Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

The superhero metaphor for the Office writing staff isn’t just an easy way to describe how they all had unique contributions to bring to the show. The writers have a lot of thoughts about their respective comedic superpowers.

MIKE SCHUR: Mindy [Kaling]’s superpower was always the super absurdist stuff, like when Michael burns his foot on the George Foreman Grill.

JEN CELOTTA: I don’t know if it’s a super strength, but what excites me is the psychology between two people like Pam and Jim. I love finding the shades and the colors and the dynamics between the two of them.

BRENT FORRESTER: Mike Schur is gifted in ninety thousand different directions, but his superpower is his love of funny words. He’s like an Eric Idle in that sense. He just couldn’t believe how funny words were. I once pointed out to him that we had a character named Jim and another character named Jan, and then we have Stamford and Scranton. And I said, “I’ve invented a new character named Jam Strandforb.” Mike almost had to quit the show because he spent the entire day coming up with other fake names just using those letters.

MIKE SCHUR: Lee [Eisenberg] and Gene [Stupnitsky] were really into the super cringey. “Scott’s Tots” was an episode they pitched very early on, and Greg was like, “We’re never doing this.” Paul Lieberstein was really into Michael’s worst instincts.

There have been a lot of legendary TV writers’ rooms over the years—from Your Show of Shows in the early ’50s, whose writing staff included future comedy luminaries like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Neil Simon, to Late Night with David Letterman in the early ’80s, which launched the careers of writers who’d go on to create The Simpsons, Seinfeld, and Newhart—and the writers’ room at The Office was no less extraordinary. How’d they pull it off, crafting a show that was equal parts funny, moving, and smart all at the same time? Was it some sort of Robert Johnson–esque deal with the devil at the crossroads? Or was it just a lot of hard work and not having a life outside the office?

“Scripts Aren’t Poems, They’re Living Documents”

Stuffing the Sausage, Strange Pairings, and Other Office Writers’ Room Tricks

The Office’s showrunner, Greg Daniels, was the guy who led our writers’ room. He was full of methods, games, and theories that he taught to the whole team.

GREG DANIELS: I have a bunch of advice that I’d give to people who wanted to break in and be comedy writers. Like . . . they should find a show they loved and watch it and pause it so you can write down everything, like it’s a court transcription.

MIKE SCHUR: When he was young, he would tape episodes of sitcoms that he really liked on a VCR and play them back, line by line, and then write out the script by hand, just to get a feel for how long scenes should be and the rhythms, and how long individual lines of dialogue were and stuff like that. Again, he’s just the most meticulous human being alive.

GREG DANIELS: I would develop these different theories. One of the theories I called “Stuff the Sausage.” A great show like Seinfeld is wasteful of wonderful ideas, you know what I mean? They’ll have a great idea and it might just turn into a couple of lines. They don’t milk it or make a whole episode out of it. So we tried to do that on The Office too.

MIKE SCHUR: Before one of the first days we reported for duty, he sent us an email and said, “Everybody come in tomorrow with ten ideas.” And those ideas could just be observations. I remember he said once that he noticed when people who work in offices are eating lunch, they throw their neckties over their shoulder, to keep it out of their soup or whatever. He was like, “That’s what I want. I want those tiny observational things.”

BRENT FORRESTER: The depth with which he will think about stuff is remarkable. And he’s in possession of something brain-wise that mere mortals don’t have. His ability to remember what was in the second draft of an episode we’d done six episodes ago was just astonishing. And sometimes he would have these wonderful Rain Man–like moments where he used to take the script in the rewrite process and put the pages on the ground in a giant oval, circling the writers’ room table, so that he could walk around observing the script in three dimensions. Then one day, he decided that three-by-five cards on the wall corkboard were not enough when plotting out the seasons. So he had the cards removed from the wall and taped to paper cups so he could move the cups around in three dimensions on the table. Like Spock’s three-dimensional chessboard on Star Trek. It was astonishing to watch.

LEE EISENBERG: The other thing Greg did with us was called “Strange Pairings,” which I always thought was so fun.

MIKE SCHUR: Greg would write everyone’s name down on cards and then he’d grab two at random and would send us off to write some Stanley-Creed stories or whatever.

LEE EISENBERG: We’d have all the characters up on a board, and he’d be like, “What’s a Kevin-Creed story? What’s an Oscar-Michael story?” That’s how you get weird stuff like Dwight spying on Oscar.

In the season two episode “The Secret,” Dwight suspects that Oscar is faking an illness and stakes out his home, eventually catching him returning from an ice-skating date with his boyfriend.

LEE EISENBERG: If all the stories are just the accountants together, that feels like, “Oh, I know where The Office is going.” But if Kevin and Dwight form a band together—which was something that we talked about at one point—then it’s like, okay, Kevin’s a musician and Dwight’s a musician and now you have a different thing going.

MIKE SCHUR: He’d do that once a week. It was something he did when he was getting annoyed by us. But it also didn’t feel like busywork. What happens if Creed and Stanley are in a story? What happens if Meredith and Angela are in a story?

