November 23, 2021 • 45 mins
On this week of giving thanks, Brian brings in the actual world’s best boss for the final installment of their conversation, the incomparable and unbelievably brilliant showrunner and creator of The Office, Greg Daniels. Greg and Brian discuss the way that Steve’s dedication to improv changed the show, the awards ceremony that went horribly wrong, and what the man that every single cast and crew member is thankful for - is thankful for himself.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi. I'm Greg Daniels. I was the showrunner of the Office. Hello,
Hello everybody, Thank you for diving in to another episode
(00:23):
of the Office Deep Dive. See what I did there.
I am your host, Brian baumb Gartner, and I am
so thankful that you are here. Yes, for those of
you listening in real time. It is Thanksgiving week here
in the States, and I love this time of year truly.
The Crisp Air, my birthday, the fall Leaves, my birthday, Football,
(00:50):
it is the best, all right. And as I mentioned
last week, working on this podcast with some of my
favorite people and the whole entire world has just been well,
it's hard to put into words, but it is definitely
the thing that I am most thankful for this Thanksgiving
(01:13):
my family aside, of course, but know this, my podcast,
this podcast, it has truly changed my life. And the
other thing that, without question has changed my life. Who
I'm so thankful to be talking to today is our showrunner,
(01:34):
Greg Daniels. His brilliance, his mentorship, his general aura of greatness.
I am just so happy and feel so blessed that
this man is a part of my life. So I'm
going to bring you today the last part of my
(01:55):
conversation with Greg. As you know, he was the creator
of the Office, and he has gone on to make
Parks and Wreck and Upload and Space Force and so
much more. He also wrote the foreword of our new book,
Welcome to dunder Mifflin, So if you get a chance,
go check that out. But it was important for me
(02:16):
that on this week of giving thanks, that I give
thanks to my boss of almost a decade. And while
famously Michael Scott was the world's best boss, everything he
knew he learned from Greg Daniels. Is that a compliment?
(02:40):
I don't know, but anyway, give it up for the
best boss on the entire planet the galaxy, the incomparable
Greg Daniels. Love it bubble and squeak bubble and squeaker
(03:05):
cookie at every moment. Lift over from the nut people. Okay, well,
here's kind of a fun one. So you worked with um,
Steve Carrell, Yeah, John Krasinski, Rain Wilson, and well myself
(03:33):
and um I've heard it has been said that your
favorite actor of all time is Paul Aberstein. Paul is
very good. I mean, I'm certainly not gonna say anything
negative about Paul. I don't want to rank you guys,
I don't think that's fair. But Paul is like it
didn't expect him to be so good. You know, he
(03:55):
basically just filled in at the table read in season one,
and Kevin would go to the table reads and Paul
got laughs and Kevin was like, what happened to that
guy with the red hair? You know? Put him in
more And that's how he got on the show pretty much.
But he always had an interesting attitude about it. And
you know, Paul is like a jazz vibraphonist. Uh and
(04:16):
I feel like something about that jazz timing was in
his performance and was like a little bit unusual. Yeah,
I know he's great, but I don't I don't want
to say like, uh, anybody's better than anybody else. Why
why did you? Why did you choose Paul and Jen
to run the show after when when you left to
(04:37):
go to Parks. Well, Um, the interesting thing about making
the writer's performers is that that kind of bites you
a little bit. Like season one, we wrote all the scripts,
we shot all the shows, and then I went into
editing and just did full time editing. And that was
great because you could be physically presented everything it was
(04:59):
really on. And that was when you know, Paul became
a character, Mindy became a character. B J was always
a character, and there was no downside to that. Season
two we start and then those guys go off to
the set and I'm suddenly looking around. I've got like
half the staff, you know, I got Mike and Jen
(05:21):
and Lee Jean, and that's it. Everybody else is on set,
you know. And then they'd show up and they obviously
still did great stuff and wrote great episodes and everything,
but there were times when the room was a little
bit thin because they were acting and Mike was a
very mature, full package, like he could produce, he could write,
and he wasn't one of the main characters. And I
(05:42):
also felt very much responsible to the cast and to Steve,
and if Steve was not going to go do movies
and bug out and was going to stick with it,
I didn't want to be the guy who was, you know,
gonna do something to detriment the show, right, So I
didn't want to haven't be like, oh, you can't find
me into your pall on set because they're doing a
(06:04):
spin off or whatever, and it and I guess Mike
could worked there for four years, and he was gonna
go anyway, do you know what I mean. It's not
like he was gonna put the rest of his career
working there. He was pretty icious and headed places. So
I felt like he would be a good choice to
do it because I could set it up with him
(06:25):
and then he could run it and I could still
see the office throom. So and we had different ideas,
like the Parks is the idea of Okay, it's mockumentary.
