Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

By the late aughts, The Office was hitting its stride. Seasons five and six are often ranked by critics and fans alike as among our best. We weathered unexpected storms, witnessed pivotal moments for our characters, made new hires at Dunder Mifflin, and faced some major shake-ups behind the scenes.

How did we navigate those winds of change? In the words of Michael Scott, when asked by Dunder Mifflin CFO David Wallace to explain his secret to success (in the fifth season episode “The Duel”), “Sometimes I’ll start a sentence, and I don’t even know where it’s going. I just hope I find it along the way.”

That might as well have been our motto before every season: We don’t know where it’s going, we’re just hoping to find it along the way.

Which isn’t to say we faced the challenges with a confident shrug. The more attention we got, the bigger the stakes. And now more than ever, we knew how much there was to lose. Or as one soon-to-be Office showrunner put it . . .

JEN CELOTTA: We did not want to screw anything up.

“It Feels Like Mozart Wants to Design a Piano with Me”

Office Spin-offs and New Hires

When you have a TV show as popular as The Office—a staple of NBC’s newly branded (as of 2006) “Comedy Night Done Right” Thursday lineup—it’s only natural that the network would come knocking for a spin-off. Ben Silverman, who replaced Kevin Reilly as cochair of NBC Entertainment in the summer of 2007, was eager to double down on the show that had made his reputation at NBC. Just as Cheers had its Frasier, All in the Family had its Jeffersons, and The Daily Show had its Colbert Report, The Office would have its . . . well, Greg wasn’t sure yet. But he knew whom he wanted to help him create it.

MIKE SCHUR: [Greg asked me] during the writers strike. We were picketing at Paramount, and Greg was like, “Hey, I want to talk to you.” And he basically said, “The network wants me to do a new show and I want to do it with you.” I remember thinking, “What does this feel like? Oh, it feels like Mozart wants to design a piano with me.” That’s the closest analogy I could come up with. “This is the moment that my life changes.”

GREG DANIELS: Mike could produce, he could write, and he wasn’t one of the main characters [on The Office]. I felt very responsible to the cast and to Steve [Carell]. If Steve was going to stick with it and not bug out and go do movies, I didn’t want to be the guy who was doing something to the detriment of the show.

MIKE SCHUR: I was very nervous, because The Office is the best job I ever had in my life by a factor of a thousand. There’s a thing in this business of like, if you’ve got a bird in the hand, just leave it in your hand. What are you doing? But again, you don’t turn down the chance to develop a show with Greg Daniels. So it was very scary, but it was also the right move. And if it blows up, I’ll bet he’ll hire me back [on The Office].

GREG DANIELS: There was a lot of pressure to do an Office spin-off. And I was worried, because it felt like spin-offs are never as good. Why are you doing it? ’Cause you’re trying to take advantage of the [original show’s] popularity.

Dick Wolf is the creator and executive producer of the lucrative (and seemingly endless) Law & Order franchise.

MIKE SCHUR: But he was like, “I don’t want to harm the integrity of The Office proper.”

GREG DANIELS: I used to go to NORMS all the time up in Van Nuys. There’s a terrific NORMS on Sherman Way that would be my hangout.

NORMS is a chain of twenty diners in the SoCal area started in the ’50s by used-car salesman Norm Roybark. It’s the place where Tom Waits claims he enjoyed “strange-looking patty melts” in the Nighthawks at the Diner song “Eggs and Sausage.”

GREG DANIELS: I started going to NORMS trying to think of a different show.

MIKE SCHUR: We met for breakfast like three times a week. And I pitched him, I don’t know, 275 ideas for TV shows. And he pitched me, it wasn’t a one-way street. We just kept pitching and pitching and pitching. Some of them were like, “Maybe we could do something with the warehouse,” or “Maybe a different branch.” The reason the show was [originally] called The Office: An American Workplace is because Greg was thinking a thousand chess moves ahead. If this works, you could do The School: An American Workplace and do a show about teachers. Or The Team: An American Workplace about a minor league baseball team, whatever. He was thinking globally at that level, even before he made the pilot.

GREG DANIELS: I had an idea that I thought was good. The workplace is a good genre of TV comedy, but an even bigger genre is the family show. What about a mockumentary about a family? There’s that American Family one from the seventies that was on PBS.

An American Family, a 1973 PBS television documentary that’s often called the first American reality series, followed Bill and Pat Loud and their five children from Santa Barbara, California. Audiences watched as the couple went through a divorce and their son Lance came out to them.

GREG DANIELS: We had worked it out. Ed Helms was gonna maybe be the lead with [British actress] Catherine Tate as his wife. It was going to be a mockumentary looking at some suburban cul-de-sac.

BEN SILVERMAN: We were talking about having Amy Poehler and her husband at the time, Will Arnett, do a family-like spin-off. We had debated and discussed what the mothership [i.e., The Office] could support and how to set something that wouldn’t be competitive with it but would be consistent with it.

MIKE SCHUR: Because he’s Greg, he didn’t commit to anything. He’s like, “Okay, good, we’ve got that, let’s keep pitching and try to come up with something else.” Day after day after day after day after . . .

Mike was starting to feel anxious. At least until he talked to someone who knows Greg’s quirks better than anyone: his wife, Susanne.

