Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

Audiences had such an emotional connection to Jim and Pam—or, as some superfans called them, P.B. & J. (short for Pam Beesly and Jim)—that it still resonates to this day.

Long after The Office went off the air, they’ve created Jim and Pam mash-ups on YouTube with romantic ballad sound tracks like “Crash into Me” (Dave Matthews Band) and “Iris” (Goo Goo Dolls). Two Office fans with an uncanny resemblance to Jim and Pam went viral on TikTok in 2020 with their word-for-word re-creations of the TV couple’s most memorable moments.

Supermodel Chrissy Teigen is so obsessed that she hosted a Twitter poll in 2019, on the ten-year anniversary of Jim and Pam’s wedding, asking fellow fans if the pair were still together. When 70 percent insisted they were, Teigen argued that the fictional couple were either divorced or unhappy. “They never went to Austin,” Teigen wrote, referring to the Office finale when Jim and Pam decide to make the move to Texas for a fresh start. “You know it and I know it. I talk about moving to Austin every other day and here I am. Not in Austin.”

That’s a lot of time and mental energy devoted to a couple that only exists on our TV screens.

But people want to believe. They want to think that Jim and Pam weren’t just fictional creations but flesh-and-blood people whose love story was genuine and true. One viewer tweeted at both John and Jenna in 2016, writing, “I’m watching The Office for the first time and I’m very saddened to hear that you two aren’t together in real life.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You should just explain that John’s a real pain in the ass in real life. Why would you not just say that?

JENNA FISCHER: [Laughs.] No, it’s that I am not Pam in real life and he’s not Jim in real life. In real life, we’re mismatched. He is perfectly matched with Emily [Blunt, his wife since 2010], and I’m perfectly matched with Lee [Kirk, her husband since 2010]. We need our laid-back, easygoing partners.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I also think you were both playing characters on a TV show.

JENNA FISCHER: But I feel like I have to justify why John and I aren’t actually in love. The bottom line is, we were playing characters. But when you say that, it destroys some of the magic of Jim and Pam. That’s the thing I don’t ever want to take from people.

We’re not going to destroy the magic of JAM—our other favorite shorthand for Jim and Pam—or at least we’ll try not to. We just want to tell the tale of how a little workplace comedy that wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel—only share some stories about everyday people that felt truthful and real—created one (or maybe a few) of the most iconic couples in TV history.

“A Really Intense Love Story with a Quarter of the Screen Time”

When Jim Met Pam

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: If you go back and look at those early episodes of The Office, the budding romance between Jim and Pam plays out quietly on the sidelines.

MIKE SCHUR: Greg [Daniels] had a lot of theories, and they were all correct. One of the things he pinpointed for us very early on: What makes the British Office so good? Part of it is the once-in-a-generation performance from Ricky Gervais and some of it is other incredible actors and a wonderful mockumentary premise. But Greg broke it down even further. He said, “Almost every show in history has had a formula, and the formula is—the center of the show is—a will-they-won’t-they Sam and Diane [from Cheers] romance. And off in the corner is a wacky boss, and occasionally the wacky boss comes in and does something funny and gets big laughs and then leaves. But the audience’s investment emotionally is with the will-they-won’t-they couple. The British Office inverted it. The wacky boss is the main part of the show, and shoved into the corner is this will-they-won’t-they romance.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Does that change how the audience feels about these characters?

MIKE SCHUR: It does two things. Number one, it makes the wacky boss into a viable character worthy of introspection and layering and dimension in a way that the wacky boss traditionally isn’t. No one usually cares about what’s going on in the wacky boss’s emotional life. It also means that when you shove the romance into the corner, it becomes this delicate, gossamer spiderweb of glances and tiny moments. A character getting someone a candy bar from the vending machine becomes an enormous emotional moment. You’ve fundamentally changed the way audiences relate to romance. “I only got eight seconds of the romance this week. I want more!” So many people got invested in a different way than they’re normally invested in TV romances.

The challenge for everyone, from the writers to the actors to the editors, was how to strike the perfect balance, letting this subtle love story of Jim and Pam unfold at the edge of the frame.

JEN CELOTTA: The fact that they weren’t front and center made us enjoy it even more. They were the pop of beauty in the gray.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Their story wasn’t Ross and Rachel from Friends. Jim and Pam was a little moment here, a little moment there.

