Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

For Greg, the finale was his chance to say goodbye, both to The Office cast he’d brought together and the characters he helped shape from the very beginning.

MATT SOHN: He kept writing more and more and more. It was almost as if he didn’t want the show to end.

KEN KWAPIS: He was both very emotional about the finale, and I think he was also anxious about it. I think for him the stakes felt really high. I don’t want to call it a parting shot, but this was the last chance to say what he needed to say with this series. The cast felt the same way. There wasn’t a day on the finale where everybody wasn’t expressing what these characters are doing with precision, because you’re not going to get to do it after this.

For his final statement on The Office, Greg was getting the old band back together again. And one of the first to sign on was Ken Kwapis, who’d directed our pilot and some of the biggest episodes of our first few seasons, like “Booze Cruise,” “Casino Night,” and “Gay Witch Hunt.” His last time directing for us was the one hundredth episode, “Company Picnic,” back in our fifth season.

KEN KWAPIS: Greg asked me to come back for the finale. It had been two or three seasons since I worked on the show, but I think Greg wanted to create a sense of coming full circle and returning to the show’s origins. I was very flattered and excited, and also very daunted. All of the characters’ lives had evolved. And I felt like, even though I knew the show as a viewer, I needed to get a little deeper and get involved in the characters’ lives now. I had to go back and watch things in a different way. So many of the characters who began the series in secondary roles, their roles had grown. Everybody had an interesting and complicated story to tell. How were we going to do that? Well, it took longer than a normal show, that’s for sure.

Greg had been planning the finale’s story, where the documentary crew returns to Scranton, since season three. Dwight is still regional manager at Dunder Mifflin. Andy is now working in the admissions office at Cornell, trying to forget the very public humiliation of his America’s Next A Capella Sensation audition. Darryl is living in Austin, working at Jim’s sports marketing company, Athlead. Stanley escaped to Florida, and Creed faked his own death to avoid prosecution (he was accused, among other things, of trafficking endangered animal meats). Kevin had been fired, as was Toby. But everyone was returning to Scranton for the wedding, an event we’d all been anticipating since Dwight and Angela first hooked up in a doghouse at Jim’s barbecue.

It was a beefy script, and that’s just what the actors and crew were allowed to read.

KEN KWAPIS: There were forty to fifty pages of alternate ideas that may or may not make it into the final script.

There were a lot of amazing moments that didn’t make the cut, like the now infamous Matrix prank, where Jim tries to convince Dwight that he’s living in a computer simulation—a plot borrowed from the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix starring Keanu Reeves.

DAVID ROGERS: There’s a cat that walks by [Dwight’s office], and then the same cat walks by again, like a glitch, and then Jenna goes . . .

PAM: Training the cat was both easier and more boring than I thought it would be.

DAVID ROGERS: And then we had Hank the security guard as Dorpheus, who’s Morpheus’s brother, and he’s wearing the same kind of jacket as Morpheus. All of these guys were going to run out, like Hugo Weaving–type characters. [Hugo Weaving played Agent Smith, the black-suit-wearing villain in The Matrix.] We had a whole thing, we just never finished the visual effects. And it was too long. It was going to be the cold open, but we cut it for time.

We all gathered together on March 4, 2013, for the final table read. Now, usually at a table read, it would just be the cast members, a few writers, and maybe a couple of producers. But this time there were several hundred people watching, folks who had worked on the show over the past ten years and some friends and family.

MATT SOHN: I was very excited to sit and watch it [as an audience member], but ten minutes before it started, Greg said, “Hey, Matt, could you grab a camera and shoot the final table read?” And I was like, “Really?” He said, “Yeah, it’ll be great for us to have.” So I shot it as a cameraman and didn’t get to really take it in.

The entire table read, all one hour and seventeen minutes of it, was shared online and has been watched by millions of Office fans. There were a lot of hilarious moments—like how Rainn was the only cast member to dress in costume, or when everybody else was crying at the end and John glanced at the camera with the perfect Jim Halpert smile—but there was also a lot of emotion.