MIKE SCHUR: She told me about a time early in their marriage, when they were driving from Chicago to New York. It’s ten o’clock at night and they’re driving through Schuylkill [County], Pennsylvania. They pull off the highway and find a diner. The waitress comes over and Greg says, “What do you guys serve here? What’s everyone’s favorite dish?” And she goes, “Oh, people really like the meat loaf.” And he goes, “How do you prepare it?” She goes into the meat loaf, and he’s like, “What else do people like?” And Susanne says, “Can we just eat?” And he goes, “I want to know what kind of food they have.” So he asks a hundred more questions and she goes, “Honey, I’m starving.” And he goes, “Susanne, this might be the only time we’re ever here. We have to get the best dining experience in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania.” And they don’t sit down. They drove to another restaurant and he asked more questions. “What do you serve here? What do people like?” She tells me this story and my mouth is agape. She goes, “That’s the man I chose to marry. And that’s the man you’ve chosen to develop a TV show with.”

It was beginning to seem like they’d never come up with a premise for the spin-off.

BEN SILVERMAN: And then Mike Schur came up with an idea set in the world of small-town politics.

That idea, in part inspired by Barack Obama and the ’08 presidential election, would become Parks and Recreation. “Documenting” the lives, loves, and adventures of the parks and rec department in the fictional town of Pawnee, Indiana, the series, which starred Amy Poehler, ran from 2009 to 2015.

MIKE SCHUR: The show isn’t just about local government, it’s about a whole town. Like we can invent Dunder Mifflin, but an entire town, an entire ecosystem with media outlets and restaurants and city hall and local celebrities and a history. It set our brains on fire. It’s like a comedy West Wing. If the stakes of the West Wing are Russia and China going to war in Kazakhstan, the stakes of this show are the boys’ soccer team and the girls’ soccer team are both trying to use the same soccer field.

It wasn’t technically an Office spin-off, since the two shows shared no similar characters.

BEN SILVERMAN: I had made a deal with Amy Poehler, who I was pursuing to be part of The Office cast originally.

Amy was briefly considered for the role of Jan Levinson. It didn’t worry Greg that Amy and Steve Carell, both alumni of the Second City comedy theater in Chicago, could be very convincing (and sympathetic) at playing well-meaning morons. Amy’s character on Parks and Rec wouldn’t just be the female Michael Scott.

GREG DANIELS: I don’t think Amy can hide her intelligence. One of Steve’s real gifts is you can stare at his face and he’s doing something really stupid and you can’t tell that he’s aware that it’s stupid. He completely hides his intelligence. Amy probably could if she wanted to, but chooses not to. She just doesn’t hide it. Maybe it’s also being a woman. It means something different to hide your intelligence.

Parks and Rec was taking shape. But Greg knew he couldn’t run two shows by himself. Luckily, he’d been planning for this moment for years and had his eye on two writers in particular.

JEN CELOTTA: We were . . . I’m terrible at military things . . . lieutenants? Is that like a person like underneath the captain? Greg’s the captain and we’re underneath him and take on some responsibilities.

Jen Celotta and Paul Lieberstein were perfect for the job of co-showrunners, or cocaptains.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: Greg and I went on a walk on Saticoy [Street in Van Nuys], and he asked if I wanted to do it with Jen.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You took a walk with him?

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: That was not unusual. Did you not walk? We had a real running club [for the Office cast and crew] for a month.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: When Greg asked you to take over, did it scare you?

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: Definitely.

JEN CELOTTA: We felt an enormous amount of responsibility. But it wasn’t like Greg was getting on a boat and leaving. He would help us navigate this and we’d be able to ask questions. The main responsibilities would be to Paul and me, so we certainly felt like there was a lot on our shoulders. But Greg would still be involved.

That involvement began early, with weekly meetings between Greg, Mike, and the two newly appointed Office showrunners.

JEN CELOTTA: Greg passed out a memo about the meetings that was like, “Say things in the quickest amount of time that you can say them,” or something like that. It was very polite and basically like, “Try to stay on track.” I was thinking about it—Mike likes to talk but he’s very succinct in everything he says, and Paul doesn’t talk that much. I was like, this is for me. Greg wrote the memo for me. It was saying, “Jen, stop talking all the time.”

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: Jen and I wrote “Goodbye, Toby” together [the season four finale], and I remember Greg saying something to me that shocked me ’cause I hadn’t thought about it this way. He was like, “Really kill it with this one. ’Cause a lot of people will be looking. This will set the tone for next year.” I was like, holy shit. Well, that makes it harder.

LEE EISENBERG: Paul and Jen had been our coworkers for three years and we loved them and we thought they were incredible. So it felt like a natural progression rather than like the show is now a different show.

Paul and Jen had no intention of overhauling The Office or changing it radically from Greg’s vision.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: It wasn’t like, “Finally, we get to do it our way.” We loved Greg’s writing. Even though he gave me authority, I wanted him to like the show, you know? If he came to a table read and didn’t like something, I would change it. I don’t think I ever said, “Well, I like it so we’re doing it.” We would always find the overlap.

It was a good thing they did, because season five threw us some big curveballs. Remember back in our first season, when NBC ordered a measly six episodes? Well, now it wanted twenty-eight.

JEN CELOTTA: We ended up doing nineteen in a row. It was just like, “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.” Greg is very good about signing on to things and then just figuring it out. With me, I pre-panic and pre-worry, and then once things get rough, I’m okay. When we were first asked to do nineteen episodes in a row, I remember panicking a little and they [Greg and Paul] were like, “It’s going to be okay, it’s just more episodes. It’s more exciting. It’s more for everybody to do. It’s more money, it’s more everything.” I remember telling Paul and Greg, “I feel like I’m in a horror movie with you guys, but I’m the only one that sees the monster.” And then I remember there was a particularly hard patch and Paul was like, “I see the monster, I see the monster!”

Thankfully, they had help. Paul Feig came on board as a co–executive producer. And with editors Dean Holland joining Parks and Rec and Dave Rogers starting to direct as well, we brought in a new editor, Claire Scanlon. Today, Claire is a major TV director—Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, The Good Place, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and the Netflix romantic comedy Set It Up—but back in early 2009 when she joined our show, she had done only reality shows and documentaries.