JOHN KRASINSKI: The stakes were set up so wonderfully, because that’s real life. When you’re in love with someone, especially someone at work, you look forward to those interactions at the office. When you go home and have a home life with your friends or whatever else you’re doing, you will not see that person. So you’re sort of, I don’t know, tantalized by the idea that when you get those moments with her, you’ll savor it.

GREG DANIELS: You can play a really intense love story with a quarter of the screen time, and you’ve still got three-quarters for comedy. Think about Cheers. They had one lead man and woman and then side characters. The lead had to carry the comedy and the romance. That’s one of the great aspects of The Office, you didn’t have to put it all in one person. It’s like Zeppo Marx. [Laughs.] With the Marx Brothers movies, the main plot would be the Marx Brothers, and they also had a romance, but they gave it to Zeppo. Obviously Krasinski is no Zeppo. He’s super funny. But he didn’t have to be as crazy as Michael and Dwight. He can be more of an everyman and react to stuff and be in the romance.

BRENT FORRESTER (WRITER, PRODUCER): Greg used to say a thing that I thought was very interesting. “Tonally,” he said, “separate out the scenes that are dramatic tone from the scenes that are comic tone. Don’t try to do them both at once.” That was a big learning curve for me. He called it the McDLT. This is a reference to a thing that McDonald’s used to do very briefly. They had this hamburger that was served hot in half of the Styrofoam container and then the other half was the cold lettuce and tomato. The gimmick was you’d put it together and the hot stays hot and the cold stays cold. That’s what Greg used to say. “Keep the hot side hot and the cold side cold, the funny side funny and the drama side dramatic. Separate out those scenes.”

KEN KWAPIS: The show is a comedy, but within it is a romantic story that’s not played for laughs. This is a show with clowns and lovers. In a show like Friends, the romantic story lines are all funny. But in The Office, we don’t love Pam and Jim because of the laughs. We love them because they seemed grounded and real.

Another reason the relationship feels so grounded is the pacing. Many of the biggest Jim-Pam moments happened off the beat, when we didn’t expect them.

GREG DANIELS: Surprise is really good for comedy, right? Anything you can do to increase surprise is good. The problem to me with multicamera shows in general is that the rhythms are so ingrained. It felt like Kabuki or some kind of really ritualized thing.

JOHN KRASINSKI: In TV, you know that the big scenes are coming. And Greg wouldn’t do it. I remember how bold it was when you thought Jim was going to do something, like propose to Pam, and then it wouldn’t happen and you were like, “Oh man.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Or the time you and Pam accidentally kissed at the Dundies.

JOHN KRASINSKI: That’s real life. Those are the things you remember. Whereas a regular television show would have a big huge kiss scene, like, “They finally got together!” I remember reading that script and being like, man, that is so smart. To have the audience be like, “Did they just kiss?” And not give them what they thought they wanted. ’Cause that’s how I felt. I felt like, “Oh my God, I thought we were going to do some huge kiss scene.” And instead she just did it at the Dundies. I guess this is where I’m very much like Jim, because I would’ve stewed on that for months and been like, “Was it a real kiss?”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Did that count?

JOHN KRASINSKI: Was she just drunk? That’s real life. Rather than if it was a big kiss scene where I took her out back and made some huge overture. You’d be like, “Oh good, I’m being entertained by this moment. But I don’t feel anything. I’m not connected.”

For someone watching this unfold on TV, it was obvious that Jim had it bad for Pam from the pilot. But in the second season, the tension in this will-they-won’t-they relationship really started to build. That was partly due to the addition of a new writer in season two, someone who loves nothing more than a complex psychological story line, Jen Celotta.

JEN CELOTTA: Hi!

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Yay!

JEN CELOTTA: Yay, ya, yay! I’m so excited!

MIKE SCHUR: Jen Celotta was the beating heart of the show. Her superpower was her incredible connection to Pam and to the sweetness of that character.

GREG DANIELS: When I think about Jen, I think about Michael Scott stories. I think about the funeral for the bird and stuff like that. She was super into the psychology of Michael. Jen is fascinating. She’s the child of a physicist and very brainy. All of her work after The Office is like . . . she has a screenplay where every scene is from a different year of a guy’s life, and she’s doing an animated show with trees as the protagonists.