JENNA FISCHER: I was crying. That was really emotional. Chris Workman, our camera operator assistant, took a photo of the last table read, and Angela had it blown up and put on a wall in her house.

ANGELA KINSEY: I was starting to really feel it. Oh, they’re going to be people I might not see for a really long time. Because that’s what happens. You all get on other projects, and people move apart. I knew we’d stay in touch, but just getting to see people, have lunch with them, have a really great conversation by the coffee truck, you know? There’s a group of our crew that were really just like family.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We were a family.

ANGELA KINSEY: We are a family.

GREG DANIELS: It wasn’t just fiction. It was such an emotional friend group that developed over the show. There’s this cliché that if you do a pilot with people and the pilot doesn’t go, you’ll be friends for life. If it goes maybe one or two seasons, you might still be able to talk to each other. But if it goes a long time, you’re gonna hate each other. I think it’s very rare that it worked out the way it did for us.

“He Was Very Nervous About Lying to NBC”

The Finale’s Mystery Cast of All-Stars

Ken Kwapis wasn’t the only Office alumnus to return for the show’s finale. B. J. Novak and Mindy Kaling, who’d both left the previous year to work on The Mindy Project, were back, as was Mike Schur, who (reluctantly) featured in the final episodes as an actor.

MIKE SCHUR: I most famously, and most annoyingly to me, played the character Mose Schrute.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Oh my God. We never talked about Mose.

MIKE SCHUR: I assumed it was gonna be your first question.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You weren’t happy playing Mose?

MIKE SCHUR: No. I hated it. I hated every second of it. I was wearing wool clothes and had a neck beard and it was always really hot. The joke was I didn’t talk, and that’s not a funny joke. I had to get up at 4:30 in the morning and drive to the middle of nowhere and wear wool clothes. All I wanted to do was be back in the [writers’] room breaking stories. Shouldn’t that be what you want me to do instead of this? Then the joke became with the writers, because they knew how much I hated it, “What if you’re shirtless? What if you’re on a seesaw? What if you’re on a trampoline? What if you’re running as fast as you can alongside a car, like a dog?” I was at Parks and Rec and they would call me and be like, “We need Mose!” And I was like, “I have a job. I have a life. I have young children.” They would just make me do it. They would compete with each other to find the most humiliating possible thing they could have me do.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I love that Mose existed primarily to make the writers laugh.

MIKE SCHUR: Meant specifically to make me miserable. Like riding a moped, trying to jump a bunch of cars [from the season eight episode “Garden Party”]. I don’t know how to drive a moped. No one taught me how to drive. They were like, “Just get on and rev the thing.” Because the point was, if I wipe out or slip and fall and break my pelvis, it’ll be really funny. The subtext was always the worse this goes, the funnier it’ll be.

A few new faces were added to the cast for this last episode. During the Q&A session for the fictional documentary, a woman in the audience (played by Joan Cusack) asks a question of Erin about her birth mother.

Just as Erin realizes that the mystery woman is her mom, a man (played by Ed Begley Jr.) steps forward and takes the microphone.

ELLIE KEMPER: Erin never really had a permanent family. I just loved that the writers arranged for her to meet her birth parents.

CRAIG ROBINSON: Oh my God. When Erin was reunited with her parents? I’m gonna cry thinking about that. I didn’t know what was going on. It was pretty heart-wrenching.

ELLIE KEMPER: By the way, do you know I still have Joan Cusack’s cardigan? I either complimented her cardigan or said it smelled good or something. This was on the last day. She took it off and gave it to me.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: She gave it to you to use for a minute? Or was she like, “Here, take this forever”?

ELLIE KEMPER: She said, “You can have it.” But maybe she literally meant “you can borrow it,” and then I never gave it back. It’s very possible I misinterpreted that.

The finale’s cast also included quite a few people not accustomed to being on the other side of the camera.

BRENT FORRESTER: You may have noticed that Greg cast tons of people who worked behind the scenes.

Writer Brent Forrester was one of those people, the first “audience member” to ask a question of the Q&A panel.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Is that your acting debut?