CLAIRE SCANLON (EDITOR AND DIRECTOR): This was the very first scripted television show I ever edited, period. I literally went from not scripted to the number one company.

She got the gig after passing along an editing friend’s name to Paul Lieberstein, whom she’d known in social circles since their twenties. Claire’s friend was hoping to join the Office spin-off.

CLAIRE SCANLON: I told Paul, “Hey, my friend wants to put his name in the hat for the new show.” And he’s like, “Well, what about you? You’re an editor too.” It didn’t even cross my mind that I’d even have a chance. I’d met Greg and Susanne at Paul’s birthday party one year. To me, they were like the grown-ups. They had a kid already, and I was in my twenties and they were just so mature. When I went in to my interview with Greg, I remember thinking, “He’s a dad.”

CLAIRE SCANLON: I told him, “I don’t have any narrative editing background. This isn’t my forte. I come from documentaries. In fact, I’ve worked with a lot of your camera operators on The Apprentice.” Greg’s like, “That’s a plus.” I can see now in retrospect why that was an attractive quality. He wanted people willing to thwart the script structure, who don’t think the script is the Bible.

DAVID ROGERS: She hit it out of the park right away. She just got it.

CLAIRE SCANLON: It was a trial by fire. Dave Rogers was amazing, and he’d always watch my cuts and give great advice like, “Don’t cut away. Stay on the joke till the end.” Things it would take a more seasoned editor to know. But because of my background, I was very comfortable with the shooting style. Whereas I think other editors would come on and be like, “Whoa, what the heck?”

Claire stepped in, Paul and Jen stepped up, and Greg and Mike stepped back. Our show was changing, but we always managed to find our footing. A good thing, because as we’d soon find out, there were choppy waters ahead.

“How Does It Make You Feel?”

The Office and the Great Recession

GREG DANIELS: I want to be realistic. I want to be relatable. I want to be observational. I want to do research and look at the real world. What’s happening in the real world? How do you connect that so that it feels relevant to people? If you’re going to follow those principles, you’re going to end up commenting on what’s around you.

What was around us in the summer of 2008, as we prepared for our fifth season, was a mix of hopefulness and anxiety. NASA landed a spacecraft on Mars. Folks from around the world flocked to the Beijing Olympics. Barack Obama was running for president. It was an optimistic time. But also, we were in the midst of a terrible recession.

The Office had been reflecting this economic anxiety for a while, such as in the season three classic “Business School,” where Michael has to defend Dunder Mifflin to business school students.

There was “Money” in the fourth season, where Michael takes a second job as a telemarketer to make ends meet . . .

. . . and “Customer Survey,” episode six of the fifth season, where Jim buys his parents’ house in the middle of the housing crisis.

BRENT FORRESTER: I think it was in the DNA of the show even before the recession. Scranton was deliberately chosen as this struggling working-class town, with paper being an obsolete industry. For sure we were aware of the recession, but Scranton was already an economically precarious place. I don’t recall us ramping that up during the recession, but I do remember people talking about it.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The story line of Sabre came at a time Comcast was coming in and taking over.

The fictional Florida-based printer sales company Sabre bought out the Scranton branch in season six, just as Comcast was buying stakes in MGM and Disney and becoming the nation’s largest internet service provider.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Was that intentional or a happy accident?

BRENT FORRESTER: B. J. Novak was very aware of these trends in technology. WUPHF [Ryan Howard’s fictional website, introduced in season six] is such a perfect takedown of the internet start-up. And Greg is always way ahead of trends. I don’t know where he finds the time to read The Economist or whatever he’s doing. We did an episode, I think it was called “China” [from season seven]. That was Greg realizing, “Oh shit, China’s gonna take over the world economy. What if Michael reads an article about this in a dentist’s office?”

MICHAEL: My whole life, I believed that America was number one. That was the saying. Not “America is number two.” England is number two. China should be like eight.

BRENT FORRESTER: I’ll tell you a writers’ room joke. There are things that become a reference that never leaves the room. When webisodes became a thing and people were talking about them, the writers’ room joke was there should be a form of entertainment called “silosodes,” where they just project The Office on the front of a grain silo. [Laughs.] So we were always talking about the silosodes money.

There were even times when the line between life in The Office and life in the real world became a little blurred. Take Andy Buckley, for instance. He played Dunder Mifflin’s chief financial officer, David Wallace. And he didn’t just look like a finance guy. He was an actual financial adviser at Merrill Lynch.

ANDY BUCKLEY (“DAVID WALLACE”): Michael Schur loved that I was in the financial world. And I stayed at Merrill Lynch the whole time I was on the show. We filmed the last episode in March of 2013, and I officially left Merrill Lynch in December of 2012. I worked at Merrill Lynch the whole time.

ANDY BUCKLEY: One time we’re at home and I’m looking all scruffy, playing with our son Xander, who at the time was two. The doorbell rings and I answer it and it’s Courtney Love. She was having a meeting with some big director about a movie role and she wanted to be prepared. I told her, “Nancy’s coming down. You can wait in the kitchen.” And I go back to playing with our little guy. Nancy comes down and they walk back to the studio, and the first thing Courtney says to my wife is, “Why is the guy from The Office in your house?”

Andy wasn’t just “the guy from The Office.” He was working at Merrill Lynch when everything went south in the fall of 2008.

ANDY BUCKLEY: The weekend that Lehman Brothers went out of business [on September 15, 2008], it was nuts because this was when I was on The Office all the time. It was my busiest year on the show. Luckily I did have partners. There was one day the stock market was down over seven hundred points in just three hours.

It happened on September 29, 2008, just days after our season five premiere. The Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered the largest point drop in its 112-year history.