JEN CELOTTA: I’ve heard some people talk about how I particularly loved writing Pam and Jim. I did love finding the shades and the colors and the dynamics between the two of them. One of my favorite things I got to do with them was the jinx episode where they didn’t speak.

One of the shared office games between Jim and Pam is jinx. After two people unintentionally say the same word or phrase simultaneously, the first one to say “Jinx, buy me a Coke” forces the other to remain entirely silent until a Coke is purchased for the jinxer. In “Drug Testing,” episode twenty of season two, Jim and Pam both utter the same Stanleyism (“I do not think that is funny”) and Jim is jinxed. Following the “unflinchingly rigid” rules, Jim makes his way to the vending machine but discovers it’s sold out of Coke, and so he must spend the day not saying a word to anyone.

JEN CELOTTA: There’s a moment with Jim and Pam where she says, “Oh, what, are you going to tell me something?” And he wanted to say that he liked her, but he has to be silent. And she says . . .

PAM: You look like you have something really important to say and you just can’t for some reason.

JEN CELOTTA: He looks like his stomach drops and he turns white and looks down, and then you see her know what that means and she reacts. They could be silent film stars.

While these magical Jim and Pam moments felt organic and effortless on-screen, working on them on a day-to-day basis was not. Nothing brought production to a screeching halt like a big Jim-Pam scene.

JENNA FISCHER: It’s true.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I would be like, “Please get me out of here before they film this, or it’s going to be seven hours.”

MATT SOHN: There was a lot of emotion and discussion that went into the Jim and Pam scenes.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I had a very specific Tom Waits impression that I would do, which would be something like [with a Tom Waits gravelly baritone], “There’s a discussion at the monitor,” and the writers would get so aggravated.

MATT SOHN: It was true, though.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You would see it happen. You would see people start assembling.

MATT SOHN: The writers would get called; they would all come down to huddle. Everybody would go to craft services to get coffee. The set would clear out. We’d sit around, we’d wait, we’d talk, we’d chat, we would dissect the scene and we would rebuild it.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Why do you think those scenes were so important?

MATT SOHN: It was a slow burn early on, and they didn’t want to go too far too fast. Jenna had strong feelings on what it should be, as did John and Greg.

JENNA FISCHER: We cared very deeply. Everybody cared very, very much. John and I would fight hard for what we believed and we were usually on the same page. We had a singular mind when it came to Jim and Pam.

MATT SOHN: It was finding that exact tone that kept everybody happy, that kept their relationship on point to give it that slow build. It wasn’t one of these ridiculous, romantic, silly things that you see in a lot of shows.

GREG DANIELS: I didn’t want to do a romance like in so many shows, where they come together and break apart and come together and break apart. It didn’t seem real. I felt when Jim and Pam finally get together, they’re going to be together. I don’t see anything breaking them up because they’re so in tune with each other. So then the question was: How do we spin this out for a certain number of years? What are the obstacles?

JENNA FISCHER: There was often one Jim-Pam moment per episode. And it was either where they’re going to connect in some super special swoony way or they’re going to misstep in some way where one of them gets their feelings hurt. And there was this very fine line that we had to walk all the time. So for example, shooting a scene over and over and over again, where this time they can touch hands, but then we have to do one where they don’t touch hands. ’Cause it might be too much if their hands touch, that might be going too far. Do we end it with a hug, or should he kiss her cheek before he leaves? How much were they allowed to literally touch one another, look into each other’s eyes, swoon at each other? I mean, we would spend hours debating and shooting alternates of these Jim-Pam scenes.

LEE EISENBERG: When you look back and you watch it, it feels like some of the choices are so confident and so inevitable.

This is Lee Eisenberg, who joined our writers’ room at the beginning of season two.

LEE EISENBERG: But that inevitability makes it feel like it takes months and months and months of going down all these different avenues. When you finally make the choice and it goes through multiple rewrites, and then you have these actors do it and everything comes together, it feels like, oh, that was the exact right choice. But we debated Jim and Pam in “Casino Night” for weeks and weeks and weeks. What does he say and what doesn’t he say, and what does she say, you know? There were multiple drafts of it and different versions of it.

Ah yes, “Casino Night,” the season two finale, which first aired on May 11, 2006. It gave us the quintessential Jim and Pam moment, the one we’d all been anticipating with every under-the-radar flirtation and furtive glance.