BRENT FORRESTER: Back on Nurses [an NBC comedy that aired from 1991 to 1994], I asked one of the senior writers there what makes a story, and the guy called me into his office. His name was Bruce Ferber. He closed the blinds, shut the door, locked it, and he said, “A story is usually about two people.” And then he unlocked the door and made me leave. It sounds so commonplace, but it’s actually the key, right? My first Simpsons episode, I paired Homer versus Patty and Selma. It had never been done before, so I got an episode. On any show, what two characters have never been in a story together? Do that.

MIKE SCHUR: We’d look at episodes like a jigsaw puzzle. There are twenty people in the cast and three stories per episode, and I have twenty-one minutes and thirty seconds. How do I put this all together? Writing for Saturday Night Live was great for a number of things, but most don’t translate to long-form writing. But SNL teaches you to be non-precious with your own writing. You learn that these things are disposable. Greg used to say the scripts aren’t poems. They’re not architectural blueprints. They’re living documents and they change and it’s okay for them to change.

GREG DANIELS: You don’t live in the blueprint, it’s just a means of getting to the house. But a poem is a thing in itself that is valuable in itself.

ANGELA KINSEY: There would be nuggets dropped in and never revisited again. Like, all of a sudden, we find out Creed did action movies in Hong Kong. We start in the middle. We don’t explain everything to you. I was just rewatching the “Halloween” episode, and when Michael leaves, he walks right past Hank [the security guard]. No one ever introduced Hank. That’s just where he sits, that’s who he is. He’s the security guy downstairs. But there weren’t these big “now we must introduce this person” moments. It was just like life.

STEVE CARELL: I don’t know how much footage there is on the cutting room floor, but you could probably edit an entire season of scenes that were hilarious and cut for time. I mean, our scripts were long. Our first cuts had to be, what, forty minutes? Sometimes they just split them in half and we’d have two shows.

MIKE SCHUR: Greg introduced us to this concept called “Double Duty.” Bad sitcoms split their lines—some are jokes and some are advancing the story. The best writing does double duty, where you’re advancing the story and telling a joke. Our cuts used to be forty-one, forty-two minutes long. And you have to tell the story. If you don’t tell the story, the audience is like, “What am I watching?” So what ends up happening is, if you’ve separated the story and the jokes, you cut all the jokes to get the story and then you have nothing but stories. So he was really hard on us. “You have to make the story funny. They have to do double duty. And if they don’t, then that’s not good enough.”

As it turns out, this was an easier rule to agree with than follow. Many of the writers fell in love with jokes that just never served the story.

MIKE SCHUR: We wrote a talking head for Dwight that was, I think, an entire page long. It was insane. It was about how one of his cousins had one leg that was shorter than the other, and when he ran to the bus, he would have to curve in like a long arc because the natural awkward gait of one leg being shorter than the other would cause him to run in a long curve. It was nonsense. And it went on for so long. Paul [Lieberstein] and I were in a crazy giggle fit when we wrote it, and Rainn loved it and memorized the whole thing and nailed it. I wish it could’ve aired but there was no way to justify it. It had nothing to do with the story at all.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The thing that I got the most pissed about was, to me, one of the greatest jokes that might’ve been. It’s an episode called “Baby Shower,” where Jan brings her baby to the office. Kevin asks Jan where she went to get her sperm donor donation and she goes, “Oh, it’s a very exclusive place.” And Kevin says, “The place behind the IHOP?” The idea being that it potentially could be Kevin’s child. I just loved it. I went to the editing bay and they were like, “It’s gone, man. They can’t.” And I was like, “No, no, you cannot!” It’s funny, but it’s not the story.

STEVE CARELL: That’s such a great thing, though. Even if it didn’t become a story line, just to dangle it out there as a possibility is so funny.

Another strategy the writers had was to take moments that happened in the writers’ room and put them in the show.

LEE EISENBERG: In some ways it was looser [than other writers’ rooms]. It would take us a long time to focus. But it’s like, you’re writing a show about an office and we’re working in an office. We just happen to be writing a show about the thing we’re doing. We played [the first-person shooter video game] Call of Duty a lot, and then we did an episode about Call of Duty [“The Coup,” episode three from season three].

JIM: At the Stamford branch, they all play this World War II video game called Call of Duty, and they’re all really into it. I’m told it started as a team-building exercise. Unfortunately, I really suck at it.

LEE EISENBERG: Everything is fodder. I’d come in and I would talk about my date from the night before and all of a sudden that could be something.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I remember going into the editing bay one time, and I was having a conversation with [editor] David Rogers and somebody kind of whizzed by the door. And they were like, “Ready, Dave?” And I’m like, “What’s going on?” And he goes, “It’s Call of Duty time.”

LEE EISENBERG: It was just procrastination. But it all turns into something, you know what I mean? When you’re doing a show that’s about people trying to make it through the day, everything is up for grabs. I think that’s one of the reasons that people dig it. It’s like, “Oh, this feels like my job.”