ANDY BUCKLEY: That was the day that I was sitting there and it was . . . I think it was the Michael Scott negotiation, when we’re buying out the Michael Scott Paper Company.

It was “Broke,” an episode from the fifth season—the first, coincidentally, directed by Steve Carell—in which Michael’s offshoot paper company, on the brink of financial ruin, gets a buyout offer from his former employer.

ANDY BUCKLEY: Every time they were like, “Okay, let’s take five,” I’d duck out to make a call for work. “Dr. Wilson, it’s Andy Buckley. We’re going to be fine, it’s a temporary thing.” And meanwhile, I’ve got a huge scene. I wanted to tell them, “You cannot believe what I’m getting to do today!” But of course I couldn’t say that.

It was a stressful time, but The Office was a place where people could go for comfort. CNN in late 2009 claimed that the recession-era themes in The Office offered “a sense of solidarity for the viewing public and a new type of coping mechanism for dealing with recession-related stress.” And on February 1, 2009, we got to provide that on the biggest stage in TV, the hour after the Super Bowl.

This was the most coveted time slot in network television. Lassie owned it first in the late ’60s, getting the prime TV real estate on three different years, and soon the postgame programming became as popular (a record-setting 52.9 million viewers tuned in for the post–Super Bowl Friends in 1996) and talked about (an ass-kicking Jennifer Garner in lingerie wowed audiences who stayed for Alias in 2003) as the game itself.

Super Bowl XLIII included a pregame interview with President Obama and a halftime show with Bruce Springsteen. After the game, NBC aired a two-part Office episode called “Stress Relief.” It’s the one where Dwight surprises his coworkers with a fire drill so frighteningly real, it gives Stanley a heart attack.

EMILY VANDERWERFF: It has one of the great jokes that is now a time capsule, but at the time was so timely, which is Michael yelling at Stanley, “Stanley, Obama is president!” I think it was the first Obama joke on television.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: “Stress Relief” is the episode most people tell me is their favorite.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Well, it was special, coming on right after the Super Bowl.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN: Yeah, but I think that’s irrelevant now. It was a really big deal at the time. We were so focused on this opportunity to get more eyeballs on the show.

TERI WEINBERG (NOW EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT OF NBC ENTERTAINMENT): We needed to do something completely outrageous to make sure that people watching the Super Bowl who’d never seen The Office before would say, “Oh my God, I love this! I’m staying!” I was getting a little pressure from [NBC president] Jeff [Zucker] to make sure we had some celebrities in there. But we never had celebrities on our show. It was always about making sure that it felt like we were dropping into a world of human beings.

Our casting director, Allison Jones, wasn’t thrilled with the idea of including celebrities. In fact, she’d been resistant to stunt casting since day one.

ALLISON JONES: I would not shut up about how it’s a documentary, and suddenly Matt Damon is gonna show up in Scranton? It drove me crazy. As the network started getting more involved with sweeps week and stuff, they started saying, “You have to use Ben Affleck,” or blah blah, blah blah. I never agreed with that at all. To me, it broke the DNA of the show. So we never did it much at all.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Until the Super Bowl episode.

ALLISON JONES: That pissed me off. I would never normally talk back to a studio executive, but I believe I did it on a conference call. I was like, “Are you effing kidding me?” I was vociferous about not wanting that.

TERI WEINBERG: But in Greg’s brilliant fashion, he found a way to bring in celebrities without it feeling like celebrities were a part of The Office.

Jim, Pam, and Andy watch a pirated movie called Mrs. Albert Hannaday, in which Jack Black’s character has a torrid affair with his fiancée’s (Jessica Alba) grandmother, played by Cloris Leachman.

TERI WEINBERG: For me personally, I didn’t care if there were stars in the episode. That was a boss [Jeff Zucker] trying to mandate. And I understood it as a programming thing. But we found a way to make the boss happy without fucking with the integrity of the show. I had to learn how to balance both of those things, give my bosses what they felt like they needed, but most importantly, protect the show.

The show delivered as promised. According to Nielsen, 22.9 million viewers tuned in to watch, our biggest audience ever. The reviews were glowing—the A.V. Club summed up the episode in three words: “Holy motherfucking shit”—and Jeffrey Blitz won an Emmy for directing the episode. But Teri is proudest that they did it without abandoning the creative principles that Greg instilled in them from the beginning.

TERI WEINBERG: He used to tell me, “What’s most important to me is that you tell me how you feel. How does the episode make you feel? How did the characters in this episode make you feel?” So I would look at the script and think about how it made me feel. I didn’t look at it and say, “Well, the structure isn’t so much blah blah blah.” It was all about: Are we accomplishing this really quiet moment between Jim and Pam? Is there something going on with the accountants in the corner that we’re peeking in on? It was really about how it made me feel.

“A Pigeon-Toed Person Dancing with a Bow-Legged Person”

The Many Loves of Erin Hannon

Season five of The Office saw a lot of staff changes at Dunder Mifflin. Both Ryan Howard and Toby Flenderson returned to the Scranton branch, and Michael quit to form his own business, the Michael Scott Paper Company, somehow convincing Pam and Ryan to follow him. We also saw new faces join the team, like Charles Miner, the new vice president of the northeast region (played by Idris Elba), and Toby’s replacement in HR (and Michael’s soul mate) Holly Flax (played by Amy Ryan).

We also met our new receptionist, who would stay with us for the rest of the series. Erin Hannon, played by Ellie Kemper, couldn’t have been more different from her Dunder Mifflin coworkers, most of whom were just counting the minutes till they could leave.