“What I Was Shooting Looked Real”

The “Casino Night” Kiss

GREG DANIELS: “Casino Night” is when Jim says he likes Pam for the first time to her face in the parking lot. The writing staff kind of went nuts. Everybody wanted to write it, first of all. This was, to me, one of the most charming and likable aspects about the writing staff. They cared so much about the show. A lot of times, you get in a situation where they’re just trying to get out and go home. And these guys were young. It was Mike [Schur] and Mindy [Kaling] and Paul [Lieberstein] and B.J. [Novak] and, at that point, Jen [Celotta] and Lee [Eisenberg] and Gene [Stupnitsky]. Everybody wanted to be the person to write it.

GREG DANIELS: And Steve wrote it really well.

The pivotal scene happens near the episode’s end, when Jim and Pam run in to each other outside a company party. It’s a simple moment, just two people in a parking lot, spanning no more than two minutes of screen time. But behind the scenes, it became a tug-of-war between director Ken Kwapis and the writers.

GREG DANIELS: Ken wanted to shoot it in a very straightforward fashion. And his reasoning, I think, was very sound. Which was, yes, yes, everybody loves the conceit and the mockumentary part. But now it’s about the characters, and the most entertaining and interesting thing is to see their faces. But the writing staff desperately wanted to lean in to the mockumentary. They thought it was our secret weapon.

JEN CELOTTA: I like it when you have to fill in the blanks. In the parking lot scene with Jim and Pam in “Casino Night,” I didn’t want to miss everything, I just wanted to be late to the party or find the shadow of them and hear them talking.

GREG DANIELS: Whose contributions do you want to really push at this moment? The concept and the writing? Or maybe this cast? Should you trust these two great actors and let them do their thing?

DAVID ROGERS (EDITOR): Originally the concept was we would just see the aftermath of it. There was a huge discussion with Greg and Ken and the actors, and it was like, yeah, it’s cool to do something as a documentary and just capture the moment after. But there’s something unsatisfying for an audience member to not see a piece of this. I think we made the right choice in letting [Jim and Pam] have a conversation.

JIM: I was just . . . I’m in love with you.

PAM: What?

JIM: I’m really sorry if that’s weird for you to hear, but I needed you to hear it.

GREG DANIELS: There are a lot of different versions. But one version which we actually shot was that the cameras are covering Casino Night and, like on a reality show, somebody is monitoring the sound ’cause everybody’s mic’d. They realize Jim is about to confess something to Pam and they tell one of the cameramen, “Get it, get it, we don’t know where it is!” And the camera guy runs out of the warehouse and down the alley and around the corner of the building just in time to see Jim be told no and walk away. We did shoot that and it was interesting. But ultimately, we went with the faces.

JOHN KRASINSKI: I remember not knowing where Matt [Sohn] was and Ken wouldn’t tell me. He was like, “Don’t worry about it. Just do the scene.”

PAM: What are you doing? What do you expect me to say to that?

JIM: I just needed you to know. Once.

PAM: Well, I um . . . I . . . I can’t.

DAVID ROGERS: You think that’s it.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We’re done.

DAVID ROGERS: We’re done. But then at the end, I mean, talk about an ending.

MATT SOHN: The kiss? Oh my God.

The next thing we see on-screen is Pam, back in the office, quietly talking to her mom on the phone. And then Jim walks in and kisses her.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Nobody was on set, nobody was around the craft service table. I didn’t know that was happening. So I walked on, you know, ready to joke with folks, and nobody wanted to make eye contact with me. I was like, “What happened?” I was so nervous.

KEN KWAPIS: There was a lot of conversation about the kiss. I think that John and Jenna had a lot of, uh, what’s the right word? They were anxious about the scene.

JOHN KRASINSKI: I was like, “What’s happening? Is no one going to call action?” Randall [Einhorn] and Matt [Sohn] were two of my favorite people on earth and I couldn’t see them. I was like, “What are we doing?” It was really weird. I was so freaked out. I was on set for a while before Jenna showed up, ’cause Jenna was taking her moment. I didn’t know that I could take thirty minutes in my trailer to prepare mentally. And then I got even much more scared. You start to think like, “Oh God, I didn’t do my homework.”