JEN CELOTTA: Greg and I were trying to write a script together. I wonder if I should say this. We both usually wrote alone and then we were going to try and write an episode together. My process at the beginning of writing is a lot of procrastinating and then panic and then writing. We sat down to write, and it was one of those writer things where you just make sure the temperature is exactly right. You have all the pencils exactly sharpened. And then we were like, “We should order lunch.” Just avoiding getting to it, ’cause it’s hard. It’s wonderful, but it’s hard. He was having some sort of . . . I don’t remember if it was a back thing or a shoulder thing, and I was having an ear problem. So we went to WebMD. He got me to put some olive oil from the kitchen in my ear ’cause I was like, “I think that this will help.” And we’re sitting there and we’re on WebMD and we’re just not starting. We’re not starting. We’re just diagnosing what’s wrong with my ear and what’s wrong with his back, and we’re spending a lot of time not writing anything. But we turned it into a Michael and Dwight on WebMD.

DWIGHT: Okay, where does it hurt?

MICHAEL: Just . . . all over. I don’t want to do anything . . . I’m dying . . .

DWIGHT: No, that’s not how it works. You have to point to a specific part of the body.

JEN CELOTTA: That’s what was happening in our lives.

All of these methods, games, and theories helped build the dynamic in the writers’ room. But because our writers had different superpowers, they were bound to clash.

BRENT FORRESTER: Writers’ rooms are a very competitive environment. We are trying to impress each other that we’re smart and talented. I definitely remember the first day I walked into the Office writers’ room. I knew it was going to be brutal. So I brought in a prop. I brought in an army survival manual. There’s an acronym that the army has: S.U.R.V.I.V.A.L. And each of those letters has a thing you’re supposed to do. S is survey the situation, understand the risks. One of the Vs is vanquishing fear and panic. It was my way of surviving. I figured if it got tight in there, I’d have a whole bit I could do. I never busted it out, but I remember on the first day, Mike Schur and I, we were arguing over some plot point. Should the story go this way or that way? I just went into an English accent. That was my move.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Did it help?

BRENT FORRESTER: Absolutely it helped. I mean, it defused everything. And then on some level it kind of says, “We’re playing a game of performative cleverness and this is just a move in that dimension.”

MIKE SCHUR: There’s only a couple of times in my life where something didn’t really play well and I still fought for it. One of them, I wrote a talking head for Dwight in the “Dunder Mifflin Infinity” episode [of season four] where he gets into the backstory of his maternal ancestors and how they were maybe Nazis.

DWIGHT: I’m gonna live for a very long time. My grandma Schrute lived to be 101. My grandpa Manheim, he’s 103. He’s still puttering down in Argentina. I tried to go visit him once, but my travel visa was protested by the Shoah Foundation.

MIKE SCHUR: It got like a moderate laugh ’cause a lot of people probably didn’t know what the Shoah Foundation was.

The Shoah Foundation—Shoah is a Hebrew word for the Holocaust—is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving survivor testimony of the Holocaust and other modern genocides.

MIKE SCHUR: The idea that the Shoah Foundation would get involved in a travel visa for a random guy, that’s how bad his maternal grandfather was. I remember fighting really hard for that in the edit. Greg wanted to cut it and I was like, “Please, please, please, please, please!”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Was the Shoah Foundation in there?

MIKE SCHUR: Yeah, that aired. I was basically like, “I will never ask you for anything for the rest of my life if you leave this in.”

JEN CELOTTA: I didn’t hear this from [Greg], but somebody said that he wanted to hire people that could replace him. He wasn’t scared of somebody who would constantly challenge him. Like, he wanted to have people who would fight him on stuff in the room. He wanted to have people who are passionate. They all gave a shit and they all fought.

PAUL FEIG: I remember just standing and watching [the writers] from the other side of the room. And everything they came up with was brilliant. Occasionally I tried to pitch a joke and they looked at me like, “Okay.” I’m suddenly the dad in the room, pitching some shitty old hacky joke.

“I Had This Boss Once . . .”

The Collaboration Between the Actors and Writers

When it came to scripting, a big part of Greg’s philosophy was to blur the lines between actors and writers.

GREG DANIELS: [On other TV shows], the actors and the writers didn’t really hang out. And they’d always resent each other. The writers would try and write actor-proof jokes because they didn’t trust that the actors could get laughs on behavior. It was very dysfunctional. The first thing I really wanted to do was create comedy television in a different pattern so that you could get more laughs off performance and not jokes.

JOHN KRASINSKI: I remember when the writers did come, I was always struck by how little they would talk. You know what I mean? I was always kinda surprised that they weren’t saying things like, “No, we’ve got to do that line again.” They were more just smiling and almost seemed like fans of the show. And now that makes sense that they were actually probably thinking, in their head, “Let’s see what happens to the thing we wrote based on what these people are doing.”

GREG DANIELS: The biggest laugh of all time was Jack Benny, where he’s getting mugged.

MUGGER: Don’t make a move, this is a stickup. Now, come on—your money or your life.

BENNY: [Silence.]

MUGGER: Look, bud! I said, your money or your life!

BENNY: I’m thinking it over!

[CROWD ROARS WITH LAUGHTER.]

(From The Jack Benny Program, March 28, 1948)

GREG DANIELS: To me that’s great. ’Cause it’s not a joke, right? You’re bringing to bear everything you know about the character. I thought those were such cooler things than jokes.