Instead of being about business and the private sector, it's
about the public sector. But at the same time, I
had an idea that I thought was good, which was
(06:46):
all right, workplace is a good genre of TV comedy,
But an even bigger genre is family show. What about
a mockumentary about a family show? And and I had
a plan after Mike was going to spin off and
do Parks, I was going to do a show with
(07:07):
Jen and we were going to do the family sitcom
one And we had worked it out ed Helms was
gonna maybe be the lead with Catherine Tate as his wife,
and they were, and it was going to be the
mockumentary looking at a cul de sac, some kind of
suburban cul de Sac and then Modern Family came out
and you know, it was huge hit that kind of
(07:29):
put the end too that plan, right, Mike Sure said
about being asked to go and develop Parks and rec
they basically said that it feels like, um, Mozart told
me he wants to design a piano with me. It's
not Steinway Mozart both are designing a piano. Let's are
(07:53):
very incompetent piano maker. Yeah, but still somebody who probably
should follow. But yeah, that's cool, that's nice. Yeah, it was.
It was certainly fun to do Parks. I mean we
you know, we're so close to the Office that we
thought Parks was just completely different. I mean like we
I didn't see it as having any bearing it all
(08:15):
on the office, Like we got a female and it's
a completely you know, a different world and everything. And
of course, in the same way like it took season
one to be able to get free of the English show,
you know, like season one, Parks was too close probably
still and I think we figured that out. We didn't
have a pilot because Ben was now running NBC and
(08:39):
Ben hooked us straight to series for Parks, and so
by the time we looked at the footage of the pilot.
We already shooting episode three or something from Parks, but
we kind of steered it around. Part of it was
I remember thinking, like, Okay, it's not all about a
(08:59):
crazy central character. It's more like thirty Rock maybe, where
the central character is surrounded by crazy and like when
we kind of made that adjustment, it seemed to work better.
But but Amy is like very different from Steve. She's
a different type of performer in what way. Well, like
I don't think she can hide her intelligence. Like one
(09:23):
of to me, one of Steve's um real gifts is
you can stare at his face and he's doing something
really stupid and you can't tell that he is aware
that is stupid, you know what I mean. He completely
hides his intelligence. And Amy probably could if she wanted to,
(09:44):
but chooses not to, and she just she doesn't hide it.
And I think maybe it's also being a woman, you
know what I mean. It's like it means something different
to hide your intelligence. It's more retro and you know, uncool,
probably to hide your intelligence as a woman. So it
didn't fit great to have her play naive. She had
to be a little smarter. What do you think was
(10:08):
the bigger loss, Michael or Steve. Huh wow, Oh yeah, well, um,
I do think that when we said goodbye to Steve,
it became really clear how much the crew loved him,
(10:28):
and the stories from different crew members was really sweet.
I mean, I remember like when forty year old Virgin
was still in theaters and he was the biggest movie
star in the country and we were shooting I think
the Dundee's, and um, we were in a parking lot
like of a defunct Black Angus. It's two or three
(10:52):
in the morning, and his entire role is to drive
the car away from Jenna after saying his line. And
he's doing it at three in the morning, take after
take after take to support her in that scene where
so many people would have been like, yeah, you put
the photo double in goodbye, And I'm doing a show
(11:13):
with him now. I'm doing Space Force with him now,
and he's number one on the call sheet. Same deal.
We just had our rap party. The crew came up
to me. They were all like, it starts at the top.
