heralded show, and it did not get good reviews out of the blocks.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: My favorite review is from a gentleman by the name of David Bianculli [a TV critic on NPR’s Fresh Air]. The way he took us down, it was like dark poetry.

David Bianculli (from 2005): “As fights for independence from England go, it hardly ranks up there with the American Revolution . . . Where Ricky Gervais let the boss’s insecurities show through, Steve Carell is all noise and stupidity. He’s like a sketch comedy character, not a real person. Not just foolish but a fool.”

STEVE CARELL: Across the board, there was not a lot of critical love for the show.

Washington Post: “The quality of the original show causes the remake to look dim, like when the copying machine is just about to give out.”

Slate: “The harder it tries (and even, at times, succeeds) in amusing us, the more melancholic we’ll feel, remembering how magical things used to be.”

STEVE CARELL: I think we all just disagreed. We felt like we were onto something, and it wasn’t the British version. It was something unto itself. People have their own opinions and they’re entitled to them.

STEVE CARELL: You can’t take any of that too seriously.

New York Times: “The Office has the potential to be a hit, though perhaps not overnight. It remains to be seen whether NBC finds the nerve to keep it on the air long enough to build an audience, the way Seinfeld did.”

GREG DANIELS: I made a lot of Seinfeld comparisons in the beginning. I was like, “Look how small that started. It’s something new, it’s something unique, it’s funny, let it grow.” But it turns out every single producer made Seinfeld comparisons if you had a show that was struggling. No matter how good it was or how close it was to Seinfeld, they’d heard that argument before. They were like, “Well, if it’s really like Seinfeld, Seinfeld only had four episodes or whatever in the first season.” [Laughs.]

The debut season of Seinfeld, which aired in June 1990, was the smallest sitcom order in television history.

GREG DANIELS: So we get this little skinny pickup, and now I have the ability to hire writers. In the meetings [with writers], I’d describe the show, and the more you describe it, the more your thoughts started to coalesce. I realized, as I was trying to pitch the show over and over again to different writers, that this was the first comedy version of a reality show.

Greg wasn’t looking for direction from the critics or anybody who wasn’t coming to work every day at our cramped office set. Instead, he turned to the people who were already there, witnessing firsthand what we were trying to make.

GREG DANIELS: Phil Shea, the prop master, I would ask for his opinion all the time. And Dave Rogers, the editor. I completely relied on and cared about their opinion as much as any of the writers.

MIKE SCHUR: Kevin Reilly basically staked his entire professional reputation on The Office. He does a thing that executives very rarely do. He says, “I believe in the show, the show can work.”

KEVIN REILLY: Picking it up the first year took some finesse, but nothing like the challenge of bringing it back. I think everyone thought, “Okay, you had your shot with this little thing. We’re moving on, aren’t we?”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: How did you get it revived?

KEVIN REILLY: That was brutal. It was one of the toughest things in my career. I’d realized, at this point, odds are I’m going to get fired. You get to that thing where you say, “Let me go down [my way].” So I wasn’t going to let it go. That second year of going through the screenings, they just couldn’t believe it. I remember at one point, I got in this debate with [NBC executive] Dick Ebersol. He does know comedy [he helped cocreate Saturday Night Live with Lorne Michaels] and he’s a legend in the sports world. He hated The Office. Despised it. And I remember at one point, he was literally pounding the table. [Pounds table.] “Hasn’t . . . America . . . voted on . . . this . . . show? What more . . . evidence do you need . . . that they . . . don’t like it?” And I said, “Dick, I don’t think so. We buried it.” I was clinging to my sales pitch. It almost became a screaming match at a certain point. Then he stood up and laughed, and I laughed, and he gave me a big hug. I think he would have loved to put the knife right in my back. It was like when a Mafia don gives you the hug. You don’t really want the hug.

BEN SILVERMAN: I was incredibly hopeful and obviously passionate about the prospects of the show. I felt we had overcome the initial hurdle of comparisons to the UK Office with our first season. But it was still not by any means a sure thing. If anything, there was a sense among the senior management at NBC that they didn’t understand it.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Meaning Jeff Zucker?

BEN SILVERMAN: It was more of an institutional rejection. There were people in the marketing department and the promo department who didn’t understand it. “How do we market this? How do we sell it? Is it a documentary? Is it a reality show?” And no one was a star! There was no star at that point.

GREG DANIELS: The marketing department, all they knew was Will & Grace.

BEN SILVERMAN: And some Friends.

GREG DANIELS: So they took single lines out of context and that was the first ad. Out of context, none of the lines played like jokes. We didn’t do setup–punch line jokes. It was all behavior and context and acting. It was horrifying. You’d look at these ads and go, “Oh my God, we have the stupidest, most unfunny show in the world.” And they were like, “Yeah, God, you guys are going down.” [Laughs.] I had to say, “Look, the frame has to be different. You have to blow up one moment and let it play. Otherwise we’re doomed because it isn’t a highlight reel.”