ED HELMS: The creation of Andy’s profile was one of the most thrilling creative endeavors of my life, because the writers would give Andy some weird thing and I would take it and run with it on set and improvise and do some crazy thing. If it was the a cappella thing, I would just start singing on set at wrong times. And then the writers would see that and be like, “Oh, that’s fun.” And then they’d write in more singing. That’s just one example. There were so many little details that started to slot in, like a Tetris game about who Andy was. And it was this feedback loop, and Mike Schur in particular had a real shine for Andy and we just had so much fun. I would go to the writers’ room and just joke around with Mike about who Andy is and what made us laugh about him. The collaboration between the writers and the cast was next level.

ANGELA KINSEY: Jenna and I pitched an idea to Greg one day on set about these ridiculous “women in the workplace” workshops we’d have to do when we were both in corporate America. He was like, “Hold up, hold up. B.J., come here and write this down.” B.J. took it and ran with it, and it became the episode “Boys and Girls” from the second season.

PAM: Today’s a “women in the workplace” thing. Jan’s coming in from corporate to talk to all the women about . . . um . . . I don’t really know what. But Michael’s not allowed in. She said that about five times.

JENNA FISCHER: I remember the first time Greg called me at home, it was early on in season one and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m being fired.” The only reason a showrunner calls you at home is to fire you. They don’t call for any other reason. And Greg called and he was like, “Jenna, I was just wondering . . . why do you think Pam is still with Roy?” And I was like, “Oh, Greg, I’ve got a document. I’ve got a whole—”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: “Would you like to read the book I’ve written?”

JENNA FISCHER: I told him, “Greg, in my mind, the reason they never got married was because they had saved up some money for the wedding, and then Roy bought some WaveRunners with his brother. He spent their wedding money on a pair of WaveRunners.” And Greg was like, “Oh my God, oh my God, that’s amazing.” And then he wrote it into the show. Greg truly believed that no one knew our characters more than we did. He would ask us questions all the time. He also knew that I worked in offices and that I had worked as a receptionist, and he used to ask me questions. “What’s the craziest thing one of your bosses ever made you do?” There’s an episode where Michael is refusing to sign all of his documents until the end of the day [the season two episode “The Fight”]. He keeps putting it off and putting it off and putting it off. And I told Greg, “I had this boss once, every month at the end of the month, he had to turn in this boilerplate report and he would put it off and put it off. And one time he put it off so long I had to drive to LAX because that was the last FedEx pickup and I was so pissed.”

PAM: Michael tends to procrastinate a bit whenever he has to do work. Time cards, he has to sign these every Friday. Purchase orders have to be approved at the end of every month. And expense reports, all he has to do is initial these at the end of every quarter. But once a year it all falls on the same Friday. That’s today. I call it the perfect storm.

JENNA FISCHER: Greg loved those stories. He was always very curious.

STEVE CARELL: To be able to trace the evolution of a character and have something in mind and be able to talk to the writers and Greg Daniels and say, “What if next season my character went in this direction?” And then it happened. To be able to chart your own course as a character rather than just have it laid on you, that was really special. I think everyone trusted each other to such a degree that they were willing to not be too precious about anything.

It wasn’t the only time that a script was changed while it was being shot. Just as Greg had told the writers, scripts were living documents that could change and evolve at any moment. This happened in a pivotal scene from “Gay Witch Hunt,” the first episode of the third season, in which Michael inadvertently outs Oscar to the entire office and then tries to reconcile by hugging him and then . . .

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: He kissed you. And that wasn’t scripted, right?

OSCAR NUÑEZ: That was not scripted. No, Steve just did it. He just did it.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Why? Why did he do it?

OSCAR NUÑEZ: Because the scene was flat. Nothing was happening.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: What do you mean?

OSCAR NUÑEZ: Well, I thought at the time it was just messing around. He kept hugging me. And that’s nothing, not for an Office scene. Something’s got to happen.

MICHAEL: [Embracing Oscar.] You know what, I’m going to raise the stakes.

OSCAR: You don’t . . .

MICHAEL: I want you to watch this. And I want you to burn this into your brains.

OSCAR: I don’t think we need to do this . . .

MICHAEL: Because this is an image that I want you people to remember for a long time to come.

OSCAR NUÑEZ: Michael always has good intentions, but he’s an idiot with a God complex. He’s the only one who can fix problems. He knows better than anyone, so he’s going to fix it. That beautiful kissing scene, it was like the ultimate acceptance. It was like, “Look at what I’m doing, everyone.”

JEN CELOTTA: Michael kissing Oscar was one of the best moments of the whole show. It was funnier than what was scripted. Steve had great respect for the text, but he also had this ridiculous ability to understand everything in such a depth that if he was going to change things up, it was always going to honor the intention.

STEVE CARELL: For me, the hardest part of it was servicing the script. I’d get dialogue every day and think, “I can’t screw this up.” I think we all felt a responsibility to get it right. We all had a barometer as for what rang true and what didn’t. And I think the things that ring true are the things that are reflected in society, but to do it in a way that wasn’t too heavy-handed and felt organic to what we were doing as characters.