The vibe on the set is so beautiful and everybody's
you know, such a great feeling and and everything, but
you know, one of the things that I got out
of working with Steve was like I didn't really have
(11:35):
an improv background, you know what I mean, Like I
had come from Sketch Comedy and then Simpson's. And when
we started working together, he told me about this book
Truth and Comedy, which is kind of like the bible
of the Chicago improv world, and I found that to
be really the key to kind of how he worked
(11:57):
and it saved us a bunch of times. When one
of my favorite memories of Steve as a producer or
as a you know, not as an actor, is we
were doing Dundee's and the problem was we went to
Black Angus and then we went to Chili's restaurant, and
we didn't actually get any money for it. You know,
(12:19):
it's not like what they paid us a lot of
money to use Chili's. What they did was they sent
us their branded decorations for set deck. So we say, yeah,
we've got the menus and we got some signs and stuff. Anyway,
so we're there. We're at this defunct Black Angus for
three days shooting with all the Chili stuff, and like
on day two, the Chili's lawyers call and they go oh, hey,
(12:42):
we just looked at the script, the part where Pam
is so drunk she throws up. That's not gonna work
for us. We're being sued for overserving patrons and we
can't that's a bad look, So you can't do that.
And I was like cocky at this point. I was like, yeah,
well we're shot two thirds of our shoot, you know.
(13:04):
And I turned to the Universal executives and I was like, well,
check the contract with the Chilis because obviously you know,
they don't have editorial control. And they're like, uh, there's
no contract. There's no written contract. We just thought we'd
say fifty thou dollars of set deck and we just
did it on a handshake. So then we were like, well, wait, wait, wait, wait,
what do we do? What do we do? And they
(13:26):
were like, well, you don't have to take that note,
but in that case, you can't show any of the
branded set decoration that we sent you, which meant that
we would have had to shoot go back to the
beginning and not used the two days that we already shot,
which we couldn't afford right because it was hundreds of
thousands of dollars. So I was like getting ill in
the corner freaking out, and Steve notices and it's like,
(13:48):
what's up. And I told them the situation and the
thing that was so cool to me was this improv thing,
like he had utter faith always that he would his
creativity would never flag, that he would be able to
find an answer when it was necessary, Like that's what
all that improv training was. And I completely shut down.
I was like going to blow my brains out, and
(14:08):
he was like, okay, all right, well, all right, and
then he came up with this notion of the manager
being interviewed and saying that Pam had a lifetime band
from Chili's and it solved everything. And I really was like, huh,
that's a different way to live than I'm used to.
You know, the overthinker doesn't doesn't do that right. I
had all my plans had just been thrown for a loop,
(14:30):
and uh so I feel like I tried take that away.
I think it's like a little bit of a religion
for him to be an improv guy. What do you
(14:58):
remember about because you obviously you came back for Goodbye
my call Um, How did you feel writing him off?
I mean, did you did you feel like the show
was going to should go on past him. Um, yeah,
I did, because you know, part of the painful part
(15:18):
of my job is as the showrunner, you're not done
when the rap right. You've got to go edit all
of the things. So, like at least the third maybe more,
my job was sitting with the editors cutting the show
down and it then it made a huge difference in
our show because our rough cuts were thirty eight minutes
long and we had to get down to three or whatever. So, um,
(15:42):
that's an enormous amount to throw out, and it was
very painful because we could get the show down to
twenty six minutes or something with with just cutting the fat,
but then after that you got to cut the muscle.
You know, there's good scenes that are not going to
be brought cast. And you know, once we got five
or six years into the show, the full ensemble was
(16:05):
really working and capable of doing really good stuff. And
so the best argument to me to continue was it
would let all these people who didn't have as much
screen time have more screen time. And Steve didn't obviously
didn't want us to shut down, so I kind of
felt like it was it was good that we would
(16:26):
do Okay, Now, the difficulty is that people are not
created to be leads and you know, all that stuff
that I was saying the beginning of positioning Steve in
in season two and finding you know, ways that he
has good intentions and is more of a lead and everything.
(16:47):
Like I knew the Dwight had been created to be
the foil to these people and was a charactery creation
to begin with. Andy Bernard was created to be the
Stanford version of Dwight, you know, in season three, like, uh,
(17:09):
you know, Jim shows up in Stanford and he's got
this weirdo who's like a preppy weirdo, like a different
type of weirdo, and um and well and also he
was an idiot, like unlike Dwight, who you know, Dwight
was an idiot in his own way, but I mean,
like sorry bad at his job, Like he had been
(17:30):
positioned as being not good at his job. He was
not very good at his job. He punched holes in walls.