ELLIE KEMPER: Erin loved being there. You can imagine her getting ready for work in the morning, just wanting to excel at her job. Stanley was maybe a little bit over it. Oscar was over it. But Erin lived for it. Within thirty seconds of meeting her [Erin joined the Scranton branch in the “Michael Scott Paper Company” episode from season five], she agreed to change her name. Her full name is Kelly Erin Hannon, but there’s already a Kelly in the office. So she’s like, “I’ll go by Erin.” She just wanted to be there.

BRENT FORRESTER: Ellie was one of those guest characters that every writer instantly wanted to write for. Everybody started pitching stories for her. It was like a shot of adrenaline to us. Some performers are so gifted and special that they create their own longevity.

PAUL FEIG: She’s got a real different energy from everybody on the show. So it was like, “Is this going to work?” But that was really the brilliance of Greg and Paul [Lieberstein], seeing that and going, “Yeah, let’s play with this.” [Directing] her first talking head, I just had never done a talking head with anybody with that kind of attitude on The Office before. It was refreshing but also disorienting.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Her character is someone who’s actually optimistic and enthusiastic.

PAUL FEIG: That’s why we put her against the window. We gave her the Jim window because she was so happy. The Jim window was something that Randall came up with, I think, which was putting Jim’s talking heads against the wall with a window, because he has a future and isn’t trapped, and the others are mostly against a wall with no exterior window.

CLAIRE SCANLON: When Ellie came on, we were like the new girls. I didn’t know how you guys introduced new characters, which was really by hook or by crook. They waited for the actor to show them who they were and it either worked or didn’t. I remember cutting “Secretary’s Day” [the twenty-second episode of the sixth season], and Erin had a scene where Michael took her out to lunch and he told her that [her boyfriend] Andy had been engaged to Angela, and then Erin has a meltdown.

[ERIN COVERS HER FACE WITH HER HAIR.]

MICHAEL: What are you doing?

ERIN: In the foster home, my hair was my room. [Starts yelling under her hair.]

CLAIRE SCANLON: I remember thinking, “She’s going to make it.” I hadn’t seen much of her work before that, but cutting that scene, I was like, “She’s got the chops, she can play with Steve, she’s going to make it.” It was a great scene and she was definitely driving it, and he was the reactor to everything she was doing.

ELLIE KEMPER: Oh, you’re gonna make me cry. That’s the sweetest compliment. “Secretary’s Day” was my favorite episode.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You were going toe-to-toe with Steve, maybe one of the best improvisers on the planet.

MICHAEL: Andy, you know, come on. Andy, his butt looks big in those khakis.

ERIN: Oh, I like his butt.

MICHAEL: You said butt.

ERIN: You tricked me!

BOTH: Ahh!

ELLIE KEMPER: It was one of the best days of my life. The whole time I felt a little bit giddy.

The writers liked Erin and the new story lines started following, including a complicated office romance with Andy Bernard, played by Ed Helms. He first started pursuing Erin in season five, even getting into a “Take Me Home, Country Roads” sing-off with Dwight for her affections. It wasn’t until season six that Andy finally mustered the courage to ask her out.

ED HELMS: I don’t think there was an arc spelled out early on, but Erin’s energy was just so funny and it felt right for Andy in a way, both of them being very left-footed socially. It made them perfect for each other. It’s like a pigeon-toed person dancing with a bow-legged person.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Ellie, do you think Erin and Andy were a good match?

ELLIE KEMPER: I never thought so. Is that terrible to say?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: No.

ELLIE KEMPER: I felt like Andy was a bit too childish. I don’t think he was ready to take care of Erin the way she needed to be. And Erin was ready to take care of him, so it felt uneven in that respect. I love that we got to be in so many scenes together, but that relationship never felt fair to me.

She soon drifted to Gabe Lewis, director of emerging regions coordination for Sabre (played by Zach Woods), but he wasn’t a much better match.

ELLIE KEMPER: I don’t know who Erin should be with. Someone who’s odd but also able to take care of her. I didn’t feel like she ever quite got her right match in that show. So that’s why we need one Christmas special to see who she picked. I want that to happen. I don’t know if anyone else does, but I do. Just one episode.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Do you know that I pitched Kevin and Erin getting together?

ELLIE KEMPER: I think that would be a pretty reasonable relationship.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I went up to the writers’ room. And I said, “If Kevin could mature just a little.” There was something about their energy that I thought was right. It’s almost like the static being and the hummingbird, but somehow their energies matched in a weird way.

ELLIE KEMPER: Brian, that actually makes perfect sense to me. I love that pitch.

Kevin and Erin actually came close to becoming the next great Office romance. In the season six episode “The Delivery,” Michael attempts to play matchmaker, setting up new couples in the office. He matches Kevin with Erin, and sparks don’t exactly fly on their first “date.”

“We Basically Blew the Entire Budget with One Shot”

The Proposal

Over the next few seasons, we would see some of the biggest changes yet for our other favorite couple, Jim and Pam.

PAUL FEIG: It wasn’t a Sam and Diane situation. It wasn’t a Ross and Rachel situation where that was the centerpiece of the show. It was this nice thing that was happening as a sideline. So you didn’t get worn out on that story line. You just kept investing in it, wanting it to happen more.

The moment we’d all been waiting for finally came in the premiere of season five, an episode called “Weight Loss.”

PAUL FEIG: One of the greatest honors for me was also getting to direct the proposal.

It happened, as you likely remember, at an interstate rest stop in the pouring rain, somewhere between Scranton and New York City.

PAUL FEIG: It was the most expensive shot we ever did in the show’s history. That was the very first episode of that season, and we basically blew the entire budget with one shot, which cost like half a million dollars.

Why so much for what became a fifty-two-second scene? The original plan was to fly the cast and crew out east to shoot at an actual rest stop on the Merritt Parkway, but they wouldn’t be able to create fake rain for the scene. So our production team built an entire rest stop on a parking lot behind a Best Buy in Los Angeles. Greg guesstimates the cost at around $250,000.