BEN SILVERMAN: I got into a beyond fight with Jeff Zucker. I remember going into Jeff’s office, talking to him about another project, and I used that meeting to also push for The Office. I was like, “You have to do this. It has to happen. It’s too good. Please pick up the second season.” And from that, I was thrown out of his office. [Laughs.] But in a joking way. He was like, “Get the fuck outta here. I know you want your show picked up!”

Finally, in May 2005, almost a month after the last episode of our first season aired, Ben received the news he’d been waiting for.

BEN SILVERMAN: I got a phone call. They said, “We’re going to say that we’re ordering thirteen episodes, but we’re only picking up six.”

MIKE SCHUR: Greg convinced them to lie because an episode order of six sounds like we’re going to get canceled.

GREG DANIELS: What actually happened was, Kevin Reilly wanted to announce the pickup more strongly, but he could only get a few picked up, so he asked us if we would go along with the lie. And we agreed. So basically, it came from Kevin and I acquiesced.

BEN SILVERMAN: A normal pickup would’ve been twenty-two. And then they say, “You have to make it for half the price.”

NBC was offering a budget for those six episodes that was roughly the same price to shoot one episode of Lost and a third of the price of any other sitcom currently on TV.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: How do you make that work?

BEN SILVERMAN: I needed everyone to take less money on these episodes. It was probably the lowest price in the history of modern TV. My first call was to Ricky and Stephen, because I thought they would say, “Fuck you.” But I was like, “I know you’ve worked for two years now on a promise, but we have this opportunity. If we let the work speak for itself, we’ll make more of them than you ever made in the UK. And we’ll have a chance to be part of a big broadcast hit in America,” which still meant a lot back then. And everyone said yes.

GREG DANIELS: Kevin Reilly said to me, “Okay, Greg, you have to come in and pitch me how you’re going to change it, ’cause it has to change. You can’t do the same thing for season two as you did for season one.”

KEVIN REILLY: If this was going to sustain and do more than six episodes, Michael Scott couldn’t be an idiot all the time. He had to have some appeal. How did he become the boss, this fumbling guy who sucks up oxygen and can’t read a room?

GREG DANIELS: I’m not sure exactly where—I feel I might’ve been on vacation—but I wrote on a napkin, trying to come up with things that would rehabilitate Michael and change his character.

“He May Be an Idiot, but He’s Our Idiot”

Finding Michael Scott’s Heart

While Greg was tinkering with Michael Scott, a little film called The 40-Year-Old Virgin was released. The comedy, directed by Judd Apatow and starring Steve Carell, was about a shy and genuinely sweet man who had somehow made it through four decades without losing his virginity. Opening in August 2005, the movie became a blockbuster, bringing in over $177 million at the box office worldwide. Carell’s newfound stardom was the fortuitous break our show needed.

JENNA FISCHER: I can hear in my imagination a conference room filled with NBC executives, all saying, “We aren’t going to be the assholes who let Steve Carell, the number one box office comedy star, out of his television contract.”

MIKE SCHUR: NBC has a movie star under contract. Now every movie star is on a contract, but at the time it was a big deal.

JENNA FISCHER: 40-Year-Old Virgin came out while we were shooting season two. We went to the premiere while we were shooting.

KATE FLANNERY: The billboards for 40-Year-Old Virgin were everywhere. There was so much hype about that movie that I had a good feeling. I remember when we went to the premiere, the second season hadn’t aired yet. We’d just started shooting for a couple of weeks. And I had this profound, intense feeling at that premiere. I got in my car and I literally burst into tears. I was like, “I feel like something big is happening.” And it had everything to do with Steve.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Almost overnight, it seemed like everyone wanted a piece of Steve. And we had him. All of us in the cast started to feel a tiny ray of hope. Like maybe this movie could save us.

ANGELA KINSEY: I really felt like they were banking on Steve. And I was like, “Okay, I will attach myself to the Steve wagon. [Laughs.] I’m banking on him too.” I thought that that was a really good sign. But I still wasn’t confident. When we finished those first six [episodes of season one], they printed our names on pieces of paper and then laminated them and put Velcro on the back, and that’s what stuck to the door of your trailer. I went up to mine and ripped it off and said, “I’m going to save that.” [Laughs.]

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Because you were sure it was done?

ANGELA KINSEY: I just didn’t know.

For Greg Daniels, however, The 40-Year-Old Virgin wasn’t just proof that Steve Carell was bankable. The character that Steve created on the big screen reminded Greg of what he’d been trying to do in TV comedy for years.

GREG DANIELS: I realized that I’d been treating The Office like everything I had learned on King of the Hill didn’t count. When that show started, Hank wasn’t very likable. I had to rewrite that show and create situations where Hank could be conservative but in a likable way. A lot of the other characters on King of the Hill are there to make him more likable and appropriate. For instance, he has his niece [Luanne] there so he can be very Boy Scout–y. You know what I mean? [In a Hank Hill voice.] “Don’t show me your underthings!” You go, “Poor Hank, he’s doing his best.”

