How I Wrote The Office

there were a lot of metaphors we used for the office and the visual metaphor that great gave us for the show at large was like a paved over concrete sort of boring looking in like office park parking lot with one little kind of flower peeking up through a crack in the pavement and his point was like this is a this is a satire about the the modern world of parking lots and office parks and fluorescent lights and drop ceilings but like the soul of the show was that little flower that somehow has found its way

that little tiny bit of brightness that has found its way through a crack and this very sort of paved over universe right and that was a very powerful metaphor I think about that all the time Greg had always envisioned having writer actors he came from Saturday Night Live and the British show - I mean Ricky Gervais was you know writer actor so I think he thought that there was something organic and fun and the sort of like playful rebellious spirit and just doing it yourselves like Monty Python or something the show had such a different

feel and I wanted to have such a sincere feel to it the enemy of that to me is the factory TV process which Hollywood is often guilty of and I would definitely say don't admire too much because a lot of times in this factory process the actors are kept apart from the writers and they distrust each other and it leads to a certain type of writing where the writers write actor proof lines which are very jokey because they don't trust the the actors to be able to deliver them without a setup and a punch line

in the same speech to me what was so wonderful about the the office was that behavior was what was funny the way that we would start a season we'd start with what we would call a blue sky period which was my favorite part of every year for two three four weeks sometimes if we had a long time every single day in the writers room was just what if there's no penalty there's no maybe we can't there's no but this one conflicts with that one what if Dwight goes to the moon what if Jim and Pam

get divorced what you know just every idea is is valid we had a situation on the office where the initial pitch there was an episode where Michael by mistake it's Meredith in the parking lot with this so the initial pitch for that was that he runs her over and kills her I took her to the hospital and the doctors tried to save her life they did the best that they could and she is going to be okay the showrunner would say you know all right we don't have anything for Dwight or like how about everyone

split up and come with ten ideas for Ryan or you know let's come up with more ensemble stories you know there would be sort of a leadership that way I mean I like to say well what's what's unique about the the psychology of the character that could be a comedy engine for a long time there's so many interesting funny people around in your own life and if you are a fan of like analyzing them and trying to figure out what why are you laughing at them you know that to me is like the the first

stage with it white for example he was improvising in an interview and he said Dwight Schrute my father's name was Dwight Schrute my grandfather's name Dwight shrewd he said Amish and as soon as that was like that we're like ah that's nice and you know and that kind of went and took the character in this sort of rural direction and a lot of it came out of rains own family and you know for various times you write something about the characters backstory the actor has to provide photos if you want to do something about when

that the character was 12 years old the actor has to go find his own photos of himself when he's 12 and bring them in so they can be manipulated into whatever the joke is and rain came in with this photo album himself you know he grew up like in rural Oregon or something Washington and he came in and started talking about all of his uncles and aunts and you know these kind of farm people you didn't want the character to be you know one-dimensional nerd or something like that so the idea of like a farm

nerd was like oh that's cool that's a lot of men Mo's what are you doing no most put put them on or down put it down do not throw it do that one of the things that I thought was really brilliantly constructed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant in the office was how the the four main characters kind of fed on each other in the sense that Michael had no social skills but desperately cared of other people thought and Dwight could give a [ __ ] what anybody thought but also had no social skills and

you know Jim didn't really care about what other people thought but had wonderful social skills and you know they all were like they fit into each other nicely after the six episodes aired that nobody liked Steve Carell became a gigantic movie star just totally coincidentally four-year-old version comes out and the world goes oh my God look at this guy look how funny he isn't look how kind he is and look how talented he is at NBC because when we have this giant movie star on their contract right so let's think about how we should take

that information and use it for the show and the way we should is by saying that guy that character that he's playing in that movie is so empathetic or sympathetic rather and so kind and so lovely we need to take 20% of that energy and put it into Michael Scott and the writers his own writers me included rebelled and said do you're gonna ruin it and this is the thing that Ricky and Stephen created is perfect and how dare you and the whole point is it's supposed to be bleak and Michael Scott's like David Brent

is a terrible person and blah blah blah and Greg patiently listened to all of us and hurt us all out and said no you dummies I'm gonna do it this way and we're gonna just add a tiny little glimmer of hope to the end of every episode that dundies episode at the beginning of season two he was exactly the same dude he was exactly as annoying and obnoxious and likely had a massive blind spot but at the very end of that episode I like another random dude in the bar that he's in starts like making

fun of him and you just see like Jim and Pam and other people go like hey don't make fun and these are that's our boss he's our friend and they kind of end up sticking up for him and just thought those tiny little things just make a huge difference and the office definitely would have got cancelled I think if we hadn't done that that is the difference between that show lasting 12 episodes and lasting 200 if you notice in the show it's only certain characters sort of have the permission to have that from with the

camera and the cameraman and other characters who have less self-awareness do it less and it works great like for instance Rainn Wilson who plays Dwight has I think is a kind of character who has less self-awareness and he doesn't do it as much as say John Krasinski and and Jenna Fischer who played Jim and Pam though the two like the love interests there it is yeah it's kind of saying does anyone else see what how crazy this is so you have to be kind of a reasonable character to to get away with it although when