DAVID ROGERS: We built this on a huge parking lot and we had eighteen-wheelers doing figure eights, to make it look like they’re passing.

But once they got that shot in the can, that’s when things really got complicated.

DAVID ROGERS: We did a version where you couldn’t hear them, you would just see it. And then we had a version where you would hear it.

GREG DANIELS: I couldn’t decide whether you should hear it or just see it. You could tell what it was from seeing it. We recorded the audio and then we were like, well, maybe it should just be the sound of rain. What’s the most effective?

BRENT FORRESTER: One of the great debates of American history.

JEN CELOTTA: It was the craziest discussion, and there were people on both sides. It was about fifty-fifty on whether we should have sound when we saw Jim propose to Pam, or just see the visual of him in the rain getting on one knee.

BRENT FORRESTER: They went back and forth and tested and A/B-ed it and firmly concluded it should be one way and then revised it. I think it’s possible that objectivity finally gets lost in that process. It’s hard to remain objective about anything, but in a subjective medium like the arts and comedy, who knows? You just make a decision at the end.

GREG DANIELS: It went back to that “Casino Night” thing. How much do you lean into the docu device? Is it going to make it cooler or less cool?

JEN CELOTTA: The side that wanted to hear Jim’s words were like, “We’ve been waiting forever to hear him propose to Pam. Why would you take that moment away from people and not hear his actual words?” You want to give them what they’d been waiting for, which might be slightly more of a comedy show kind of thing. With a mockumentary thing, it was, “God, it’s so beautiful and subtle to be across the street and have to reach for it.” Because Jim would turn his mic off in this moment. It’s a big moment. Or [the camera guys] missed the exit and they’re trying to get it and they can’t get it exactly. But you see what’s happening and you know what’s happening. And once you see him down on one knee, what is he going to say other than what everybody says [during a proposal]? We know what he’s saying. Actually filling in the blank is more beautiful.

PAUL FEIG: I was a pro-sound guy. It was so emotional to me and their performance was so good, and we were already dealing with so much with the highway and all of these cars zooming past. I remember fighting really, really hard for that. I think Greg was always on the fence about whether we should have done it [with sound].

JEN CELOTTA: There was one moment where Greg was getting into his car, after the discussion had gone on for a month and we had to settle on it. I was coming from a trailer and he was getting into his car, and I said, “Greg.” He turned and he was trapped between his car door and his car. I was like, “Did you decide on sound or no sound?” And he was like, “No, no, I haven’t.” It was literally like a horror film. I was stalking him to find out if the decision had been made.

GREG DANIELS: I went back and forth on that. I had so many versions. I tested it with different people, brought in everybody to look at it.

JEN CELOTTA: I remember being in the office and I saw a list of people who wanted sound and a list of people who wanted no sound. His wife and two kids were on one side of the list, and his other two kids were on the other. His family was split down the middle. So he was interviewing everybody and saying, “What should we do? What should we do?”

PAUL FEIG: We were literally like, “Hey, guy who fixes the cars for the show, come on in. What do you think?”

DAVID ROGERS: Ultimately, Greg went with the version where you can’t hear them. And then he changed his mind that morning that we were airing. He’s like, “No, I’ve slept on it and I want to put the one where they can hear them.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The morning we’re airing?

DAVID ROGERS: Yeah. I think both of them were great versions, but it’s probably better to hear. I mean, we waited so long for this moment, it was probably better to hear it and not just see it, because you didn’t want any kind of confusion of what happened.

GREG DANIELS: And we sorta did a half and half I think at the end. Right. They can kind of hear it, but the audio’s got a lot of rain in it.

[JIM GETS DOWN ON ONE KNEE.]

PAM: What are you doing?

JIM: I just . . . can’t wait.

PAM: Oh my God.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Do you think they made the right decision?

BRENT FORRESTER: I think it could’ve gone either way. That’s why directing is not a fraudulent art form. All of those questions, whether you see the actor or don’t see him, all these different ways you can do it. And then to have the conviction at the end to go, “Yeah, there’s clever ways to do this, but what matters most is this performance.”

DAVID ROGERS: I think we made the right choice. But I’ll tell you this, they didn’t destroy the one with no sound. And when it was time to make the DVDs, they almost screwed up. It almost got burned on the DVDs. They were doing QC [quality control] and some heads rolled because, you know, this [alternative take] needs to be labeled so it doesn’t get mixed into syndication cuts or Netflix or whatever.

“You Can’t Have a Horse Die at the Moment of Maximum Romance”

Jim and Pam’s Wedding

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Were you worried that when Pam and Jim finally got married, it would screw things up?

JENNA FISCHER: I wasn’t, because we had been together now for a couple seasons. So I think the question was: Can they get together and be a stable couple, and will we still care? I remember having a conversation with Greg, and he was like, “What’s going to lose people is if we just keep manufacturing these weird ways to keep them apart. That’s exhausting and it’s not realistic. And so what we’re going to need to do is bring them together and then give them obstacles to overcome as a couple.” So rather than obstacles that keep them from being a couple, give them obstacles to break through as a couple. Like Pam wanting to go to art school or Jim wanting to start his own business or having their first kid or whatever. Things where they’d have to weather the storm together, which is more interesting and realistic. What’s not gonna be satisfying is if they get together at the end of season nine after multiple affairs. Everyone’s going to be like, “Yay . . . I guess. Congrats? I hope you enjoy your marriage with all your horrible baggage.” Not a happy ending.