You know, he would have needed a lot of the
same kind of moving the character over that we did
in season two, and I believe Paul was doing that
with Andy, but it was different because we were everybody
was paying close attention to the show at that point,
(17:52):
so there was definitely a lot of like, there was
a lot of for some reason. The thing with the
Office is like people get super into it obviously, which
is great, but then there's then there's so much attention
and worry about changing it or touching it or you know,
don't touch my my beloved thing. Right. So in the
same way there was all this negative attention about adapting
(18:13):
the British show. I think that there was a lot of,
you know, worry about making any changes to it, right. Well,
but I think you you think of the Office right
as this place of stasis, right, and we're all there
in one room, and there's the whole bullpen and everybody's
there all the time, and it's all the same. But
I think one of the special things that you did
was you created sort of a kinetic energy by changing,
(18:40):
by constantly changing it and not keeping it the same.
Bringing in the Stanford Branch and Ed and Rashida or
Jenna leaving and going to art school or so much
of that was being driven by Pam and Jim and
the romantic storyline and the way those two characters were
set up. They were soul mates. And what I didn't
(19:01):
want to do was, like so many shows, they come together,
they break apart, they come together, they break apart. You know,
it didn't seem real. I felt like, when they finally
get together, they're going to be together. I don't see
anything breaking them up. So then the question was, well,
how do you spend this out for a certain number
of years? Right? So? Um, you know, so a lot
(19:24):
of it was what are the obstacles? And we you know,
when I was trying to figure out what came next
in the show, I didn't have an entire season broken.
I would be able to have about a half a
season arked out. And the thought with Pam and Jim was, okay,
you know season one, she's obviously with Roy. Well, actually
(19:48):
season one there the only kind of thing was he
was obviously pining, and then he starts dating first girl,
right right. So season two she's with Roy and he's
getting closer and close short to confessing his feelings and
he rolls the dice. And you always feel like when
you're watching a TV show, we're worry about the yank,
(20:09):
you know, that's what we call it in the writer's
room where the Jeopardy of the episode is something you
don't really believe because it would change the show. You know,
like you don't really believe like Rain is going to
go work for Staples. Why it's going to leave the show.
It's like, no, he's too important to the show. You're
not gonna set him to the Staples. So we set
up the situation where Jim was like, well, maybe I
(20:30):
should take that job in Stanford, and um, we were
like us, that a yank. I don't know, We're worried,
is that a yank? And then we were like, let's
let's put him in Stanford, you know, let's really make
it happen, and that'll give us a whole new lease
on the Jim Pam thing because it's a new obstacle.
And that cooled it off a lot. And then by
(20:50):
the time he finally came back, he had Karen and
that gave us another thing. And then around the like
Beach Games area, the obstacle was Okay, the obstacle is
now Pam. It's in Pam's court. She wants to be
with Jim, but she's too timid, and so then she
walks on the fire and we were like kind of
got past that obstacle and then eventually was like, well,
(21:12):
I can't see any more obstacles. Got to get it together,
and get them together sooner, like slightly sooner than the
audience thinks, so that you could preserve you know, a
surprise to it. Uh yeah, so, but that drove an
awful lot of the changes and bringing people in and everything.
Another thing that was super unique about what you did,
(21:33):
and I remember you talking about it when it was
going on, but that you wanted the episodes to air
roughly when they were happening, right, So it's obvious every
network just show Christmas around Christmas time or whatever, but
that it was happening sort of within the calendar year,
and that you chose to keep the form and the
format of each episode is one day. It takes place
(21:54):
over one day, and in the summer, the camera crew
goes on their holiday and their vacation and they're not there,
so we don't see it as opposed to Ross and
Rachel kissing and then four months passing and the next
moment is the same moment that we left with, because
the audience now has to work and find out what happened.