BRENT FORRESTER: It certainly is.

BRENT: How did it feel to see your lives played out on TV?

BRENT FORRESTER: Before I went on camera, I turned to you and said, “How do you act? I have to deliver a line. What is actiiiiiiing?!” We had two minutes for you to tell me how to deliver a line. You kind of translated it into “just imagine it’s really happening.”

GREG DANIELS: I put a lot of people on. Every writer was on. [Writers Amelie Gillette, Allison Silverman, Dan Sterling, and Steve Hely all asked questions during the Q&A.] My wife was on. [Susanne was the Q&A moderator.] Part of that is I wanted ordinary people, ’cause it’s a documentary, and if they are a little bit uncomfortable in front of the camera, great. The boom’s in the shot, the nonactor is looking weird, that all works.

Jen Celotta finally achieved her dream of playing a Schrute. Her character name was listed as “Jen Celotta Schrute” on the call sheet, and she appeared at Kevin’s bar with the other Schrute relatives.

JEN CELOTTA: I said no to every other offer. Like Person #3 in Line and Waitress #4. I said “Schrute or nothing” for like five years. And then Greg called me, mostly because I think he wanted all his pals back for the finale. He was like, “Fine. You can be a Schrute.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: How’d it go?

Kate Flannery got a moment on-screen with her favorite crew member, photographer Chris Haston.

KATE FLANNERY: They let my boyfriend, Chris, dance with me during Dwight and Angela’s wedding. I’m with the tall red-faced guy. It was a nice gift, just subtle and wonderful, and it really meant a lot.

The frat boy who mocks Andy in the steak house is actually Greg’s former driver/assistant, Jonah Platt. Jennie Tan, the Office superfan who ran the OfficeTally blog, emailed Greg and asked if she could be in the finale, and he said absolutely, giving her a speaking role in the Q&A. (She’s the one who asks Jim and Pam if their relationship is “like Harry Potter.”) The after-party guests who pose for a group photo include editor/directors David Rogers and Claire Scanlon, script supervisor Veda Semarne, first AD Rusty Mahmood, and prop master Phil Shea. Matt Sohn’s voice made a guest appearance, as the crew member interviewing Dwight in his Dodge Challenger SRT8 during the cold open.

MATT SOHN: I was assured that they were going to replace my voice with a more masculine documentarian voice. They told me, “We’ll change it in the edit.” Lo and behold, there’s my first and only acting credit for anything.

The woman at the warehouse party who tells Phyllis the mugs are for PBS executives is Allison Jones, casting director extraordinaire.

ALLISON JONES: Oh God, I was horrified. I remember Greg wanted everybody who had worked on the show to be in the finale. And I said I’d only do it if Phyllis was right there with me, ’cause I just don’t know how to do this. So I had a line with Phyllis, and now of course I think I was terrible. The whole situation was terrifying for me.

BRENT FORRESTER: What Greg was doing was creating a kind of yearbook for himself, where he managed to photograph all these people that he cared about. So when he watches that episode, it’s an emotional reunion for him too.

There was only one person missing from this group, a guy who’d been away for a few years and was sorely missed. Could we have a finale without Michael Scott?

GREG DANIELS: It was essential to me that Steve come back. So I approached him very early, and he didn’t think there was enough of a reason for Michael to return. The happy Michael who had grown as a person didn’t care about fame anymore.

STEVE CARELL: I felt like Michael’s story had definitely ended. And when the show was wrapping up, I was reticent about coming back.

GREG DANIELS: I think he was really anxious that it not be all about him. Everybody who put in these other two years [after he left], this is the end of all of their stories. So he didn’t want to do too much.

STEVE CARELL: I just didn’t feel like it was right for Michael’s return to take anything away from that. That was everyone else’s ending. Michael had already had his. But at the same time, I felt like I should, out of respect for all of you guys and out of my love for everybody, acknowledge the ending of this thing. So that was my reasoning behind it. I wanted to do as little as possible while still being there to support it.

