Brian Baumgartner - Welcome to Dunder Mifflin: The Ultimate Oral History of The Office

For our fans and Office family

Its May 2004. A small company called Netflix only mails you movies on DVD. NBC, the home of Must See TV, is throwing a bash in a Manhattan restaurant for the new shows of the 20042005 season. Im standing unnoticed, wearing my only suit, as the casts and producers of the pilots NBC loves are celebrating with executives. The party is packed with the teams from Joey and Father of the Pride, a cartoon sitcom about the pet tigers of Las Vegas magicians Siegfried & Roy. NBC is incredibly confident in Father of the Pride, despite the fact the real Roy has recently been mauled by his tiger, which is a whiff of oncoming doom that someone should be sniffing. Their schedule is built around this sure thing, which was picked up weeks ago, giving its team plenty of time to book hotel rooms and make plans. The Office was picked up only hours before, and I have just arrived in New York to represent the show at the party. That night I will sleep on my parents couch.

The previous day I was desperately arguing to the execs that The Office, with its relatable setting, observational humor, and bittersweet tone, was classic NBCand that testing poorly with audiences only showed we were delivering something fresh, that we would follow the same trajectory as Cheers or Seinfeld. After much courageous tenacity from programming chief Kevin Reilly and persuasive begging from producer Ben Silverman, Jeff Zucker, the head of NBC, finally agreed to give us a tiny weak order: we could make five episodes past the pilot for a midseason launch.

To be fair, the negativity is not only coming from the network top. A New Yorker writer wanted to follow me around during the shooting of the pilot, and literally told me the piece wouldnt make you look bad, it would be about how stupid NBC is.

I wander the party alone, wishing the team was there to share this weird experience. Sixteen months have passed since I first met Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant in Bens office. When we wrapped the week of shooting our U.S. adaptation, the cast and crew felt if all we got to make was that pilot, it was still so worth it. But now we will be able to shoot five more. The show will get a chance to grow and find a life.

At the party, ignored by the brass, I start getting to know the ordinary NBC office workers in sales and marketing and affiliate relations that Ill be working with, and I find they have all seen the pilot in internal screenings and they love it. They get it. They have their own Michael Scotts to deal with, and they give me reassurance that were not crazy; this show is special and deserves its break.

I wait in line to thank Jeff Zucker for the five episodes. He pulls me in for a quick handshake before moving on to someone else, muttering only Okay, Greg, Im giving you a chance. Dont fuck it up.

Are you still reading? If so , you must have an interest in backstage stories about our show. Or else maybe youre in a bookstore, pretending to be fascinated, while secretly glancing over the top of the page at your office crush, who you convinced to walk to the mall with you. Either way works for me.

I have a lot of backstage stories about The Office, beginning in 2002 when my agent sent me a VHS tape of season one of the brilliant British show to consider adapting, through to turning in the final cut of our series finale, which reunited the team with our adored number one Steve Carell. As the showrunner for most of the run (I started relying on Paul Lieberstein and Jen Celotta in the middle of season five, and Paul took the reins himself in seven and eight), I selected which stories we told from hundreds of ideas pitched, which scenes or lines made it into the script, and which actor improvs or moments made it into the cuts. That means my brain is stuffed with all the false starts, weird clunkers, and paths not traveled. I think one of Michael Scotts funniest talking heads was a long rant about his shower curtain and a novelty gift bull penis he uses to hold his shampoo. That never made it out of the writers room, for good reason, but we laughed for hours in season two wording it every which way. Working on the show was fun, which you would hope would be the case making any TV comedy, but often isnt.

To guide us with tone, I wrote three words on index cards and taped them to my computer: originalfunnypoignant. (The Netflix algorithm has three different words for the show: wittysitcomcomedy, which is basically funnyfunnyfunny. Good job, robot!) When I think back about our cast and crew, the words that come to mind are talentpassionlove. They had mad skills, they cared deeply about every detail, and they supported each other.

Two early decisions contributed to the behind-the-scenes spirit of the show. The first was blurring the lines between peoples jobs. Writers acted, actors wrote, editors directed. I asked the accountants their opinions on the edits and listened to story feedback from prop master Phil Shea or set painter Shelley Adajian. The second was finding a tiny lot for us in the middle of nowhere instead of renting stages at a Hollywood studio with a lot of other shows. I mostly wanted a real building and parking lot to shoot, but the best part turned out to be that every day of production the cast and crew ate lunch together. Over the years, over many wonderful meals from our caterer mensch Sergio Giacoman, we bonded into a strong team, maybe even, if I can say it without sounding too much like a deluded Michael Scott... a family?

Steve was the dad who went to work every day and provided for us, brought home the bacon with his unique talent and was the moral center, the pillar of integrity. I was the stay-at-home dad, raising the kids (writers?) and running things behind the scenes. One nice thing about my partnership with Steve was that we were the same age and had come up in similar worlds. While most of the cast and writing staff were younger and hipper, our references and instincts worked great for Michael, like the late-eighties SNL sketches we remembered verbatim that made the others scratch their heads. Steve accessed his humanity to make Michael a lovable character despite his flaws; I gave the writers ideas for Michaels stupidity just by being their boss. Like the time Mindy was depressed about a breakup, and I asked to hold her cell phone and pretended to call her ex as a joke. Halfway through, I blundered and actually connected and then panicked and hung up, as she watched in mounting horror. No wonder she could write Pam so well.

Many times the real experiences we had in our production office went straight into the show. Jen made a game out of the bouncing DVD icon screensaver on a TV... boom! Cold open. Thats how a writers room is supposed to work. But sometimes its more random. Staff writer Caroline Williams was anxious that her grandmother was going to watch her first episode, Phyllis Wedding, so to tease her during the rewrite, we pretended to put in a fart joke. But fart jokes are powerful magic, and as writers will, we fell in love with it, and pretty soon the joke had put down roots and couldnt be dislodged. (Sorry, Granny Williams.) Once we even put in stuff that made no sense whatsoever, as when B.J. and Mike Schur had an intense conflict in the writers room over a long-sleeve T-shirt. It is memorialized on-screen by Ryan asking Will I be too warm in a long-sleeve T? in Safety Training. This line is utterly pointless in the episode, but I left it in to remind us of the hilarious super-articulate fury Mike brought to this inconsequential issue. I still have no idea what it was about.