(22:16):
What happened? Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I think
that that was um, you know that that works well. Uh,
I mean obviously Friends did good too, Oh I know,
but that was a conscious decision for you that it
was important that it seemed real. And again also like
if you're going to try and stay in the pace,
(22:36):
you got to catch up over the summer somehow. I
mean we did it with weight loss. We we did
a different type thing, yes, but yeah, I don't know.
I mean it helped with the storytelling to jump a
little bit, because the other thing is like, with the
Office being so realistic, sometimes it is hard to do
a restart or to jump and you sometimes you have
(22:58):
to shoot down ideas because you're like, well, how did
they get there from yesterday? So sometimes a little uh
time jump is really good for that, right, why did
you come back? Well, two questions and two questions one. Um,
(23:19):
the Office has a beginning, a middle, and an end,
and it was my belief that you knew fairly early
what that end was going to be. Well, it did
shift though, because like my idea for the end in
the beginning was like around season two, I had this
idea that you know, I was a big fan first
of all, I love documentaries and I was a big
(23:39):
fan of seven Up. If you remember that one, well
seven Up changes every seven years. It was fourteen up up.
And what it is is they are following a group
of British seven year olds. This is guy Michael Appted
and and he's been doing it. They just did like
sixty nine up or something. Okay, that's that's how old
(24:00):
the segmentary is. They're following these guys for every stage
of their life. And um, I think that is like
a reality show thing too, of like, oh, it's Survivor
Survivors over and let's get them together on a stage
and see what happened. And I thought, well, this is cool, right,
we could get them together on a stage and you
(24:22):
think that it didn't work out for certain things that
you want, but the documentary is still filming. Things are
going to happen backstage at the wrap up. That was
kind of my notion was that I would provide an
unhappy ending for Jim and Pam in the last episode
that looked like the series, and then I would do
the wrap up and I'd have a happy ending at
(24:43):
the wrap up something like that. Anyway, this is the
obviously five seven years out, So this is just a thought.
So then the idea of a wedding also is a
good one because it attracts people back. So I mean,
I think the idea was, let's jump a year, you know,
like if you jump a year, you can really find
out what happened everybody in more of a rappie up way.
(25:03):
And then we're like, well, let's do both, you know
what I mean, And it made sense kind of like
the if I was the documentary crew and I knew
Dwight was getting married, that's when I would do my
reunion show because everybody's coming in for the wedding, because
otherwise I don't think I can get everybody, like I
can't get Toby to come back from wherever he was
Poland And were you were you ready for the show
(25:27):
to end that season nine? I mean, for for me personally,
this was the most wonderful, you know, experience in all aspects.
It was like creatively super interesting, It was successful. It
had a great story in the sense that it didn't
look like it was going to be successful and then
(25:48):
it turned out to be successful, which is obviously the
best kind of story. And also it was me being
kind of daring a little bit like to take on
doing the remake was a little bit fraught with danger,
so I did something a little bold, you know. And
(26:08):
it was also like there hadn't been shows like this really,
so it was a little bit artistically bold. I don't know.
It was a great story, obviously, and I really loved
the whole experience, and everybody was so much of family
by the time, and part of it was the fact
we were in this weird little lot all by ourselves
and we had every meal together, you know, and it
wasn't that show busy. So it was a tremendous, tremendously
(26:31):
wonderful experience. So when definitely what I knew was I
wanted to be there to do it at the end.
And I also realized how much more pleasurable it is
to be the show runner than to be an executive
producer who gives notes that sometimes they're taken and sometimes sorry,
(26:51):
you know, it's not as much fun, uh of an experience,
And there is something very personal about show. I mean,
part of it is the whole docu thing, the realism
and the people and the truth and beauty and all
that kind of stuff like that was everything I felt
was important about writing for TV, and it all was
(27:13):
able to happen in that show. So after the show
was over, I was pretty spent, do you know what
I mean? I was like, well, I did it. You know,
I'm done. I don't know if I need anything else,
you know, And so yeah, so it kind of felt like,
when you're gonna get this opportunity, let's see what a
great ending is, you know. So I guess maybe I
(27:34):
like the idea of of that. I do think it
plays well now when you look at Netflix, like, I
think the fact that it hasn't ending is a positively.
