'Everyone considered it a bad idea': How The Office went from Slough to Scranton
Greg Daniels (showrunner): The UK version hadn’t finished airing and I’d never heard of it. My agent sent me a VHS tape of season one. It had a somewhat boring title so I didn’t look at it. He told me he wanted to show it to someone else if I wasn’t interested, so I popped it in. I watched the entire first series that evening.
Michael Schur (writer/producer): I think Seth Meyers was the first person who brought it to me. He had a friend doing improv olympics in Amsterdam and had brought back a bunch of DVDs. We watched it like it was the Superbowl. I just couldn’t believe what I was looking at.
Daniels: I arranged to meet with Ricky [Gervais] and Stephen [Merchant] when they were in the US. We got along really well. They were big fans of The Simpsons, which I’d worked on. I made my pitch to adapt it in a way that was very similar to the values I had doing King of the Hill, which was very realistic. I was somewhat hampered by excessive respect for the original. The challenge of the pilot was “can I make something that looks and feels like the British show and has a great cast?” After the show got ordered, I had another five episodes. Then the challenge was “let’s do all original scripts and see if we can keep that feeling of the British show but do it from an American point of view”.
Schur: We added a more classic American sitcom formula and imposed a repeatable structure. The first six episodes were very true to the tone of the British show – every episode ends on a downbeat note and, that summer, we almost got cancelled. Then Steve Carell was in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, which was this unexpected hit. In our first meeting before season two, Greg said we need to take 20% of the Steve in The 40-Year-Old-Virgin and put it into Michael Scott [Carell’s character]. We thought he was crazy but it was the best decision anyone ever made. “That’s What She Said” was a joke dorky radio DJs made and thought they were funny. I believe it was BJ [Novak, writer/Ryan Howard] who said “Michael should definitely say ‘That’s what she said’, but earnestly, thinking it’s hilarious”. It was always funny.
Mindy Kaling (writer/Kelly Kapoor):
I was 24. I hadn’t much heard of the British Office until I went in to audition. I think the two seasons and the specials are perfect, but I also just needed a gig. I remember what was so great about the show was that you could be funny and real without having to be gorgeous. What Greg said – and I’m sure Ricky and Stephen felt this way when they were doing the original – is what’s real is what’s beautiful, not what’s beautiful. I found that very empowering.
BJ Novak (writer/Ryan Howard): I was well aware that everyone considered it a bad idea. It was either too slow, quiet and offbeat to ever work on American television, or too smart, stupid and blasphemous for us to attempt – but I felt that at least we were aspiring to something great. We were imitating something we truly admired.
Kaling: He [Michael] wore his emotions a little bit more on his sleeve than David Brent. I used to look at episodes and be like, “does he cry every episode?” He was so emotional and not afraid of showing it. He thought of himself as Mel Gibson in Braveheart but he was such a sensitive and vulnerable character. I think that’s something that made Michael approachable and made you root for him. I felt uniquely qualified in the writing staff because I was the only woman and the only minority. I felt I had this trove of times I’d been offended in a workplace environment, but I think the thing The Office did really well was well-meaning people who are trying not to offend you