MIKE SCHUR: We were in these crummy trailers on the very edge of the Universal lot. It was like the area where they put you before you’re fired. No running water, it’s terrible. Greg gives us a speech and he says, “The reason we’re back is largely because of The 40-Year-Old Virgin. We need to change Michael Scott. We need to take 20 percent of what is so endearing and likable about that character and swirl it into Michael Scott. And we need to take 20 percent of the optimism. I want every episode to end with a little upswing. Michael can still be terrible and offensive and oblivious and everything. But at the end of every episode, we’re going to have a little upswing, just a tiny, little positive thing.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Were the writers upset? Were they like, “We’re trying to do this really deliberate downbeat thing, and now you’re telling us to make it happier?”

MIKE SCHUR: Most of the people on the staff were like, “He’s ruining the show. We may get canceled, but at least we honored the British show with how downbeat and sad everything was. And he’s blowing it. He’s totally blowing it.” I remember we took a walk around the disgusting abandoned parking lot where they’d put us and talking to Paul [Lieberstein] and Mindy [Kaling] and everyone and just being like, “This is terrible. At least we could hold our heads up high creatively and say we did something really cool. This is a disaster.”

JEN CELOTTA (SEASON TWO WRITER; FUTURE CO-SHOWRUNNER): There’s this thing on TV, especially then and even before then, where everybody has to be so likable. And sometimes likable and softening takes any kind of edge and any kind of comedy away. You’re just softening them into this benign mush.

MIKE SCHUR: And of course Greg was 110 percent right. Once we got into the actual story-breaking, our fears were allayed.

JEN CELOTTA: Our mission with season two was to try and understand this character more, to see the underbelly of him. He could do crazy, ridiculous things, but you understood why.

JENNA FISCHER: They started to allow Steve to display vulnerability, which he’s so good at. They would let him break our heart a little bit.

GREG DANIELS: Season two was gradually kinda putting in new coordinates for Michael. Part of the other thing was figuring him out and going, “Oh, okay, he’s good at his job.”

Written by Paul Lieberstein, “The Client” (season two, episode seven) followed Michael and his boss (and soon-to-be lover) Jan Levinson as they meet with a client (played by Tim Meadows) and attempt to win back his business.

JENNA FISCHER: You see Michael start out as what seems like a total buffoon and turn into a masterful salesperson.

MICHAEL: [Making his pitch.] I know this place. I know how many hospitals we have, I know how many schools we have. It’s home, you know? . . . Here’s the thing about those discount suppliers. They don’t care.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You see the reason that he actually has this job.

If that sounds familiar, that’s because it’s the exact ingredient Kevin Reilly asked Greg to add to the show.

GREG DANIELS: Everything that makes him a bad manager—his caring what other people think and desperate need to be liked—it also makes him a really good salesperson. So it became more like the Peter Principle. He’d been promoted past his level of expertise.

The Peter Principle, a management theory first suggested by Canadian educator Laurence J. Peter in 1969, proposed that excellent employees will keep being promoted up the hierarchy until they reach their “level of incompetence.”

JENNA FISCHER: In the first season, we just really leaned into Michael’s mean-spirited buffoonery and the ways he irritated us. But now in season two, we were bringing out sprinklings of these very redeeming qualities in him.

GREG DANIELS: His team feels oppressed by him and is always rolling their eyes, but if an outsider criticized him, they’d back him up.

The show explored this idea in the first episode of the second season, “The Dundies,” based on an idea that Greg had originally envisioned for the pilot, in which Michael holds an award show for the office at a Chili’s restaurant.

MIKE SCHUR: “The Dundies” is a story where Michael is a buffoon, and he thinks he’s hilarious and he bombs terribly. The only difference between what it ended up being and what the version would’ve been in season one is, in the end, some ding-dongs at the Chili’s start making fun of him.

GUY AT BAR: Sing it, Elton.

MICHAEL: Hey, thanks, guys. Where you guys from?

OTHER GUY AT BAR: We just came from yo’ mama’s house.

GREG DANIELS: When people who don’t work [at Dunder Mifflin] start heckling him and throwing stuff, the staff rallies around him.

PAM: More Dundies!

PAM AND JIM: [Clapping.] Dundies! Dundies! Dundies! Dundies!

MICHAEL: [Getting his spirit back.] All right, we’ll keep rolling.

MIKE SCHUR: Pam sticks up for him and is like, “Hey, we can make fun of him, but you guys can’t! Screw you!” Ninety-two percent of the way through the episode, it could have aired in season one with its tone. And then at the very end, you’re sent away with a little bit of happiness in your heart that things aren’t so terrible.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The Dundies showed that Michael may be an idiot, but he’s our idiot. And he’s an idiot with good qualities. Like how he acts around kids.

GREG DANIELS: In the ending of “Halloween” [season two, episode five], you see Michael desperately wants to have a friend at work, but he can’t ’cause he’s the boss and he has to fire somebody and he’s just so bummed out. But then he lights up when the kids come trick-or-treating. It was a different show after that.