I think people like it that has an ending and
then you can start up up again if you want it. Ye,
(28:08):
last year, The Office was the number one show on Netflix,
streamed over fifty two billion minutes. Why do you think
that it has endured? Mm hmm, Well, I mean we
did put a lot of good work into it. You know.
I think there was a lot of talented people assembled
(28:30):
for that show. It was kind of a dream team.
And I think that the approach that we took to
value character, comedy, and behavior as opposed to jokes, Like
jokes kind of don't last that long, but you fall
in love with the characters, and you you always have
something to see like and the stuff. The work that
(28:52):
you guys did also gave so much rewatchability to it,
you know, because you could follow the sorry, but you
guys were constantly acting in all moments, Like you can
watch the entire show looking at one character and it's
interesting because they're doing their thing, they're being in character,
(29:12):
and they're working the way and being funny in the background.
I think the layers maybe help the rewatching. And I
think that the voice of the show is a very
humanistic voice too, you know. If there's a message or
something that that was maybe in the finale just about
the importance of just decency and ordinary lives are worthy of,
(29:39):
you know, being on TV. I don't know. That's all
good stuff. Yeah, it's it's occurring to me truly that
I think about who the show appeals to now, and
it's so often it's young people and even younger and
people who are potentially marginalized or they don't quite fit
(30:02):
in this awkward teenage years or high school college. And
the show appreciates people of all shapes and sizes, and
but it does it in a funny way which young
people like too, yeah, you know, yeah, everybody gets to
(30:24):
the pluses and minuses. It's not like where anybody's excluded.
It's a pretty inclusive show, yeah, which I think is great.
And uh, the other thing about kids, like, I didn't
understand why it would be appeal to kids because a
lot of people were like, well, you know, it's the workplace, right,
what do kids know about the workplace? But it's actually
(30:45):
really similar to the experience of being a kid in school,
because you know your teacher is your boss, and you're
sitting at your little desk next to somebody else, so
you may or may not like you know, and you're
compelled to listen to whatever or ring crap. You know
it's coming down there, down from above. So I think
they relate to it from that standpoint. I also think,
(31:10):
I wonder what you think that I think the show
is subversive in a way. It's looking at issues or
race or the brilliant gay witch hunt episode that you wrote,
and it's looking at things in a subversive way, which
I feel like the older you get is less appealing.
But that sort of young idea of doing something a
(31:33):
little bit under the radar, and that it's become cool.
I don't know. It's tough. You know, it's hard to
talk about what you're doing. I think that there's something
um that always makes me worried when you talk about
comedy or whatever. At some point you start to be like,
I don't want to lose the ability to do it.
(31:54):
I don't want to talk about it too much. Interesting. Yeah,
there's that power ruble of the centipede. I think it
is where they have hundreds of legs and when the
centipede tried to think about how it was that his
legs all worked properly, they all got taggled up, but
he couldn't he couldn't walk. I don't know. What do
you think the legacy of the Office is? Well? I
(32:17):
do think that it did. Like that thing that I
was saying about, maybe if we go to NBC will
change the boat of comedy. I think it did. You
know that seems like a lot of the shows that
came after are, if not completely doc you definitely have
that style. And the people went on to do a
(32:38):
lot of great things, and I loved it all this
new people like the show so much. We used to
have a lot of visitors from different make a wish
type things, and I always thought that was indicative of something,
you know what I mean, Like people with all these
health problems would get at so much solace out of
(33:01):
the show. And I always was proud of that, but
I didn't really know what what what what it was.
But it seems like it's a it was a valuable
thing to have made. We did a good job making it.
People like it and it provides something good for them.
I was at a children's hospital last year and um,
(33:23):
we were going room to room and one of the
administrators would go to the next room and make sure
that the kid was able to be seen and we
could still kind of go on our little tour. And
she came back and she said, so, he doesn't know
that you're coming. And I turned the corner and I
walked into his room and he's got tubes everywhere and
(33:44):
he's watching The Office Hiss TV. And it like took
my breath away. That's something that we've created. It can
really mean something to people and give them comfort or
a laugh in a moment month that they have a
difficult time. That's something valuable. Yeah, I definitely, I definitely
(34:07):
agree with that. That is nice. I mean you guys
in the cast feel it more than I do because
I walk around and doesn't come up all the time,
but like if I walk around with Paul, it comes
up all the time. Like like I was just walking
down the street with Paul the other day and I
hear the squeal of you know, breaks and somebody you
(34:28):
know just turned his car around and did a you
turn because he saw Paul out of the corner of
his eye and you know, jumped out to tell him
how much the show meant to him and everything. It's
it's it's crazy. It is way bigger now than it
was when it was on Thursday. Interesting, I knew it
was big now, but I didn't know it was felt bigger.