Michael Scott does it it has a different flavor it's usually uh oh I just blew it again didn't I oh yes I did and that's what makes a great comedy character I think is someone without any self-knowledge a lot of humor is coming from characters who don't know themselves or have you know weird problems and a lot of heart comes from them learning about themselves or you know we're solving some of their problems but every time that they do that which maybe makes a great episodic ending you're chipping away a little bit at the engine

for the show I don't like jokes that are that are jokey jokey jokey jokes yeah that could have been you know in gum wrapper but I mean I think what it is is natural dialogue and it's like back and forth and the joke is in what a character says to respond to whatever prompt he's given everyone we need to pump in a pace of 100 beats per minute oh okay that's hard to keep track how many is that per hour one time I you know wrote a bunch of jokes cuz the scene wasn't working and

I was the guy in charge of you know bringing alts as we call them you know other versions so I bring alts to the to the set and he looked at all of them and he said I don't know these just feel like jokes to me and I was like well yeah they're jokes that's what I do that's what we do but for him comedy was a byproduct of authenticity I would compared to the difference between a kid who knows he's cute and a kid who doesn't a kid who knows he's cute is not cute

a kid who just says something without realizing cute is hilarious and that's what he wanted the office to feel like one of the big engines of the office was an individual romance story and for me who was going into it not having written about that kind of stuff I mean king of the hills a family show and you know I feel like I had more comedy writing than romance writing in my with that background I thought it was really interesting to try and date that and we say oh these enormous debates on the writing staff

but none of us had any kind of romance background we were all comedy writers and we were trying to you know figure it out the writing staff executed that relationship so slowly and carefully Greg used to describe it as like a like a spider web that like if you shifted your the angle that you were looking at it would catch the light in different ways and you know a little bit of do with sort of glisten made a certain angle but if you looked if you talked your head the other way would sort of disappear

you wouldn't be able to see it it was this really fragile delicate thing that was sort of growing in the margins of the show that was part of the genius of the office like we told these tiny tiny tiny little stories about how a relationship delicate relationships are blossoms and this very very slow way you can't just do that you can't just run the same playbook with another two people in another show in another setting with another theme you know we're seventy years deep into TV at this point and every story's been told a hundred

ways and the people are have don't have any patience for this anymore and when you if you're just trying to run a sort of standard playbook of like oh this is a Jim where this is the same a Dian or this is a Ross and Rachel you know like everyone is just on to you very quickly and so the goal became tell a real story about real people and you know treat your characters like the real people and try to figure out how the real relationship would go the idea was why are they not getting

together and how do you keep them apart the second half of season 3 the obstacle was one was rashida Jones who - Jim was dating but was also getting Pam to have enough self-confidence where one that I had felt she deserved Jim and - she could speak up for herself and try and get him away from rashida and so the whole thing with the with the Coles was to get her to walk the coals later when everyone was gone yes to give her the confidence then do whatever there are a lot of reasons to call

off my wedding but the truth is I didn't care about any of those reasons until I met you there's such a writer impulse to cringe and brace yourself when your hand your script off to be filmed and produced and this is one of the only experiences I've ever been exposed to where the writers can't wait for it to get in the hands of the actors like a line like that Steve Carell is gonna make it more brilliant than you ever thought and that's so rare because writers are so egotistical about about what they've written and

to actually honestly expect in your heart of hearts that they're gonna make it better than you imagined like there's very few places where that will happen the scenes that felt like they were just airtight winner hilarious scenes in the writers room sometimes just would not work on set and you had to learn to not be angry at it for not working you had to learn to listen to the audience because writing is really it's just a guess so if you want to test your stand-up at a thousand rooms before you do it on TV or

if you want to test the stuff you're writing for the office in as many groups as you can do it because you're not smarter than the audience it's for the audience the writing and entertainment industry needs to do something to the person who's reading it or taking it in watching it or whatever it either needs to make them laugh or it needs to move them or scare them or something and writing those to serve meandering without actually doing something to the viewer and no one's gonna pay for that you've got to just indulge develop what

you love about it so that when you then come up with but then we couldn't show this on TV or it is kind of contrived or whatever it is you'll you'll love it so much that you will have the inspiration to fix it the forces of conflict sometimes they come from like friendship stories or romance stories or whatever but like every show at some levels it's us against the world and so you can't do anything without conflict but you also the conflict doesn't have to be two people just like like ripping on each other that's

the kind of humor that I never liked personally I never liked the we're gonna make fun of each other brutally and negatively for like 29 minutes and then the last minute go like yeah we're still friends like that I that had that I've never liked as a method of comedy delivery system the world is screwed up and awful and miserable and scary and terrible and given that we all know that it doesn't make a lot of sense to write to make art that says that the world is screwed up and miserable and scary and terrible

what makes more censor is more interesting to me is to say okay given that the world is miserable and scary and screwed up and terrible what's up what's the solution what's a path through the miserable nough sand the scariness and the terribleness what's a what's a prescription that we can give to people who are we're interfacing with this art we're reading this novel or this poem or watching this show or we can say like yeah we know we were on your knowledge your anxieties about the world that you live in and we're gonna try to

say like here's something you might do to make yourself feel better or - or - here's a path through the maze hello everyone thanks for watching on this channel we are going to be learning how some of the best TV shows and films were created hearing from the creator's themselves if this is something that would be interesting to you go ahead and hit the subscribe button and join us as we take a look behind the curtain