In season six, it was time for Jim and Pam to finally tie the knot, and the entire office went to Niagara Falls for the wedding. Much like Jim and Pam’s relationship, the shoot for this episode had many obstacles. It was a real “everything that makes it harder makes it better” situation.

PAUL FEIG: We were going to shoot on this boat, the Lady of the Mist or whatever.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Maid of the Mist.

The Maid of the Mist has been taking tourists on a boat tour of Niagara Falls (well, the river below the falls) since 1846, and it’s carried passengers like Marilyn Monroe, Stephen Hawking, Princess Diana, and Mick Jagger.

Jim and Pam plan a church wedding, but when they realize that it is becoming more about the guests than each other, they sneak off to get married in secret on the Maid of the Mist. So the first obstacle? Shooting on location on an actual boat on the river below Niagara Falls.

PAUL FEIG: It brought so many logistical things that it was hard to invest in the emotion of it at first. I was so worried, like, are we going to get soaked? Is the camera going to screw up?

The camera didn’t screw up. But they did get soaked, which was not ideal for our hair department head, Kim Ferry.

KIM FERRY: Both [Jenna and John] got soaked the first take, it was awful. There was no electric on the boat and it was for the wedding scene. We were told by the producers, “Look, we did three runs [on the boat] to test everything, and it’s going to be fine because no water ever came up on the boat.” And then we get out there and we’re near the falls, and all of a sudden it’s like whooooosh. It just soaks both of them.

DEBBIE PIERCE: What did you do?

KIM FERRY: I started laughing. And then we just went with it. That’s why [Jenna’s] hair changed, because it was so drenched on the boat, we couldn’t go back again. We had to keep filming. They’re like, “Can you fix it?” I’m like, “Are you kidding me right now? With what?”

JOHN KRASINSKI: I remember showing up and I can’t walk, I’m so sick. One of the most romantic moments in the show, I’m not actually kissing Jenna. I’m kissing her cheek because I didn’t want to get her sick. I was like dire sick.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I think for that moment, you should have just gotten her sick.

JOHN KRASINSKI: That’s an awful thing. But that’s why I did a big Humphrey Bogart–like twist kiss away from the camera.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: When you walked on the boat, the two people behind you were my parents in real life. Do you remember that?

JOHN KRASINSKI: Oh my God, now I remember, yes. Paul [Feig] was in his suit in the blue tarp and, as nicely as he does, he was like, “These are Brian’s parents.”

Jim and Pam return to the church to have a second ceremony in front of all their friends and family. What viewers don’t know is that another scene was supposed to happen in that moment.

JOHN KRASINSKI: The horse was going to go off the cliff.

That’s right. Greg’s idea was that Roy would interrupt the ceremony with a grand gesture, riding in on a horse. Somehow Dwight gets a hold of the horse and rides it away from the church.

PAUL FEIG: Originally, Greg had this insane idea that Dwight was going to ride a horse over Niagara Falls.

GREG DANIELS: Dwight is at the hotel, and he’s looking at all these photos of animals going over the falls, and Roy shows up on a horse to try and win Pam back. He abandons the horse, and Dwight puts it together and he gets on the horse and he starts going over the falls, riding a horse, and then he realizes it’s a terrible idea. He jumps out at the last minute. And while Pam and Jim are getting married, a horse goes over in the background. Everyone’s just screaming at me. They were like, “You can’t have a horse die at the moment of maximum romance!”

PAUL FEIG: We were just like, “I don’t know if we want to kill a horse at Jim and Pam’s wedding.” He fought for it and fought for it.

GREG DANIELS: I was really committed to this story line of Dwight riding a horse over the falls, to the extent that I scouted the pool of water that the horse was going to fall into.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Up until shooting, that was in there. I think it was Rainn, he was like, “Even I think this is nuts.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The moment of you standing there on the boat is so beautiful. Do you want a horse diving over a cliff? And it seemed like, yes, Greg did want a horse diving over the cliff.

GREG DANIELS: We routinely made changes of that size after a table reading, just not with such big stakes. Basically, the script that Mindy and I wrote, and we read at the table, had a horse going over the falls in the background after all the romantic stuff with Pam and Jim having their own private ceremony on the Maid of the Mist after their wedding. But it was beset by problems. It was part of a Dwight story and I meant for it to balance the unabashed romance of the A plot, but after the table reading, the cast sat me down and told me I was wrong and I listened to them. It was like an intervention of normal people in the life of a comedy addict.

Greg changed his mind, which meant Paul Lieberstein and the writers had to come up with a totally new concept for the wedding ceremony.

PAUL FEIG: It was a very last-minute thing. We had like a day or two. And that wedding video was all over the internet.

“That wedding video” captured the nuptials of Jill Peterson and Kevin Heinz, who picked Chris Brown’s “Forever” for their walk down the aisle—with a choreographed twist. The bridal party danced and strutted, and the groom even somersaulted. The video was uploaded to YouTube in July 2009 and, as of this writing, has been viewed more than one hundred million times.

PAUL FEIG: It was kind of the perfect setup. And then when we were shooting in that church all day, I mean, it was so much to shoot that we were running out of time. Literally, I had like a half hour left. I was like, “I don’t even have time to get this dance number!” So we’re going to have maybe two takes at it. And the first time they did it, it was gold. It’s just like, that’s it. Drop the mic.

Now they had footage of us dancing down the aisle at the “official” wedding and separate footage of Jim and Pam’s secret wedding on the Maid of the Mist. The next challenge came in the editing room, where Paul and Claire had to figure out how to fit both ceremonies together.

PAUL FEIG: We decided to intermix the dance number with the wedding, and we just burst into tears. I mean, I still get so emotional watching that because it’s so beautiful. The way that it goes back and forth between the two.