ANGELA KINSEY: There was a pretty harsh dig from me at Oscar’s expense about his sexual orientation. I went to Greg and I was like, “Angela is a lot of things, but she does care for Oscar. He’s her only ally in that corner of accounting and she knows it. She wouldn’t say that. She might not agree with his lifestyle choice. She might not understand it. Because she has some fear, she might be a little put off by it, but she does care for him. That can exist all at the same time in someone.” He really heard me and we changed the line. Instead she said:

ANGELA: Sure, sometimes I watch Will & Grace . . . and I want to throw up. It’s terribly loud.

The topic of “Gay Witch Hunt” was obviously risky: 2006 was a time of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” and same-sex marriage in the United States was nearly a decade away. But the episode ended up being both very funny and a sharp social commentary on homophobia in the workplace.

EMILY VANDERWERFF: The reason that episode works is because it’s reinforcing the belief that it’s totally fine to have gay friends in your life. The gay guy in your office is just like you, because he is also put-upon by Michael Scott. It’s very progressive in its values and very progressive in the way it talks about what it is to be a gay man in America.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: At the time, Oscar was the only LGBT person of color to be a regular on any sitcom. Were you aware of that?

OSCAR NUÑEZ: No! That’s a big deal. That’s fantastic. I’m like Jackie Robinson.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You won awards for that, right?

OSCAR NUÑEZ: I was nominated for a GLAAD award. I took my two gay friends with me, Michael and Joel. They were rolling their eyes. They’re like, “You asshole, you’re not even gay.” [Laughs.] Joel was in ACT UP [AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power], fighting the fight for real. He was like, “Good Lord, what is happening?” And I’m like, “Don’t be jealous, I’m just better than you guys.” [Laughs.]

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Do you ever meet fans who are surprised that you’re not gay?

OSCAR NUÑEZ: All the time. I get a lot of people coming up to me going, “I came out because of you.” It’s trippy. Years ago, right around the third season, [my future wife] Ursula and I are walking around New York and these two adorable Puerto Rican guys were like, “Oh my God, you’re Oscar from The Office!” And they look at Ursula and go, “Who’s this?” I’m like, “This is my girlfriend,” and they were so disappointed. I’m like, “Come on, you guys. You ever hear of acting?” [Laughs.]

“Gay Witch Hunt” was just one example. The writers loved to poke at social issues most TV comedies avoided, like workplace health care and sexual harassment. That kind of writing won us some pretty big awards. When we won a Peabody, this is how the committee described the show: “The Office explores the monotony and inanity of the daily grind while highlighting the simple pleasures that make the working world bearable. All the while, sharp observations about American society slip through in the guise of comedy.”

GREG DANIELS: The Peabody is like legit.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: That’s a thing.

GREG DANIELS: I remember going to that and we didn’t really know too much about it. We got in the room, and the other people that were nominated were like news organizations that were digging into really important stories and war-torn places.

The other Peabody recipients in 2006 included shows and movies about the Galapagos Islands, pan-Asian immigration to the United States, urban schools, Iraq War military hospitals, and AIDS in Black America.

GREG DANIELS: You looked around that room and you were like, “Oh my goodness.”

It was humbling, sure, but it was also reinforcement that the writing really was as good as we hoped it was. As Greg often said, he wanted The Office to be real, to reflect what was happening in the real world. It’s an instinct he’d had since his days as a writer on The Simpsons.

GREG DANIELS: The way that one Simpsons writer won respect from another Simpsons writer was when you did something super real, and somehow in contrast to the cartoony-ness of it. When I got to King of the Hill, we used to do a lot of research. I’d take the writers to Texas every season and we’d fan out with our reporter’s notebooks and try to dig up unique stories. Because I always felt the shows that I really liked, the stories seemed like something that had happened to one of the writers. It wasn’t just, “What did Cheers do?” You had to go out and do your own work and dig up your own stories.

This is what our writers and actors were so good at. We tackled real, relatable topics and made them funny. We were a team. So when it came time to defend the show, we stood together.

“He Called Their Bluff”

The Writers Strike of 2007

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You may have forgotten this, but you and I share an Emmy.

MIKE SCHUR: We do?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We do. Yes.

MIKE SCHUR: For the webisodes?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: For the webisodes, yes.

In the summer of 2006, we developed a web series called The Office: The Accountants—written by Schur and Paul Lieberstein, and directed by Randall Einhorn—which follows Angela, Oscar, and Kevin as they try to solve the mystery of a missing $3,000 from the company books. The series won a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Broadband Program—Comedy in 2007.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Did you ever get yours?

MIKE SCHUR: I don’t think I have an actual trophy for it.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I do, because we were invited to the ceremony and we accepted it and it came home with me.

MIKE SCHUR: How does it look?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It’s great actually. It’s really special.

MIKE SCHUR: Those webisodes were really fun. We did like ten episodes over three days.

BEN SILVERMAN: The webisodes were launched because we didn’t have a ton of episodes for that summer, having only produced a season and a half or so. And we decided to do these webisodes, which would be original and deepen the audience’s relationship to other cast members and would open the door to more connectivity. And it was amazing. It was the first of its kind and we started something no one had ever done before.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We were showing the network that we could be valuable over multiple platforms. I remember NBC.com that summer grew exponentially.