GREG DANIELS: He really liked the idea of coming back for Dwight’s wedding, like he thought the character had learned something. He didn’t need self-promotion at this point. He didn’t need to come back to be on the documentary. He came back for his friend Dwight, which was like a very deep human relationship.

STEVE CARELL: I just didn’t want it to take away from anything. That was my biggest fear.

KEN KWAPIS: Aside from the excitement of getting the whole gang back together again, it speaks a lot to Michael’s character that he would show up for the wedding. It just emotionally felt like, with Michael’s evolution over the course of the series, it made perfect sense that he wasn’t going to miss that.

Dwight’s wedding was the perfect excuse to bring Steve back. There was just one catch. They didn’t want anyone to know about it.

DAVID ROGERS: We lied to everybody about Steve.

Well, almost everybody. Editor Dave Rogers was one of the chosen few to get the news about Steve’s imminent return.

DAVID ROGERS: I remember Greg felt really bad about lying to people. He was lying to family and friends. I remember telling Greg, “Listen, it’s like a surprise party. Someone asks, ‘Are you throwing me a surprise party?’ and you say, ‘No,’ and then two hours later, ‘Surprise!’ That’s what this is. I know it’s hard, but we have to keep it a secret.”

MATT SOHN: I didn’t tell anybody except my wife. But I tell her everything.

JENNA FISCHER: John and I had been up in the writers’ room talking about the finale, and we were sworn to secrecy. So I feel like I knew for a pretty long time and I knew that there was a lot of trickery going on. He was not written into the final script at the final table read. There was a scene between Dwight and Steve, but it was written between Dwight and Creed.

GREG DANIELS: We had the whole fake table read with Creed somehow taking all of Michael’s lines. Yeah, that was pretty exciting. We were lying to everybody about Steve coming back. NBC didn’t know. I bald-faced lied. I made the line producer lie. I said to him, “I’ll take care of you if you get fired because of this.” He was very nervous about lying to NBC.

KEN KWAPIS: It’s still remarkable to me that it was kept a secret. I was pestered by different newspeople and, you know, honed my fibbing skills.

CLAIRE SCANLON: Greg had such a guilty conscience about it. He was like, “Oh, these people are asking if Steve’s coming back and we have to lie and say no.” And he’s like, “Ken, don’t you feel like an awful person for lying to everybody?” And Ken’s like, “Not at all. I feel nothing. I don’t care.” [Laughs.]

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The reason they had to lie was because they didn’t trust the network to keep the secret.

DAVID ROGERS: We even had the footage of Steve transferred somewhere else. Normally we do all our stuff at the Universal lot. That’s where we would mix. But we took his scenes and we got them transferred somewhere else. We didn’t want NBC execs to have access to the dailies because we didn’t want them to run promos like, “Steve Carell returns!” Steve didn’t want that.

CLAIRE SCANLON: He didn’t want them to ruin it. And they would have. You know Steve would have been in the promos.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: NBC didn’t notice that scenes were missing?

DAVID ROGERS: We just sent them edited versions without Steve footage. You pull out the scene of Jim and Dwight and the Steve reveal.

DWIGHT: [Turns around.] Michael. I can’t believe you came.

MICHAEL: That’s what she said.

DAVID ROGERS: And after that, there’s the wedding march where Steve is just standing. I cut an alternate version for the network.

Many of the cast members didn’t know that Steve would be in the episode until the day of filming.

ANGELA KINSEY: That morning, I was walking into the hair and makeup trailer and they said, “Steve’s here right now. He’s in hair and makeup.” I was like, “You’re kidding me.” I mean, he was there a few hours and then he was gone. And listen, thank you, Steve Carell, ’cause you definitely gave my story line a nice ending.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: But you had to deliver it at some point.

DAVID ROGERS: We delivered it that morning. At nine A.M. that morning.

Nine A.M. on the morning of May 16, 2013, exactly nine hours before the show would air on the East Coast.

CLAIRE SCANLON: NBC never knew until the morning it aired. They were so pissed.