JENNA FISCHER: It makes me cry every time I watch it. Every time. Or the end of “Office Olympics” [season two, episode three], where Michael is crying because everyone is so genuinely applauding him for his purchase of a condo.

STEVE CARELL: He put his foot in his mouth all the time, saying inappropriate things, but I don’t think he ever valued one type of person over any other. And in that way, I think he was a very pure character. He’s very dumb in terms of political correctness and being appropriate in public. But at the same time, I just don’t think there was hardness in his heart towards anyone.

GREG DANIELS: It’s always about intention. If Michael has a purity of intention, he can do the worst things in the world for comedy. But as an audience, you sense that he didn’t do it in order to be cruel or to be a jerk. He’s trying, and he just has poor social skills.

MIKE SCHUR: The idea of shading and nuancing and layering the wacky boss was revolutionary. When Ricky and Stephen did it, it was revolutionary. And I think the American version did it even better. We got to invest the time in just getting into the psychology of Michael Scott. I remember Greg saying to the writers in that speech, “We can do what we did last time and get canceled, or we can change it and we can run for ten years.”

“You’re on My iPod, Dude”

The Office Hits the Much Smaller Screen

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Rainn, I’m hoping that you remember this conversation. After we shot the first six episodes of season two, you and Steve and I, for whatever reason, were sitting in Steve’s trailer and Steve said something. Do you remember what it was?

RAINN WILSON: [Pauses.] “Take your pants off?”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: He said, “Well, at least we got to do twelve [episodes].” And we all kind of agreed. We thought we were done.

RAINN WILSON: And wasn’t the next order for four episodes, and then like one, and then two? Just dribs and drabs. And this is just not done in that world of network television.

MIKE SCHUR: I remember the joke was that we were being picked up act by act. NBC would watch act one [of an episode] air and be like, “All right, go ahead and air act two.”

Unbeknownst to us, behind the scenes, Kevin Reilly had been working hard to convince NBC that The Office was worth every episode.

KEVIN REILLY: I kept ordering it, and I had crazy meetings where the head of finance would come in and I’d go down the list of the things we’re ordering. Here’s how many hundreds of millions of dollars it’s going to cost to order these shows, and I’d ask, “Where’s The Office?” It was this woman, Diane. She said, “Oh, you should talk to Jeff.” Meaning Jeff Zucker, who’s running the network at the time. So I called him and said, “Jeff, where’s The Office?” And he’s like, “No, no, we’re definitely ordering it.” But it’s not in the tally sheet, and we’re locking the numbers. “Let me talk to Diane.” I come back in and there’s four. “Diane, why are there four episodes of The Office?” “Did you talk to Jeff?” I went through this nineteen times. Eventually, I don’t know, we just got there.

MIKE SCHUR: Five million other things happen. We were put on after My Name Is Earl, which becomes a huge hit. Everyone’s watching My Name Is Earl and then watching us. We started at a 70 percent retention rate, and that went to 75 percent and then 80 percent and 85 percent.

My Name Is Earl may’ve brought us a larger audience, but it was up to us to keep them. One of the episodes that proved the ratings weren’t a fluke was “Christmas Party,” which aired in early December 2005. Mike Schur wrote it and structured it around a Secret Santa draw.

The premise was simple: there’s a twenty-five-dollar limit for Secret Santa gifts at the office Christmas party, but Michael, feeling flush after receiving a hefty bonus, spends $400 on a video iPod for Ryan. Tempers flare when people open their gifts and realize that nobody else got something as cool (or expensive). After Phyllis gives Michael an oven mitt, he ends up turning Secret Santa into a Yankee swap. And of course, everyone starts fighting over the iPod.

MIKE SCHUR: There was no deal with Apple. They didn’t sponsor it or anything. But the whole episode is about a video iPod. That episode airs and—in my memory, I could be wrong—the next day Apple announces it has a deal for content, to have like an iTunes Store where you can buy TV shows and movies.

When Apple released its first-generation video iPod in October 2005, the iTunes Store included a few hit TV shows from ABC like Desperate Housewives and Lost. But in December, NBC joined the service, adding eleven shows from its catalog. For $1.99 per download, iPod owners could watch new episodes of Law & Order and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and old classics like Dragnet and Knight Rider. The Office was part of that mix. Just a week after “Christmas Party” aired, iPod users could download it and watch the episode on the go.

“We think this is the start of something really big,” announced Apple CEO Steve Jobs at the time. He was talking about the whole video iPod package, not just our little show. But it was the start of something big for us.

MIKE SCHUR: That year [2005], everyone got everyone a video iPod for Christmas. And when you got a video iPod and set it up and went to the iTunes Store, the first thing that you saw was The Office and the Christmas episode. It was the number one watched thing on iTunes for thirty consecutive days. So everyone spends the entire break watching that episode and then other episodes of the show.

KEVIN REILLY: It was the canary in the coal mine for where we are today. Generationally, there was a breakdown in the viewing of network television as the go-to, one-stop shopping. There were now other platforms and places that people could get it. There’s always been a generational turning of the page where young people want the next thing.