BEN SILVERMAN: People tuned in to our webisodes on [NBC’s] online platform and [NBC was] getting revenue from the iTunes platform, which they hadn’t had as a revenue stream during the initial cycles of shows before. The audience was growing and the advertisers were loving it.

MIKE SCHUR: We shot those webisodes with union labor and no one got paid.

Not the actors, the writers, even the camera people. NBC considered it “promotional material,” even though the videos were monetized with YouTube ads and included on the DVD release of season two.

MIKE SCHUR: It wasn’t because of those webisodes that the writers went on strike. Those webisodes were an example of the way things were going. We’ve got to do something about this. Networks at the time were saying, “We don’t have enough information. Let’s just wait three years from now.” And we were like, “No, you’re basically trying to grandfather in the internet as a thing that you don’t pay for.”

On November 5, 2007, the Writers Guild of America went on strike. It was fighting the networks and studios over compensation for new media, like web originals and streaming.

MIKE SCHUR: It was a huge deal and it was very scary. It happened pretty quickly.

BRENT FORRESTER: I had a memorable showdown with Jim Brooks [cocreator of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and The Simpsons] where he said, “Hey, man, I hear you’re on strike.” He got enraged, his beard was shaking. He said, “Don’t go down that road! Don’t float that balloon!” I’ve never heard that phrase in my life.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: “Don’t float that balloon”?

BRENT FORRESTER: “Don’t float that balloon.” It might be like a World War II reference. If you ever meet him, please tell him I’m sorry and ask him what that means.

MIKE SCHUR: Greg was like, “We’re going to picket our own show.”

BRENT FORRESTER: We would go out in the cold and picket together. And there was this feeling of solidarity and shared purpose. And we felt like what we were doing was right. I will eternally praise our catering guys, who made the writers a bunch of breakfast burritos on the first day of the strike. It brought a lot of people together.

But a major concern around the strike was that the crews would suffer. If the production shut down, the non-writing staff—hair and makeup, catering, props, set design—none of them could earn a living.

LEE EISENBERG: We’re friends with the crew, and the crews are walking past us into the studio, and some of them are kind of looking at us like, “Fuck you.” The writers are among the highest-paid people, and all of a sudden someone’s going to not work for three months because we’re complaining about our DVD residuals or our health care and it doesn’t matter to them. They just want to work and we shut down production.

JEN CELOTTA: It was a little scary. It was confusing. I remember very specifically driving to the studio at 4:30 in the morning, and [the Bob Seger song] “Night Moves” was playing on the radio. Super weird. I’m on the 134 [Ventura Freeway], nothing’s around me. I remember getting there and seeing Paul Lieberstein all bundled up, with like a scarf and gloves. It’s so cold, I can see the breath coming out of his mouth. I’m like, “Oh shit, this is our new future.”

DEBBIE PIERCE: Everybody was like up in the air about whether we’re going to have jobs or not.

Debbie Pierce was one of our key hairstylists, along with Kim Ferry, who became the head of the hair department.

KIM FERRY: I remember the first day, we didn’t want to cross because all the writers were there. Literally, the whole cast was there. I was like, “I don’t want to cross. I’m union. We’re all union.” B.J. was there and he was like, “It’s okay.” I’m like, “It’s not okay.” I remember getting choked up, like, “I don’t want to do this to you. You guys are my family. I don’t want to pass.” And he said, “No, look, [the network] is telling you to cross. We don’t want you to get in trouble.” So we sat on the stage and just waited.

DEBBIE PIERCE: ’Cause there was nothing else we could do.

KIM FERRY: I think about six, seven hours later, they said, “You can go home.” As a mom of two young kids and the person supporting my household, it was terrifying. I will never forget.

On the other side of the strike were the networks and the studios. Problem was, the head of our network was Ben Silverman, executive producer of The Office, the guy who started our whole show.

BEN SILVERMAN: I was thirty-six years old when I was asked to be the cochairman of NBC [in 2007]. I thought it was my dream job and I really did see where the business was going. The future was coming hard and fast, and technology was going to enable an absolute transformation of how people consume content. And I was eager to lead that transformation. I was rudely awakened to the reality that no one wanted to change the status quo because it had been working so well for so many of the people who were part of it, and there was real fear in the decisions I was making.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: If you knew what was happening in terms of technology, then you had to know that what the writers were fighting for was inevitable, right?

BEN SILVERMAN: The problem was the networks feeling they were going to fall off a cliff. They hadn’t yet decided to be Disney+ or Peacock or HBO Max or whatever. They thought, “Oh my gosh, our ratings are going down rapidly and we are going to lose our shirts.” What was clear to me was it was bad for both sides to shut it down at that moment. It eventually did hurt both sides, but it hurt the writers more at that time. I don’t think it was clear yet what there was to fight for.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It was also really confusing for the actors, because we had our union, but we were not protected by the strike. We were still supposed to show up to work.

MIKE SCHUR: And we [the writers] knew that. I remember Ed [Helms] came out and hung with us. And then he was like, “I’m really sorry, but I need to go back inside,” and we were like, “No, no, no, we get it. Your union is not on strike here. No one’s mad at you.” No one had any animosity towards any of the actors. You were in breach of contract if you didn’t show up.