In the end, it was exactly what the finale needed: just enough Michael Scott to make it feel like a proper family reunion.

DAVID ROGERS: There’s just enough footage of him as a surprise that you’re blown away. My mom cringes at Michael Scott. But she watched that finale moment, and she would rewind and rewatch the reveal of Michael showing up at least fifty times. She’s like, “David, I can’t stop watching it.”

“I Can’t Wait to Show My Daughter When She’s Older”

The Last Scene

After shooting on location for almost two weeks—from an AT&T office building used for the Scranton Cultural Center to a Scottish pub in L.A. for Dwight’s bachelor party to Disney’s Golden Oak Ranch in Newhall, California, for Dwight and Angela’s wedding—it was time for our family to come back to the office.

KATE FLANNERY: I remember trying to be as present as possible, to try and enjoy all of it. We took two weeks to shoot the finale, and I felt like it was the shiny object. We were going to all these different places, it was the shiny object to distract us from the fact that this was ending. [Laughs.] So the very last day was when we were actually back in the office itself. And that’s when it started to feel much more intense and real. We had been on the farm, which was nuts. You couldn’t even get cell service out there. It was just us. It felt like we were distracted. And now we’re here, and there’s a reverence and a sense of honor in finishing this lovely journey together. I remember John called us all into his trailer and we all took a shot. Do you remember? That was so awesome. That was just the actors. [Sighs.] So good.

PHYLLIS SMITH: That was a tough night, especially when Creed started singing.

In the final moments of the finale, Creed emerges from a closet—where he’s been living—and plays an original song for his office mates, “All the Faces.”

CREED BRATTON: [Plays the first chord of “All the Faces.”] You’re going to start crying already, huh?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I just love that you didn’t know until the table read.

CREED BRATTON: I didn’t know. No one told me that I was going to get to sing my song. You know about John holding the mic? I couldn’t hide the mic for the guitar itself, so then John said, “Well, I’ll just hold the shotgun mic under my arm.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Because he was the closest?

CREED BRATTON: He was the closest to me. He was sitting there, looking at Pam, but all the time he’s holding it right there next to the sound hole.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It gets me every time. It’s just one of those moments. I’ll never forget all of us sitting there.

CREED BRATTON: It was magical, it was really magical. I was just worried—can I get through the song? I knew it well enough. It’s one of my oldest songs. I get all emotional, and sometimes I’ll cry onstage when I’m singing it. When I play it live, I always say, “I’m leaving you now, just like our show left you.” And they’re like [imitates a crowd crying]. Before I even hit the first note, they’re gone. [Laughs.] I love making people cry.

Everyone got to do one last talking head to the camera, a final reflection in the office.

CLAIRE SCANLON: There’s this one Pam talking head that I can’t wait to show my daughter when she’s older.

PAM: But it would just make my heart soar if someone out there saw this and she said to herself, “Be strong, trust yourself, love yourself. Conquer your fears. Just go after what you want and act fast, because life just isn’t that long.”

CLAIRE SCANLON: It was so powerful. Even thinking about it makes me misty. As a woman, you were just not seeing that on TV, you know? It was such a powerful message. And Jenna just delivered it beautifully. And now she has a little girl that she can show that to as well. Just the whole ending was sad and special, and it’s all a blur because we were pulling all-nighters when we were doing it.

Pam gets the final talking head, and it’s arguably one of the most emotionally powerful monologues in the entire series.

ANGELA KINSEY: Watching Jenna do that talking head, all of us crammed in that little room right off the main stage that had a little TV in it. We called it Video Village. It’s about the size of a small restroom. And we were all crammed in on this little sofa. Right after she did it, Ed Helms said, “Circle that one for me,” which is what we would say to our script coordinator, to circle the ones that we thought were great. It really felt like that was goodbye. It was goodbye to Scranton, goodbye to Dunder Mifflin, goodbye to those people.