When they were ready to shoot, everyone disappeared. It was just John and Jenna in the room. Randall Einhorn, the director of photography, was tucked away, just peeking through the blinds.

RANDALL EINHORN: I was so far away from them. And they’re really heavy cameras. The cameras weighed like thirty-eight pounds. Ken Kwapis was directing, and I was in the kitchen and all the lights were out. It was a really long lens shot. It was probably a 300-millimeter long lens shot.

KEN KWAPIS: If you shoot a kiss, any kind of kiss, traditionally you want to be able to see two faces. But we decided, and I don’t remember if it was Greg’s suggestion or if the actors came up with it, that we don’t see Jenna’s reaction to the kiss. We’re at her back. We see John, right? They kiss and then they break. I think they look at each other for a beat. And that’s the end of the scene. One of the things I’ve often thought about with that shot is, as an audience, you get the pleasure of being Pam. You’re being looked at by Jim. You don’t see her reactions. So you get to, as an audience, kind of write it yourself.

RANDALL EINHORN: I was actually getting choked up. I knew very well that it was John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer and that there was craft service just out the door. And I would see John and Jenna there in a minute. But I would still get emotionally involved. I would get invested because, to me, what I was shooting looked real. I was with those characters and it all felt real.

DAVID ROGERS: It’s that moment where they look at each other after and it’s like, “What now?”

It was a moment for fans to think about what could be in store for Jim, for Pam, for their future.

JEN CELOTTA: You’re so rooting for them. You feel like they’re kind of stuck in a place where they both could be—just like everybody—could be doing more.

“They Would Repel a Lot of People, but Not Each Other”

Love Secrets of Dwangela and Phyllis and Bob

Jim and Pam were far from the only promising (or potentially catastrophic) relationship that blossomed at Dunder Mifflin. On most TV shows, secondary characters generally exist to support the main characters’ story line or add a little color to the fictional world. But on The Office, every character had complex dimensions waiting to be discovered, and desires almost certain to complicate their lives.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: When did Dwight and Angela’s relationship start?

RAINN WILSON: Boy, Angela would know this a lot better than me.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: When were you aware that this relationship was going to be something that lasted?

RAINN WILSON: I think it was the episode where there was a party at Jim’s house.

“E-mail Surveillance,” the ninth episode of the second season, first aired on November 22, 2005.

RAINN WILSON: Dwight finds Jim’s hide-a-key rock, the fake rock where you hide a key in. I brought it in and was like . . .

DWIGHT: Jim! You really think this is a good idea, huh? A hide-a-key rock?

MARK: Hey, you must be Dwight!

DWIGHT: You don’t work with us.

JIM: That’s because Mark’s my roommate.

RAINN WILSON: That’s when Pam looks out the window and sees my feet and Angela’s feet sticking out of the tree house or whatever it was in the backyard.

JEN CELOTTA: It was in a doghouse or tree fort. I wish I could remember whose idea it was. It had been something that writers were talking about for a while.

RAINN WILSON: They told me an episode before that they were going to get Dwight and Angela together. I’m like, “Oh, that’s hysterical.” I just thought it would be a little seasoning, a little flavoring. I had no idea that Dwangela would become a phenomenon that would last another seven or eight seasons.

LEE EISENBERG: Every show and every movie has “Oh, here’s the weird guy,” right? And the weird guy only does weird things. And the weird guy wouldn’t get girls ’cause the weird guy doesn’t like girls. And the weird guy wouldn’t like music because music is discordant to them.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: But Dwight loves women.

LEE EISENBERG: And some women really liked Dwight. He’s super confident. Dwight has a swagger in his own way that’s weird and cool.

ANGELA KINSEY: Our characters look around for the camera. There are times when we see that we’ve been caught and then we react to being caught. That was always a really fun thing to play off of. It was always something we had to consider when Dwight and I had scenes together. Are we camera aware? Do we know that the camera’s picking this up? And sometimes we never saw the camera. They truly were hidden and doing a spy shot. And then there were times where one of us would find it, usually me, and I’d walk off in a huff.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: How did that relationship change Angela?

ANGELA KINSEY: I think it just opened her up. In the beginning, you could see her as one note. Like, “Oh, she’s just the office bitch.” It’s sort of true, but the office bitch can be a bitch in love. There’s the sneaky bitch, the superstitious bitch, the madly-in-love bitch. There are layers to her grumpiness. She’s someone who’s very fear based, and I think falling in love with Dwight and having to step out of her comfort zone and trust someone and let someone in, it made her more three-dimensional.