ANGELA KINSEY: I remember getting an email that our first Christmas episode had become the number one download on iTunes. And I was like, “What? Oh, that’s it. Momma’s getting rid of her Chevy Blazer!” And then I got a Honda. [Laughs.]

JOHN KRASINSKI: I was going back and forth between L.A. and New York, and I was walking through New York and this guy put his hand up real fast in my face and I thought I was getting assaulted. He was like, “You’re on my iPod, dude!” And I was like, “What is an iPod? What are you showing me? Are you beaming me up to space right now?” And there was my dumb face on his iPod, which was an inch by two inches or something. That was trippy for me.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I remember walking into Apple Stores and seeing The Office advertised on their billboards before we were anywhere near a big hit and going, “Wow, this is awesome.”

BEN SILVERMAN: Apple treated us better than our network.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: And maybe better than we deserved at that moment. But they saw something in the show too.

BEN SILVERMAN: They got behind the show and treated it as their own.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Remember when Fred Armisen did that Steve Jobs impression on Saturday Night Live? It was on Weekend Update and he was pitching the iPod and kept mentioning The Office. He was like, “You can film a movie while watching a movie and making a phone call, all while watching your favorite episode of . . . The Office.” I was like, “Whoa, if we’re being parodied on SNL, this is big.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Apple didn’t pay for product placement in the Christmas episode, right?

BEN SILVERMAN: Nothing, at least not initially. They ended up giving us all these computers for the set and kind of investing in the show as both an advertiser and supporter. But we were already naturally drawn to Apple, because the show always touched on things happening in the real world.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It’s funny. It’s a show about a dying industry being taken over by technology, yet the show uses technology to its advantage every step of the way. We became a hit because of iTunes, and we’re being discovered by a new generation today thanks to streaming services like Netflix.

JOHN KRASINSKI: A lot of people get to say, “We owe it all to our fans,” but I think we might be the only show who actually owes it all to our fans. When people started paying for shows they could watch for free on TV, then NBC had to pick us up for another season. That was just so mind-blowing to me.

RAINN WILSON: It was young people with their iPods who knew how to set up an iTunes account because their parents didn’t. I think that blindsided everybody, including NBC, that we would be so popular with young people. The fact that we’re most popular with twenty-two- to twenty-five-year-olds is really astonishing. We didn’t think that. We were like, “Oh, people who work in offices will like the show. And people who’ve had bad bosses before and have had to work with annoying coworkers, they’re the ones who are going to really relate to this show.” Why are fourteen-year-olds gobbling it up? It still doesn’t really make sense to me.

The network was finally starting to pay attention. The downloads weren’t being captured in the ratings, but for the first time people were paying to watch our show. And as cast members, we were also doing everything we could to reach viewers.

“We Broke the Record for Longest Moment Without Talking”

From MySpace to “Booze Cruise”

Some of the actors created MySpace pages for their characters and interacted with fans from their desks. Jenna’s MySpace blog was often stamped “From the desk of Pam Beesly,” and it wasn’t false advertising. She often wrote it on the computer at her Dunder Mifflin reception desk. She shared fun behind-the-scenes tidbits with fans, like one entry from the summer of 2006, where she revealed that she sometimes dressed in character only from the waist up. Below the desk, “I’m wearing sweatpants and Ugg boots and it’s awesome,” Jenna wrote. “If only I could have done that when I was a real receptionist.”

JENNA FISCHER: I think it connected people deeply to the show, to have the actors of the TV show that you really love interacting with you, answering your questions, caring as much as you do. It kind of makes you feel like you’re part of it in a more real, intimate way. Also, it was real. That connection was real.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You’d write back to fans on MySpace?

JENNA FISCHER: I would type things to people, like an instant message, like, “Hey, when you watch the such-and-such episode, in this scene, you’ll know I was typing this to you.” It was before Twitter, before Instagram, . . . before Facebook. MySpace was the place where there was this social interaction and we got all this feedback from fans. In that interaction, I would hear a lot about Jim and Pam. I would hear a lot of people say things to me like, “I have someone at work that I have a crush on. Do you have any advice?”

Angela Kinsey also had a MySpace account, as did Brian Baumgartner. B. J. Novak wrote a blog for TV Guide, where he revealed intimate details from the set that made readers feel like they were part of our inner circle. He shared in a September 20, 2005, entry, for instance, that the extras playing the waitstaff at Chili’s in “The Dundies” episode were all “actual Chili’s workers from around the state. One of them, a pretty, friendly blonde, appeared to have a crush on John [Krasinski].” She slipped a letter to John that contained the following poem: “Perhaps you’d join me for a night of romance? / A dinner, a movie . . . maybe a dance?” As Novak noted, “The whole thing rhymed . . . John was freaking out.”

MATT SOHN: You guys got the internet at your desks during the second season. I recall everybody going to MySpace and talking about the show and what they’re doing right now and what’s coming up. It was this early groundswell of using the internet for good and for press for the show.