JENNA FISCHER: They had originally scheduled [Pam’s talking head] to be the very last thing we shot. Ken thought it would be a good idea, and I think it was John or somebody else who said, “Oh man, we don’t all want to be wrapped.” Greg said something like, “Oh yeah, yeah, we’ve got to have the last scene be with everybody.” So we shot my talking head, and I think you guys were all out there watching. After I finished, we shot the B-roll of me taking the picture off the wall and all of us walking out the door.

The picture, of course, was Pam’s painting of the Scranton branch building, the one that Michael Scott bought at Pam’s art show (all the way back in the season three episode “Business School”).

JENNA FISCHER: We did it . . . I don’t know how many times, five or six maybe. We were crammed in the elevator.

KATE FLANNERY: I remember Greg saying, “One more take.” We were all two hours late for our own wrap party. People were texting and calling, “Where are you?” It’s like no one wanted it to end.

JENNA FISCHER: There would be this moment where we’d wait to see if they were going to say, “Cut, going again,” or “Cut, that’s a wrap.” I’m getting choked up just thinking about that. Those seconds of waiting, and every time I just wanted them to say, “Cut, going again.” ’Cause I knew when they said “that’s a wrap” that that was a wrap. That was it. I’d never shoot The Office again. And when they said, “That’s a wrap,” I just burst into tears and started hugging the closest people I could find.

RANDALL EINHORN: Greg always talked about in the last episode, whatever it is, it’d end with “that’s a wrap,” and the camera would turn around and it’d be Ricky Gervais sitting there [in the director’s chair]. [Laughs.]

KEN KWAPIS: I remember a different ending to the finale. As I recall, all the characters decide they need to take the plant that’s been in the bullpen for nine seasons. Planty. Somebody suggests that Planty needs to be liberated. So everyone marches out of the office with two or three characters carrying Planty, and everyone’s chanting “Planty, Planty!” The entire ensemble goes outside to the parking lot and they plant Planty. And the original ending, as Greg and I discussed, was everyone wanders away, feeling a little sad but, you know, festive. Greg’s original plan was that there’d be a dissolve through to the next morning, and you just see the empty parking lot at dawn with this plant and its new home. I’m not surprised that Greg decided to end with Pam’s drawing. But I must say, I loved the idea of a show that ended with a shot of an empty parking lot and a plant.

Pam’s painting and Planty weren’t the only ones to escape the office. More than a few props were purloined on that last day of shooting. Like Kevin’s ever-present jar of M&M’s.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I put it on my desk at home. A year passed and I looked and realized the M&M’s were going down. I’m like, “Hmm, that’s odd.” I’m definitely not eating them. I know how old they are. Months pass and the M&M’s are going way down. Nobody in my house is touching them. The only solution I could come up with was my house cleaner was grabbing a handful of them.

JOHN KRASINSKI: It looks like a communal pot.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: So I panicked and threw them away, because I realized I was potentially poisoning her.

JOHN KRASINSKI: It’s a great science experiment. M&M’s lasting for a hundred years is probably something we should look into.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: We probably should. But I had to throw them away. The jar is still there, there are just no M&M’s in it.

JOHN KRASINSKI: I took the name plate [from Jim’s desk] for sure, but I wanted something that is undeniably from our set. [After the last scene was shot,] we went right to the party, and I super shadily ran back in five minutes after everybody was gone and stole the Dunder Mifflin sign.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: The one inside?

JOHN KRASINSKI: Yeah, from the front that we always used to walk by and do the talking heads in front of. I was a little ashamed that I didn’t tell anybody, but I really wanted it. So I got to the party and I was like, “Greg, what did you take?” And he goes, “Oh, I’m really bummed. Someone took the Dunder Mifflin sign, that’s what I wanted.” And he goes, “Do you know who took it?” And I went, “No.” [Laughs.] I legit to his face was like, “No, that is terrible. If you want it, that should be yours. Good news is you’ve got tons of other stuff.” I remember he was talking about donating the set to the Smithsonian or something. He had that plan. And I was like, “He has plenty!” But then the longer I thought about it, I was like, “You lied to your TV dad.”

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Do you have it on your wall now?