JEN CELOTTA: I couldn’t see Dwight with anyone and I couldn’t see Angela with anyone. Maybe it was one of the things they had in common. They would repel a lot of people, but not each other. There was some fascination in terms of how un–Jim and Pam they were and how it could be played for even more comedy.

ANGELA KINSEY: But in their own way, their story isn’t much different than Jim and Pam. It’s two people that love each other and are both a little too scared to let the other person know how much they love each other, so they find ways to throw up all these roadblocks, until they finally just step out into that scary place and say, “All right, you got me.” I have a card that we hole-punched whenever we had sex. What was it called? An intercourse punch card.

ANGELA: Dwight and I have a contractual agreement to procreate five times, plain and simple. And should he develop feelings for me, well, that would be permissible under item 7C, clause 2, so I would not object.

ANGELA KINSEY: We had our own weird ways of stalling what was ultimately what we both wanted.

Healthy relationships weren’t easy to find at the Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch, from Pam and Roy’s never-ending engagement to Ryan and Kelly’s on-again, off-again affair to Kevin’s “complicated” relationship with Stacy (who leaves him after he claims the Eagles could win the NFC East). The one couple that was free of emotional complications from the very beginning was Phyllis Lapin and Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration.

PHYLLIS SMITH: When they wrote Bob into my life, I remember the auditions we had for Bob Vance. Because I was matronly looking, they wanted somebody that had a little bit of pizzazz to them, to be on the handsome side. It worked out great because all of a sudden you had this rich guy who went for the unassuming person on the lot.

From his first appearance on the season two episode “Christmas Party”—where he repeatedly introduced himself as “Bob Vance, Vance Refrigeration”—Bob and Phyllis’s relationship was mutually respectful and, well, normal.

PHYLLIS SMITH: Yeah, we were kind of normal. We just hit it off. I always said, “I helped him change a tire in the parking lot.” Here’s this big handsome guy who couldn’t get his tire changed, and I walked along—’cause we shared the same lot at Dunder Mifflin—and helped him change his tire. And that was the beginning of our romance. [Laughs.] In my mind, if the story continued, Phyllis and Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration are still together.

“You’re So Stupid, but I Like That”

Michael Scott’s Search for Love and Family

Love was running rampant at Dunder Mifflin, but there was one person who just couldn’t seem to find his soul mate: Michael Scott.

GREG DANIELS: In the beginning, we were playing his love life for comedy. It was like a comedy of errors, and he would always jump in too far and scare people off.

And then came Jan Levinson-Gould, Dunder Mifflin’s vice president of sales. From her first appearance in the pilot, Greg and others noted a sexual chemistry between Michael and Jan, played by longtime TV vet Melora Hardin.

MELORA HARDIN (“JAN LEVINSON”): I remember, after the pilot aired, being at lunch with Steve and Greg, and we talked about the interesting spark between Michael and Jan. We were all like, “Yeah, if we get an opportunity, if we get picked up, we should really have them hook up sometime at a convention or something.” We were all laughing about this idea.

But their attraction remained unrequited until season two, in the episode “The Client,” written by Paul Lieberstein. It began, like all great love stories, with a drunken make-out sesh at Chili’s.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: Jan and Michael was a great love story, one that had to end in disaster. It was about Jan lowering her standards because life wasn’t working out, but told through Michael’s point of view.

MIKE SCHUR: The fun of this isn’t, “Maybe Michael has found his life partner.” The fun of it is, “Oh no, this is going to be terrible.” [Laughs.]

MELORA HARDIN: I remember it was somewhat of a struggle for Greg. He talked about it with me and the costume designer and makeup and hair people. He used to say a lot, “Make sure she’s not too pretty. Take the makeup down a little.” He grappled with that. Greg always wanted to know what I thought. “Why would Jan be attracted to someone like that?”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Did you have any theories?

MELORA HARDIN: I feel like Jan was, well, she was brought up in a man’s world. She became more masculine in her behavior than she actually was inside. Some part of her was really sort of sad about the loss of her femininity. Michael’s puppylike adoration of her made her feel more feminine and more womanly, like she could be softer with him. She could let down a little bit of that masculine guard that was learned behavior for her.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Was there real love between Michael and Jan?