RAINN WILSON: We were trying to save the show. [Laughs.] And our jobs.

MATT SOHN: That helped build an audience.

RAINN WILSON: There’s something else that you’re leaving out, which was Dwight Schrute did a blog for NBC.com.

From September 2005—just in time for the season two premiere—to early 2009, Dwight had his own blog posted semiregularly on NBC’s official site, called Schrute Space.

RAINN WILSON: This was also very new. Oh, a network has a website and you can watch clips of the show on that website and each show has a different web page? You can sign up and be a fan and talk on message boards on those pages? This was very new in 2004, 2005, 2006. I asked if I could write a blog in Dwight’s voice. I don’t know where those blogs are. I should have printed them out or something. I don’t think they exist anymore.

Dwight’s deep thoughts, all written by Rainn himself (often while he was killing time on the set, trying to look busy at his computer), touched on subjects ranging from salmon—“It’s so pink. And it smells like fish. Salmon sucks! I hate Salmon. I hope they all die in those rivers”—to sleet—“It’s not snow (wimpy) or rain (annoying). It’s its own thing”—to whether coffee makers count as robots.

RAINN WILSON: I think it was the first time someone did a blog as a fictional character. It was just Dwight holding forth on whatever. That got a lot of press and attention, and fans really loved finding Dwight’s blogs and getting to know the character that way too.

The internet wasn’t just a way for fans to interact with their favorite characters (and actors). It also allowed them to have, if not input on the show, at least a little influence.

JEN CELOTTA: I remember us going on [the Office fan site] OfficeTally at the end of every episode to see what the fans thought. It was like live-time reviews of the show by the people who watched it, and it was just fascinating.

LEE EISENBERG (WRITER, DIRECTOR, CO–EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): The entire writing staff just crowded around a computer, refreshing like crazy to see if [fans] liked the B story. It was like they had so much power.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: How much did that influence what you wrote in new episodes?

JEN CELOTTA: I don’t remember it ever affecting any story lines. But it was a barometer for certain things. If we were slowing down Pam and Jim and everyone [on OfficeTally] was like, “I like the fact that it’s slow,” we might not feel the pressure of it as much. There were little things like that, but it was never like, “They want this so we have to give it to them.” We would have little debates in the writers’ room, and there was one debate, I can’t remember what it was about, but it was small but passionate. Lee [Eisenberg] was on one side of the debate and I was on the other. After the episode aired, somebody on OfficeTally said something totally agreeing with how Lee felt. I was like, “Huh, that’s a bummer.” A few weeks or months later, I found out Lee was that person. [Laughs.] He wrote an OfficeTally comment under a fake name.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: So the original burner accounts existed in the Office writers’ room.

Between that and the iTunes deal, our fan base was growing. When the show returned in early 2006, the first episode of the new year was “Booze Cruise.”

MIKE SCHUR: It was the highest-rated show we’d ever done. We passed My Name Is Earl in the ratings. We actually beat our lead-in. And from there, the show was launched. That’s just lunacy. You can only hope and dream that things go right. That’s not things going right, that’s like the universe conspiring to help us in some crazy way. Even though the show is serialized, Greg designed it so that you could enter it at any moment and understand the dynamics and get hooked.

“Booze Cruise,” the eleventh episode of the second season, was written by Greg Daniels and directed by Ken Kwapis, and it was the first Office episode shot outside of the Dunder Mifflin office.

JENNA FISCHER: We did two days on the boat overnight and we were getting seasick. [Laughs.] It was really insane.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: B. J. Novak threw up over the side of the boat.

JOHN KRASINSKI: We had shot till the wee hours and the sun was cracking, and we were in pitch-black water, like terrifying, shark-infested water.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It wasn’t Lake Wallenpaupack in northeastern Pennsylvania. We were on Long Beach [Harbor, California]. It was essentially the ocean.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Hammerhead sharks are all over the place there. No, it’s true. And we were on a tiny boat and we were all exhausted.

RANDALL EINHORN: It was the biggest swing by far, because we were shooting on a boat at nighttime, which everybody knows you don’t do that. It’s really hard. I mean, they learned that on [the 1995 Kevin Costner movie] Waterworld. But a boat at nighttime? It was a junky old boat and it was pretty hard to move around on it. It was rife with potential disaster.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It was stuffy and confined. So in a way, it was the exact equivalent of the office bullpen, but on a boat.

JENNA FISCHER: We were like a bunch of kids on a camping trip. We were so excited. It was like, “Sleepover! We get hotel rooms! This is so fun!” [Laughs.]

RANDALL EINHORN: We couldn’t move the boat because it would be different on every take. So instead of moving the boat, we would move the lights. There were a couple of barges that had lights on ’em that would go on action, so that the lights are in relatively the same place for each take. It was a pain in the neck.

“Booze Cruise” was also the episode with the infamous twenty-seven seconds of silence between Jim and Pam. When the two friends get a moment alone together on the boat, Pam offhandedly says of her fiancé, “Sometimes I just don’t get Roy.” Jim isn’t quite sure how to respond, and the two stand there together, perfectly silent, for an uncomfortably long time.