ED HELMS: I remember going that first day of the strike and being like, “Oh, wow, this is real.” There’s Lee and Gene and Mike and Greg, everybody’s just out on the sidewalk with picket signs. I think everyone felt a lot of tension in a way that’s baked into any union conflict, like, “Am I a part of this fight?” Obviously I support the writers, but it’s scary a little bit. It just felt so right and natural to jump out of the car and sidle up to everybody and be like, “Let’s do this!” In hindsight, I really appreciate how courageous that was for so many people.

JEN CELOTTA: There was something that happened at the strike that still bothers me to this day. [At a different picket line,] I remember that there were people with drums and loud musical instruments to disrupt a production that was going on inside. That was just not cool to me. I was very upset. I understood what we were fighting for, but other people were making their money to shoot things that had already been written. That part of it was very complicated to me because I wanted everybody to be able to continue to do their job.

Over at our studio, we could have shot another episode even as the strike was going on.

MIKE SCHUR: We had a finished script. That script was ready to go and could have been shot. The actors and the directors weren’t on strike and the crew wasn’t on strike.

Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky had written a soon-to-be classic for the fourth season called “Dinner Party.” Michael and Jan invite several couples, including Pam and Jim, to their condo for a dinner party, and the evening devolves into a hilariously uncomfortable affair, like Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but with more laughs. It culminates with Michael’s tiny plasma television getting destroyed with a Dundie and the cops showing up.

LEE EISENBERG: It’s probably to this day the thing that we’re most proud of writing. We did the table read of it, and in the beginning it’s good, not great. Then you get to the condo and you start feeling something. It became electric in a way. I’m thinking about it now and it makes me emotional.

MIKE SCHUR: It was the best read-through I think we ever had. It was like a rock concert.

LEE EISENBERG: Gene sweat through his shirt. And it was just like, it was the greatest moment of our career. Greg pulled us into his office ’cause we were getting notes from the network and we got on the phone with some executives. They said, “Hey, so we read the script, very funny.” And Greg said, “Thank you.” And they said, “It’s really dark.” And Greg goes, “Yeah.” And they go, “Just the thing is, it’s really dark.” And Greg goes, “Yeah.” And then he says, “Is there anything else?” And they go, “Nope.” He goes, “Okay, great. Thanks, guys. Bye.” And hung up. I was like, “Wow, that was fucking cool.”

JOHN KRASINSKI: Amazing. That’s like some Jedi mind trick.

The episode was ready to be filmed. And then came the writers strike. Production certainly could have gone on during the strike, and it possibly would have, if not for one man.

MIKE SCHUR: Steve Carell said no. The way we make this show is collaborative. There are writers on the set and producers on the set and we change things and we work out new little moments and pitch new jokes. He didn’t want to make the show without the writers. And he didn’t show up.

MIKE SCHUR: They shot a couple scenes from the episode that Michael Scott wasn’t in. And then there was nothing else to do and the show shut down. That was such a heroic thing. He just stayed home and he got calls from a lot of lawyers and a lot of studio executives, all the way up the ladder. He got calls from the head of the network, from people at GE corporate, from really, really powerful people, saying, “You have to do this.” And he was like, “No, I don’t. Watch me.”

STEVE CARELL: I remember when one executive came in and said, “Hey, for budgetary reasons, we would like to do some product integration.” I raised my hand and said, “I’m very much against this, because it changes the show.” If we are serving a corporate master, there’s no way the show will be the same. It’s going to alter how we write the show, how we perform the show. I was dead set against it. They went ahead and did a couple of things anyway. And each time they were disasters. They were terrible.

Well, they weren’t all disasters. When Dwight quits his job at Staples to return to Dunder Mifflin in the season three episode “The Return,” Staples, which had a product placement deal with NBC, released this tongue-in-cheek memo: “Despite his promising start in business machines (selling 2 printers in one morning), it was soon clear he wasn’t a good fit with the Staples culture.”

STEVE CARELL: I feel we were all very protective of the show. I was just in a position more often than not to be the voice of the show. Like to say something and not just let things transpire without any sort of representation.

MIKE SCHUR: Greg called him and was like, “I know that you’ve had a lot of pressure coming at you. Are you okay?” And he was like, “Yeah, I’m home. I’m playing with my kids.” He was totally unfazed by it. He had the attitude of like, “This is a collaborative effort. This is a thing that we do together. Without writers on the set, we don’t make the same show and I’m not going to make that show.” “Fire me” was basically what he was saying. He called their bluff.

Without Steve Carell, production on The Office shut down, which left the actors standing in solidarity with the writers.

MIKE SCHUR: The story of what he did spread like wildfire. He did not have to do that. There were very few people in his position—the star of a very popular, successful, gigantic, monolithic hit show—who would do that. He didn’t have to. No one would’ve been mad at him. The actors weren’t on strike.

JEN CELOTTA: I mean, what a dude. Steve’s just a class act outside of being so ridiculously talented. It really was a family and he was going to support his people. Greg and Steve were like the dads.