JOHN KRASINSKI: Oh yeah, it’s in my office. I got it framed. It looks great.

“Don’t Be Sad It’s Over, Be Happy It Happened”

The After-Party

With our show officially in the can, there was just one thing left to do: the after-party.

On March 16, 2013, an “official” after-party (more for the media than ourselves) was held at the Unici Casa Gallery in Culver City, California. But afterward, we all went to a private gathering at Chateau Marmont.

KATE FLANNERY: The public party was like, eh. But the private one was fantastic. We got that suite [at Chateau Marmont], and we were all toasting Greg Daniels, who was so uncomfortable with that, but it had to be done. I remember getting up and getting to express gratitude and the things that you don’t normally get to on a set. ’Cause it’s all business, you know? It’s fun, but it’s all business.

The after-party was just the beginning. We wanted to go out with a bang, and there was no better place for that than the town with a closer connection to The Office than any other.

Scranton, Pennsylvania, was always a very specific, very special part of our show. Back when we started The Office, Ken Kwapis and Greg were devoted to getting the details exactly right, down to the Froggy 101 stickers and the Herr’s potato chips in the vending machine. It was about capturing the reality, making it feel like these were real characters existing in an actual paper company in some Pennsylvania town. So it made sense that we’d go to Scranton for an all-day (and all-night) blow-out farewell party.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Brian, I remember you were instrumental in making that whole thing happen. You were sort of an ambassador for it.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I said, “We have to do this.”

JOHN KRASINSKI: I remember one day on set you were like, “Here’s the deal. We have to do it in Scranton, nonnegotiable.”

The people who actually made it happen were Michele Dempsey and Tim Holmes, cochairs of the Office Convention (which debuted in 2007 and ran for more than a decade) and the Office Wrap Party. They were both born and bred in Scranton.

MICHELE DEMPSEY: If you’re from here, you don’t pronounce the T.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Right. It’s Scranon.

The idea of doing a wrap party in “Scranon” was first suggested to Greg during the 2007 Office Convention.

TIM HOLMES: Greg was on one of the last flights out of Scranton. We had a moment with him where we just said, “If we can’t do something like this every year, at least consider doing a wrap party here, you know? Just get on an airplane, party at thirty thousand feet, and let’s do it here.”

For the next several years, Tim and Michele would drop little notes to Greg, just reminding him of their offer. Michele even pitched it to the boss.

MICHELE DEMPSEY: I met with Steve Carell and he’s like, “I’d love to be in a parade in Scranton. I hear you have a big parade.” I was like, “Steve Carell, you want a parade in Scranton, you’ve got a parade in Scranton. You just say the word.” And we did. We had a parade.

The parade ended up being part one of our massive wrap party in Scranton. It was May 4, 2013.

TIM HOLMES: Easily twenty thousand people on the streets in a very small area. Everything is looking good. I take a nice little picture of the parade route. We’ve got everybody in these beautiful open cars and everything. First guy we have going down is Craig Robinson. He’s on the back of a pickup truck, and he just starts dancing. He starts waving the crowd to come in. “You’re too far away! Come on in!” That’s how it happened. We lost total control. We were literally elbowing eighteen-year-old girls away from John Krasinski.

RAINN WILSON: It was insane. It was absolutely nuts. We should do that again. If they did it now, like it would be millions of people descending on Scranton.

GREG DANIELS: Yeah, it was epic.

JOHN KRASINSKI: It was like thousands and thousands of people. I thought it was going to be the town of Scranton that came out, who thought it was cool that we shot in their town. Even that late in the game, it was still not clear to me how big our show was. I remember when Cheers shot in Boston, ’cause they didn’t actually shoot in Boston, but they shot a scene there and we went down to see it. There were maybe a couple hundred people outside, watching them shoot this scene. Not thousands. When we came to Scranton, we had thousands of people, like waves of people. I remember thinking, “God, there’s people back there, sixty rows back, that can’t even see us.”