KEN KWAPIS: The length of the silence was not something we’d planned to the second. But John and Jenna both knew there were no rules about pace. They’re not doing a scene, we’re observing them. We’re observing two people having a moment. So it was not objectionable to let the moment linger. I don’t remember, when we shot it, feeling like, “Oh my God, this is it. We’ve broken the record for longest moment of not talking.”

JOHN KRASINSKI: It felt like a big deal when someone told me the number of seconds. If someone was counting, it surely wasn’t Jenna or me.

KEN KWAPIS: But I do remember mostly that it felt very truthful. It could have been half that length, it didn’t really matter. It just felt very truthful. I turned in my cut and probably worked with Greg on it, but it was Greg who ultimately fought to keep it in at that length. But for me, if you’re involved, you don’t feel the time passing. Those two actors were just so invested. I don’t think they had a clue that they were stretching the limits of what’s acceptable on a broadcast half hour of television.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: [“Booze Cruise”] was our seventeenth episode, but up until this point, I was on the show as a guest star. Meaning I was never a hundred percent sure that I would be invited back from week to week. The same went for Leslie, Kate, Oscar, Phyllis, and Angela.

ANGELA KINSEY: I found out I was going to be a series regular at like two in the morning, ’cause we were doing night shoots [for “Booze Cruise”]. There’s a photo that I think Oscar took of Jenna and me when I found out, and we’re jumping up in the air holding hands.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Before that call, were you thinking you might be fired?

ANGELA KINSEY: I remember saying to my mom, “Pretty much anyone can go.” And she was like [in a Louisiana drawl], “Well, every office needs a bitch.” [Laughs.]

On January 6, the day after “Booze Cruise” aired, Kevin Reilly woke up at four in the morning and looked at the ratings.

KEVIN REILLY: And the show actually grew. It stabilized. It was a respectable rating. Honestly, I don’t wanna admit it, but I might’ve teared up.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You’d been fighting for this moment for so long.

KEVIN REILLY: The show went from good to great. Everybody was locking in and getting in the groove. The show truly became the American version of The Office. All of a sudden it was like, “Oh my God, this is now its own thing. And this thing could go a hundred episodes or more.”

JOHN KRASINSKI: I used to go to this same diner every morning with my buddy Danny. We went every single morning and I got an iced coffee and started the day. On a Wednesday, because we used to air on Tuesdays at that time, I walk into the same diner, and the same people were now looking up and whispering, “That’s the dude from that show.” That was my moment that I really knew something had changed, people were watching. It was weird because I was really happy about it, obviously, but I was also a little freaked out because that sort of secret club that we had was no longer secret.

We were a little less than halfway through season two and finally gaining traction. And then, long shot of long shots, Steve was nominated for a Golden Globe in late 2005, in the Best Actor—Television Series Musical or Comedy category.

“Redneck Cousins at a Wedding”

The Office Crashes the Golden Globes

We were all beyond excited to be invited to a real awards ceremony. Except, well, we didn’t exactly get into the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton Hotel, where the actual festivities take place. On January 16, 2006, the night of the awards, we were upstairs, on the hotel’s rooftop.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Or more specifically, the rooftop of their parking garage.

JENNA FISCHER: We were all invited to watch the Golden Globes at a viewing party, hosted by NBC Universal, with other executives. I believe we were like the only actors in the room.

ANGELA KINSEY: Oh my gosh, we were just like the farm mouse come to town. First of all, we had to go right from work. We had to get ready at the end of the day, and I had my hair in a ponytail ’cause I’d been playing Angela Martin all day, so guess what, I just wore a ponytail to the Golden Globes. I remember I got a spray tan ’cause I thought I was really white, like too white in my dress. Rainn made fun of me. [As Rainn] “So one day on The Office, Angela Martin is pale, and the next day you look orange? Angela!”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I happened to live adjacent to the Beverly Hilton Hotel, so a bunch of us—David Denman [who played Roy], Oscar Nuñez, Angela Kinsey, and myself—we met at my house beforehand and drove to the Globes in Denman’s Honda Civic. We had to park around the corner.

ANGELA KINSEY: We weren’t allowed to sit in the main room. Only Steve got invited into the main room where the fancy people were.

JENNA FISCHER: They served sushi and lots of booze, and we all got shit-faced. We were super-duper drunk. Sort of because I think we felt like this might be the one and only swanky awards party any of us ever go to, and we were going to live it up like a bunch of redneck cousins at a wedding.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We’re surrounded by all these executives making deals in the corner. And we’re being all rowdy in front of the big-screen TVs.

JENNA FISCHER: Then it came time for Steve’s award and everyone knew that Jason Lee was going to win for My Name Is Earl. He was the odds-on favorite. And when they announced that Steve won for The Office, do you remember what happened?

ANGELA KINSEY: We about fell out of our chairs. Literally, we fell out of the sofa. We made such a scene.