CLAIRE SCANLON: There’s the last scene of Niagara where Jim and Pam are on the bow of the boat, and he puts his arm around her and looks right into the camera. It’s not even cocky, it’s just a sweet smile, like, “I got her.” John and Jenna came into my bay to see it. They were like, “We need to see this show. We need to sign off on this.” And after they watched it, I turned around and they’re both bawling. For the poignant moments, all you want is to make people cry. It was really a sweet moment to be a part of their journey and be a witness to it.

One of the satisfying things about getting to make a TV show for so many seasons is that you have the room to show real change. By the end of season six, the wedding of Jim and Pam, and their discovery that they’re pregnant, didn’t feel like a check in a box. It felt real. Hundreds of people flocked to the Pam and Jim wedding website (halpertbeesly.com) to write messages in the guest book, congratulating the fictional happy couple. But falling in love with these characters just made it even more difficult when one of them decided to walk away, as we were about to find out.

TITLE	DIRECTED BY	WRITTEN BY	ORIGINAL AIR DATE
“Weight Loss”	Paul Feig	Lee Eisenberg & Gene Stupnitsky	September 25, 2008
“Business Ethics”	Jeffrey Blitz	Ryan Koh	October 9, 2008
“Baby Shower”	Greg Daniels	Aaron Shure	October 16, 2008
“Crime Aid”	Jennifer Celotta	Charlie Grandy	October 23, 2008
“Employee Transfer”	David Rogers	Anthony Q. Farrell	October 30, 2008
“Customer Survey”	Stephen Merchant	Lester Lewis	November 6, 2008
“Business Trip”	Randall Einhorn	Brent Forrester	November 13, 2008
“Frame Toby”	Jason Reitman	Mindy Kaling	November 20, 2008
“The Surplus”	Paul Feig	Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg	December 4, 2008
“Moroccan Christmas”	Paul Feig	Justin Spitzer	December 11, 2008
“The Duel”	Dean Holland	Jennifer Celotta	January 15, 2009
“Prince Family Paper”	Asaad Kelada	B. J. Novak	January 22, 2009
“Stress Relief”	Jeffrey Blitz	Paul Lieberstein	February 1, 2009
“Lecture Circuit: Part 1”	Ken Kwapis	Mindy Kaling	February 5, 2009
“Lecture Circuit: Part 2”	Ken Kwapis	Mindy Kaling	February 12, 2009
“Blood Drive”	Randall Einhorn	Brent Forrester	March 5, 2009
“Golden Ticket”	Randall Einhorn	Mindy Kaling	March 12, 2009
“New Boss”	Paul Feig	Lee Eisenberg & Gene Stupnitsky	March 19, 2009
“Two Weeks”	Paul Lieberstein	Aaron Shure	March 26, 2009
“Dream Team”	Paul Feig	B. J. Novak	April 9, 2009
“Michael Scott Paper Company”	Gene Stupnitsky	Justin Spitzer	April 9, 2009
“Heavy Competition”	Ken Whittingham	Ryan Koh	April 16, 2009
“Broke”	Steve Carell	Charlie Grandy	April 23, 2009
“Casual Friday”	Brent Forrester	Anthony Q. Farrell	April 30, 2009
“Cafe Disco”	Randall Einhorn	Warren Lieberstein & Halsted Sullivan	May 7, 2009
“Company Picnic”	Ken Kwapis	Jennifer Celotta & Paul Lieberstein	May 14, 2009

TITLE	DIRECTED BY	WRITTEN BY	ORIGINAL AIR DATE
“Gossip”	Paul Lieberstein	Paul Lieberstein	September 17, 2009
“The Meeting”	Randall Einhorn	Aaron Shure	September 24, 2009
“The Promotion”	Jennifer Celotta	Jennifer Celotta	October 1, 2009
“Niagara”	Paul Feig	Greg Daniels & Mindy Kaling	October 8, 2009
“Mafia”	David Rogers	Brent Forrester	October 15, 2009
“The Lover”	Lee Eisenberg	Lee Eisenberg & Gene Stupnitsky	October 22, 2009
“Koi Pond”	Reggie Hudlin	Warren Lieberstein & Halsted Sullivan	October 29, 2009
“Double Date”	Seth Gordon	Charlie Grandy	November 5, 2009
“Murder”	Greg Daniels	Daniel Chun	November 12, 2009
“Shareholder Meeting”	Charles McDougall	Justin Spitzer	November 19, 2009
“Scott’s Tots”	B. J. Novak	Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg	December 3, 2009
“Secret Santa”	Randall Einhorn	Mindy Kaling	December 10, 2009
“The Banker”	Jeffrey Blitz	Jason Kessler	January 21, 2010
“Sabre”	John Krasinski	Jennifer Celotta	February 4, 2010
“The Manager and the Salesman”	Marc Webb	Mindy Kaling	February 11, 2010
“The Delivery”	Seth Gordon	Daniel Chun	March 4, 2010
“The Delivery”	Harold Ramis	Charlie Grandy	March 4, 2010
“St. Patrick’s Day”	Randall Einhorn	Jonathan Hughes	March 11, 2010
“New Leads”	Brent Forrester	Brent Forrester	March 18, 2010
“Happy Hour”	Matt Sohn	B. J. Novak	March 25, 2010
“Secretary’s Day”	Steve Carell	Mindy Kaling	April 22, 2010
“Body Language”	Mindy Kaling	Justin Spitzer	April 29, 2010
“The Cover-up”	Rainn Wilson	Gene Stupnitsky & Lee Eisenberg	May 6, 2010
“The Chump”	Randall Einhorn	Aaron Shure	May 13, 2010
“Whistleblower”	Paul Lieberstein	Warren Lieberstein & Halsted Sullivan	May 20, 2010

9

“The Moment That My Life Changed”