Steve Carell didn’t take part in the parade, but he did fly in for a Q&A with the cast at PNC Field, Scranton’s minor league baseball stadium, which was the only venue big enough to fit everybody who wanted to be there. The episode wasn’t airing for another week, so fans had no idea that Steve was even in the finale, much less that he’d show up in Scranton to be part of our goodbye.

JENNA FISCHER: The moment that Steve walked out on that baseball field, oh my gosh. The crowd just erupted.

MICHELE DEMPSEY: That stadium is what happiness looks like. That’s what joy looks like.

TIM HOLMES: Joy personified.

MICHELE DEMPSEY: Everybody’s faces just lit up, including Steve’s. He came out and you could tell, even at that level of fame, he genuinely appreciated that those people were there.

After the Q&A, we went to the Backyard Ale House for a pint or two . . . or three.

JOHN KRASINSKI: While we were shooting, I was very disengaged to the fact that it was ending. I didn’t really let my brain be like, “Oh my God, only two weeks left, only two episodes left, only two scenes left only,” whatever. A big thing that helped was when we went to Scranton. Getting together and having a life experience that felt like we were memorializing it, that helped. Because I don’t know if I would have been good having the finale just come out and being like, what do I do? Do I call you and be like, “What’d you think about last night’s episode?” I didn’t know what to do. So that really helped when we went to Scranton. That was a really special experience for me.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I want to show you something.

JOHN KRASINSKI: [Looks at photo.] Is it me behind the bar?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: This is my favorite picture of me and you and Jenna, behind the bar in Scranton.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Wow.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: I’m now showing John a picture of him holding an iPad with the lyrics of “Roxanne” on it. That’s what I was singing to a giant crowd of people.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Can you send these to me? All this stuff.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Sure!

JOHN KRASINSKI: I don’t know that I ever would have [bartended] if the love for the show didn’t always feel so warm. It never felt fanatical or sort of mercenary or something negative.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: It was authentic.

JOHN KRASINSKI: Everybody in that bar felt like they respected the fact that they got to have this moment, where we were all celebrating the show together. Cast and fans alike were all together. It felt so organic, rather than like a PR stunt. There were only like fifty or sixty people in the beginning, and then by the end there were like five hundred. Obviously texts had been sent. I remember even Steve stuck around for the end. And I thought he would bail. Not because he’s a bad person at all. He’s the nicest person ever, but of all the actors, I imagined that he would get his ear chewed off. But he was so psyched and he kept saying like, “Dude, look at this.” Imagine being at home right now and getting a text that said, “You should probably come because Denzel Washington is at the bar.” If I was a kid in high school, I’d be like, “What?!” Steve got back behind the bar, didn’t he?

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Yeah, he sure did.

JENNA FISCHER: Did you get super drunk at that bar? Because I really got super drunk at that bar. Ellie and I closed down that party. Ellie’s always the last person to leave a party. She’s very proud of this fact.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Not that night. I promise you I was there as late.

JENNA FISCHER: No, you were there after me and Ellie. I remember walking back to the hotel with her, riding in the elevator with her. I turned to her and said, “You really are the last person to ever leave a party,” And she said, “I like to make that my goal.” I think that she thinks the best stuff happens right at the end. I like to be the first person at a party. I like to be the first guest because then I get a chance to talk to everyone as they come in, and then I can scoot out and be home and in bed at a reasonable hour. That’s how I do a party.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: You’re more grandmotherly.

JENNA FISCHER: Oh, I’ve always been that way, from the time I was very young. I’m waiting to be seventy-five so that I make sense to people.

MICHELE DEMPSEY: When I’m an old lady on a rocking chair in the old folks’ home, I’ll still be telling people about that night. I heard Steve Carell say to a little group of people at the wrap party, “Don’t be sad it’s over, be happy it happened.” When I’m on my rocking chair, it’s how I’m going to feel about my life too. The Office gave us this and that’s priceless. It makes ordinary people feel like they have meaning, right? That we all are important.

Is that the reason people still watch The Office today, so many years after it’s stopped being Thursday night “appointment TV”? Why does it still mean so much to people? The show may’ve ended, but our relationship with it was far from over.