JENNA FISCHER: We were like baseball players winning the World Series. We were leaping on one another.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Whooo!

JENNA FISCHER: We piled on each other. It was such a display. The room was so confused by us.

ANGELA KINSEY: The fancy people were like, “Who are those guys?” We were screaming, we were so excited.

RAINN WILSON: Was that when he gave the really funny speech about Nancy?

Steve’s acceptance speech was written by his wife, Nancy, or so he claimed. He thanked all the usual suspects, but kept coming back to Nancy, “who put her career on hold in support of mine, and who sometimes wishes that I would let her know when I am going to be home late so she can schedule her life, which is no less important than mine.”

BEN SILVERMAN: I just remember the absolute joy we all felt in the affirmation that Steve got and the show got by association. I remember how fun it was to be young and part of something so successful, and we didn’t even get hangovers then. You know what I mean? It was like you could do anything and be anyone.

JENNA FISCHER: When the awards were over, Steve came up into the party [on the rooftop] and we tackled him. We were passing the Golden Globe around. We piled into this little photo booth.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Yes! That was one of my favorite moments. And you can still sort of see in that photo—because again, we were the redneck cousins of the Golden Globes—I had dipped something into the chocolate fondue, and it all went right down my white shirt. All the way, just straight down, all over it. Just because we were that classy.

JENNA FISCHER: That was when I thought, “Okay, they’re not going to cancel us now. Steve just won a Golden Globe. [Laughs.] I have a job!”

BEN SILVERMAN: Later on, I remember having an intimate moment with my father on a plane, when I told him, “I think this is it. I think we’re going to be okay. This show’s going to survive. We’ll be able to eat, and we don’t need to worry about health insurance today as much as we did yesterday.” It was that transformative.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: People were starting to pay attention to us now. Our show was getting recognized.

Steve’s Golden Globe win was both a validation of what we were doing and also the spotlight we needed to keep doing it. At this point, NBC finally got behind the show. All the little things really did come together. We went from fearing that we’d be canceled to saying, “I think we might be around for a while.”

MIKE SCHUR: It is wild to think about how many things lined up at exactly the right moment. We teetered on the brink of cancellation so many times, and if one of those things doesn’t go well, if 40-Year-Old Virgin made twelve million fewer dollars, I think we’re canceled. It’s crazy to think about in retrospect.

But even with everything going right, it was no time to coast. We finally had the attention we’d been craving, but now we had to keep earning it, week after week. We no longer lived in fear of cancellation, but audiences weren’t going to keep tuning in if we didn’t deliver on the promise of our first and second seasons.

TITLE	DIRECTED BY	WRITTEN BY	ORIGINAL AIR DATE
“The Dundies”	Greg Daniels	Mindy Kaling	September 20, 2005
“Sexual Harassment”	Ken Kwapis	B. J. Novak	September 27, 2005
“Office Olympics”	Paul Feig	Michael Schur	October 4, 2005
“The Fire”	Ken Kwapis	B. J. Novak	October 11, 2005
“Halloween”	Paul Feig	Greg Daniels	October 18, 2005
“The Fight”	Ken Kwapis	Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg	November 1, 2005
“The Client”	Greg Daniels	Paul Lieberstein	November 8, 2005
“Performance Review”	Paul Feig	Larry Wilmore	November 15, 2005
“E-mail Surveillance”	Paul Feig	Jennifer Celotta	November 22, 2005
“Christmas Party”	Charles McDougall	Michael Schur	December 6, 2005
“Booze Cruise”	Ken Kwapis	Greg Daniels	January 5, 2006
“The Injury”	Bryan Gordon	Mindy Kaling	January 12, 2006
“The Secret”	Dennie Gordon	Lee Eisenberg & Gene Stupnitsky	January 19, 2006
“The Carpet”	Victor Nelli Jr.	Paul Lieberstein	January 26, 2006
“Boys and Girls”	Dennie Gordon	B. J. Novak	February 2, 2006
“Valentine’s Day”	Greg Daniels	Michael Schur	February 9, 2006
“Dwight’s Speech”	Charles McDougall	Paul Lieberstein	March 2, 2006
“Take Your Daughter to Work Day”	Victor Nelli Jr.	Mindy Kaling	March 16, 2006
“Michael’s Birthday”	Ken Whittingham	Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg	March 30, 2006
“Drug Testing”	Greg Daniels	Jennifer Celotta	April 27, 2006
“Conflict Resolution”	Charles McDougall	Greg Daniels	May 4, 2006
“Casino Night”	Ken Kwapis	Steve Carell	May 11, 2006

5

“The Office Needed a Billion Things to Go Right”

“He May Be an Idiot, but He’s Our Idiot”

Finding Michael Scott’s Heart

“You’re on My iPod, Dude”

The Office Hits the Much Smaller Screen

“We Broke the Record for Longest Moment Without Talking”

From MySpace to “Booze Cruise”

“Redneck Cousins at a Wedding”

The Office Crashes the Golden Globes