One hundred days later, on February 12, 2008, the Writers Guild and the studios reached an agreement. Writers would finally get a share of digital revenues, and we could finally go back to work. Not everybody came out unscathed. Some studios and networks severed writers’ contracts and many shows in development never got made. Was it worth it?

MIKE SCHUR: There’s still people in the Writers Guild who think the strike didn’t accomplish anything. But literally one-third of all TV that’s produced now is for streamers. To think that none of that would be covered by our contracts is lunacy. It was a crucial and vital action that saved the union and all of entertainment.

But the lasting impression, at least among the cast and crew of The Office, isn’t about what was won or lost at the negotiating table. It’s about what we learned about just how strong our connection really was, and how we could count on our fearless leaders even when the future seemed uncertain and scary.

LAVERNE CARACUZZI-MILAZZO (MAKEUP ARTIST): It was like, “We have to do this because we have to make a point, but we also want you to know that you’re appreciated.” Like when every crew member got a check out of Greg Daniels’s personal checking account.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Wait, what was that?

LAVERNE CARACUZZI-MILAZZO: Am I allowed to talk about that?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Sure.

LAVERNE CARACUZZI-MILAZZO: Greg Daniels went into his personal checking account and wrote the crew [starts to tear up] each an individual check because we were going to be out of work.

KIM FERRY: A thousand dollars for every family. I was floored, because that made such a difference to my household.

DEBBIE PIERCE: I went to the mail that day, and people were sending Christmas cards and stuff. I looked at the cards and I saw this card from Greg Daniels. I’m going, “Oh, isn’t that nice? He thought of us.” I opened it up and I saw this check and I didn’t really look at it really clearly at first. I thought it was $100. And then I started counting the zeros and I could not believe it.

LAVERNE CARACUZZI-MILAZZO: You knew that it was his personal checking account because when you received the check, it had the address up in the corner. Why wouldn’t you want to keep working for these people, regardless of how long the strike is? You’re taking care of us now. My tears are more tears of joy, because I felt so appreciated at that point.

DEBBIE PIERCE: I told that story to quite a few of my friends who worked on other shows and they were like, “Are you kidding me?” That was unheard of.

KIM FERRY: You know why? Because we were family.

DEBBIE PIERCE: That’s absolutely true.

Speaking of family, not everybody on The Office spent those hundred days on the picket line or hanging out at home. Angela Kinsey got pregnant during the strike. She would be giving birth to her daughter, Isabel Ruby Lieberstein, in May 2008. Amazing news for our dear friend, but for a show where she played a character who was absolutely not pregnant, well . . .

ANGELA KINSEY: I was completely showing. I remember thinking, “Okay, how do we hide this?” Because it wouldn’t have made sense for my character to all of a sudden be pregnant. I had one of the most hilarious conversations with Paul Feig, who was directing an episode where Phyllis walks in on Dwight and Angela making out in the office and they’re caught.

In the season four finale, “Goodbye, Toby,” Phyllis catches Angela and Dwight having sex on one of the office desks after Toby’s farewell party.

ANGELA KINSEY: I was seven and a half months pregnant and they were trying to have Rainn hide my belly with his body as we’re making out. We’re supposed to be in stages of mid-undress. At first the writers were like, “Well, what if Angela got on all fours,” or “What if we put her here?” It was like, “Where do you put the giant pregnant belly? What do we do so it doesn’t look really inappropriate instead of just mildly inappropriate?”

Well, the strike was behind us, but we were far from done with the surprises and emotional tailspins. What awaited us would make the first four seasons seem like a walk in the park.

TITLE	DIRECTED BY	WRITTEN BY	ORIGINAL AIR DATE
“Fun Run”	Greg Daniels	Greg Daniels	September 27, 2007
“Dunder Mifflin Infinity”	Craig Zisk	Michael Schur	October 4, 2007
“Launch Party”	Ken Whittingham	Jennifer Celotta	October 11, 2007
“Money”	Paul Lieberstein	Paul Lieberstein	October 18, 2007
“Local Ad”	Jason Reitman	B. J. Novak	October 25, 2007
“Branch Wars”	Joss Whedon	Mindy Kaling	November 1, 2007
“Survivor Man”	Paul Feig	Steve Carell	November 8, 2007
“The Deposition”	Julian Farino	Lester Lewis	November 15, 2007
“Dinner Party”	Paul Feig	Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg	April 10, 2008
“Chair Model”	Jeffrey Blitz	B. J. Novak	April 17, 2008
“Night Out”	Ken Whittingham	Mindy Kaling	April 24, 2008
“Did I Stutter?”	Randall Einhorn	Brent Forrester & Justin Spitzer	May 1, 2008
“Job Fair”	Tucker Gates	Lee Eisenberg & Gene Stupnitsky	May 8, 2008
“Goodbye, Toby”	Paul Feig	Jennifer Celotta & Paul Lieberstein	May 15, 2008

8

“I Don’t Care, Fire Me!”

“Scripts Aren’t Poems, They’re Living Documents”

Stuffing the Sausage, Strange Pairings, and Other Office Writers’ Room Tricks

“I Had This Boss Once . . .”

The Collaboration Between the Actors and Writers

“He Called Their Bluff”

The Writers Strike of 2007