MELORA HARDIN: It was completely dysfunctional, but there was, yeah, there was. She didn’t even know that she was in love with him, but I think she was. She just was really focused on climbing that corporate ladder and forgot about her need for companionship. Michael was all wrong for her in every way, and there was something undeniably attractive about that for her. She needed that adoration. He was just so proud of having sex with her and having a relationship with her, and she was like, “You’re so stupid, but I like that.” She kind of liked being his trophy wife even though she found him ridiculous.

JAN: I am taking a calculated risk. What’s the upside? I overcome my nausea, fall deeply in love, babies, normalcy, no more self-loathing. Downside? I date Michael Scott publicly and collapse in on myself like a dying star.

JEN CELOTTA: We had so many fights in the writers’ room [about Michael and Jan], and the fights seemed to be about reality versus comedy. It felt to me like if we’re doing a documentary, if we’re leaning into that, we would want Michael to keep growing. Jim and Pam evolve to where they are, right? So we want Michael Scott to keep evolving. But if we’re just thinking with our comedy glasses on, Jan and Michael are hilarious. So there’s this tension of: Should we keep him stuck in this relationship because we can mine it for ridiculous humor, or should we evolve him? As a viewer, I start disconnecting a little if I feel that somebody is stuck in a thing that they wouldn’t be in real life.

The Michael-Jan relationship clearly wouldn’t last. But not just because they were an imperfect pairing. Michael yearned for something more than just a soul mate. He wanted a big, unconditionally loving family, a search that always led him back to the office.

MIKE SCHUR: It was important that he was single, had never been married, and didn’t have any kids. His entire emotional self-worth was tied up in the office, in his job and in those people. Even though there was very little evidence that they thought of him as a family member, he thought of them as his best friends and family members. That’s the essence of the show and the British version too, at some level.

GREG DANIELS: I drew something for the writers and it was basically a horrible sinking abyss. And I’d draw Michael running on the edge of it, trying to run out of it but falling in. To me, this is what was going on in his brain. He was desperately trying to avoid thinking of the fact that he was lonely and he was in his forties and, you know, the life he wanted wasn’t happening for him. That was key to his personality from the get-go. Why is he being so intrusive with all of the other people in the office? Why can’t he just leave them alone and be professional? Well, a positive spin on it is he’s lonely and these people are his family, but they all have other lives outside the office.

STEVE CARELL: I think Michael’s a decent dude with a lot of heart, but based on his childhood and the things he lacked growing up, things he was deprived of, he was so hungry for acceptance.

We got a hint of his childhood in the season two episode “Take Your Daughter to Work Day,” when Michael shows the office a video of himself as a kid, being interviewed on the Fundle Bundle TV show.

STEVE CARELL: I don’t think he had the strongest templates in the world to go by, but I think he also learned and evolved and became a better person along the way.

GREG DANIELS: I identified a lot with Michael. Like for instance in the “Halloween” episode, this notion that you would have to fire someone but you’d want to stay friends with them. I was the boss of the writers, so it was funny ’cause there’d be times when they’d be rolling their eyes at me, mocking me, and I was like, “Yeah, you can use it for the show.” Steve used to say, “If you’re in a situation where you don’t see a Michael Scott, you’re the Michael Scott.”

Michael was definitely a work in progress, and early on he’d be oblivious to his deep need to be loved. Nowhere was that clearer than in “Grief Counseling,” the fourth episode of the third season, which first aired in October 2006. Michael learns that his Dunder Mifflin predecessor, Ed Truck, was decapitated in a car accident. But nobody else at the office is as horrified, and they continue going about their business as usual, which sends Michael into an emotional tailspin.

GREG DANIELS: That episode was very tricky, because Michael did not know what the story was. He was in complete denial that he was really upset that the guy who had his job had died and nobody cared in the office. He fixated on the bird.

When Toby tries to explain to Michael that death is a part of life, using as an example the bird that flew into the building’s first-floor window that morning, Michael insists on giving the dead animal a proper funeral.

MIKE SCHUR: That was [writer] Jen [Celotta] from beginning to end. We kept tinkering and tinkering and tinkering. And eventually she was like, “I think I understand this and I want to write it.” We were like, “Great.”

GREG DANIELS: I remember Jen on the whiteboard. There was a trailer in the parking lot where we had the table readings, and it was sometimes the room where writers would go to work something out. Jen went into that trailer [to write “Grief Counseling”], and we came in and it looked like she was tracking a serial killer. She had all these lines and diagrams on the whiteboard, and it was about every moment: “What does Michael think is happening subconsciously? What is really happening?” It was a very complex story.

JEN CELOTTA: It was steering Michael through the stages of grief. What I always thought about with that episode in particular was: this is a story on a network television show that is an internal story where the character that it’s happening to is not even aware of it. My brain was exploding.

MIKE SCHUR: The part of it that she really locked into was Pam understanding what Michael was going through and giving the eulogy and trying to make Michael feel better by talking about this dead bird.

PAM: Lastly, we can’t help but notice that he was by himself when he died, but of course, we all know that doesn’t mean he was alone. Because I’m sure that there were lots of other birds out there who cared for him very much. He will not be forgotten.

MIKE SCHUR: It’s a really complicated emotional moment, but Jen understood it at some fundamental level.

JEN CELOTTA: I love Pam and Michael’s connection. I love their relationship. What excites me is the psychology and the insides of a person. How the insides of two people relate to each other is my favorite thing.

GREG DANIELS: What I loved was when Pam had a kindness for non-Jim characters. You know what I mean? I loved when she cared about Dwight when he got a concussion or when Dwight was trying to comfort her when she’s crying on that bench. Or “Business School,” which I think was maybe one of our best episodes, where Michael buys Pam’s painting.

“Business School,” episode seventeen of the third season (which aired February 15, 2007), follows Michael as he speaks to Ryan’s business school class (not realizing that Ryan has predicted Dunder Mifflin will become “obsolete within five to ten years”) and Pam as she tries (and fails) to get her coworkers to attend her first art show.

JEN CELOTTA: That moment at the art show is probably one of my favorite moments. It’s genius.

MIKE SCHUR: The ending of that episode, Michael has been just absolutely beaten up [at Ryan’s business school class] and no one has come to Pam’s art show. But Michael shows up and sees her drawing of the office and he’s blown away by it. It’s so meaningful ’cause no one else showed up. Jim didn’t show up, nobody showed up. And Pam hugs him. And then there’s that great joke that I think they added on the set, where she’s like, “What’s in your pocket?” And he goes, “Chunky,” and he pulls out an actual Chunky bar.

MIKE SCHUR: The moment where Michael shows up at Pam’s art show, I think it’s maybe the best moment we ever did. We were always looking for the off-ramp for Michael. Like, how does he get out of whatever miserable circumstance he’s put himself in? And it was like, oh, he goes to Pam’s art show. And then the idea that she drew the office and he takes it back and hangs it up, it was the emotional solve.

MICHAEL: [As he hangs Pam’s portrait of the office in the office.] It is . . . a message. It is an inspiration, it is . . . a source of beauty. And without paper, it could not have happened. Unless you had a camera.

MIKE SCHUR: It should be the thing that he sees every day before he goes to work.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Greg, Jen, and Mike Schur, they all told me that their favorite or the best episode of The Office was “Business School.”

BRENT FORRESTER: Wow. I’m humbled.

Brent Forrester, already a TV veteran when he joined us in season three, wrote this episode.

BRENT FORRESTER: Watching the scene now, I really feel like it’s the relationship between a young aspiring artist and a father. That’s really what you see in Pam and Michael. She’s celebrated this thing that’s been denigrated for him and so it redeems him, and he’s buying her failed piece of art, which redeems her to some degree. She feels like she’s failed and her art has been called “motel art” by somebody whose tastes she might respect. And here’s a guy who she doesn’t respect who’s saying, “Honey, you’re great.” That’s so beautiful and tragic.

“Beautiful” and “tragic.” Two words that perfectly summed up the relationships—both romantic and otherwise—on The Office. And we were just getting warmed up. We were still a few seasons away from Holly, the woman who would become the love of Michael’s life, and the weddings of both P.B. & J. and Dwangela, the two most unlikely relationships at Dunder Mifflin.

The best was yet to come. But as with everything on The Office, it would happen slowly, on its own terms.

6

“John and I Are Not a Couple”