(34:50):
But you know, like sometimes I feel almost bad that
you guys are walking around and unable to escape it
for the slightest second, you know. I mean, I'd never
have wanted to be an actor, so maybe this is
just maybe it's fun, But it's a heavy. It's a
(35:12):
heavy thing in a way, right because it's like, oh yeah, yeah,
it's very very constant, and and it's television and it's
special and they're watching it as they lay in bed
or there in their box or shorts or you know
there and their underwear and they're watching you and they
think they know you, you're intimate with them, And I
wonder also, like to what extent um, you know, the
(35:35):
changes in the TV business have changed things, because like
it doesn't seem like there will be a lot of
two episode shows made in the future, and the amount
and that stuff, the sausage thing that I was talking
about before, Like when I turn on the show, there's
bits and jokes and like, like there's so many with
(35:57):
two episodes, plus all the subplots and all the like
cold opens and the little side. There's really a lot
of ideas packed into that, you know, into the show
and all the stuff happening in the background and performances. Yeah. Right,
I think it's it's worth me saying to you the
degree to what I mean, you are a director, you're
(36:20):
an actor, Fern, you played Fern in the office. You're
fantastic performance um. But you the degree to which you
made decisions from the beginning and are so purposeful in
terms of actors is amazing. The idea that you wanted
(36:41):
reality and that behavior was so important for you on
this shows. It's really good for actors. Yeah, well thanks
for saying that. Yeah, no, I um, I do love
that part of it, and and maybe part of it
is just that it's not my part. Right if I'm
(37:02):
writing a script, it's hard to say. And now he
touched his head in a very you know, important way
or whatever, you can't really put that in the script.
So it's always really fun to see other people adding
all this creativity because you you've gotten you know, you've
gotten it too as far as you can get it,
and then you hand it over and then you just
like marveling at the people that run with it. And
(37:24):
then I guess that's sort of improv because like I
think part of the yes and spirit of improv and
the team aspect of improv is you take something and
you add to it. You don't contradict it, you kind
of elaborate on it. And like in the Halloween episode,
I had written a whole scene between Dwight and Michael.
(37:47):
I don't know if you remember this, but there's a
scene where Dwight comes in and is agitating for Michael
to get rid of Jim or somebody. Yes, He's like
he's like a sith lord and Michael's got another head
on it and just just at the very end, it
was like no, no no, no long scene. At the very end,
I had some like notion of Michael talking to his
(38:08):
head about Dwight in his presence, and they just ran
with that and we didn't end up using anything that
was written in the scene. We like started the scene
two lines after their improv began, you know, And it
was so good. It was such a joy to watch
that the run with this notion. But like, when you
think about it, improv is this mix of writing and acting,
(38:31):
and it's more well known. I think that actors will
do that, right, They'll they'll be in the moment, they'll
be in their characters and they'll make up what they
have to say. But it's the same process mentally that
we're doing in the writer's room, you know what I mean.
We're we're thinking of what to say and then we're
pretending really hard to be the actor in the situation
(38:53):
in order to see what comes. What's the next line?
You know, what can you think about? So we're sort
of coming out from two two angles. I guess, right,
what are you most thankful for? Well, I'm really thankful
obviously to have had the experience, like I said after
every season, because it was exactly what I wanted from
(39:17):
an artistic point of view, you know, just the kind
of stuff I like. And to be able to have
so many people with me on the ride who were
so much fun, and that we managed to do it
and still like each other is pretty cool. I don't know,
it was just the best experience. Well, Greg, you changed
(39:41):
my life, and you change the lives of every single
person you invited to join you on this journey, and
we're stuck with each other. Now, that was what I
was going to say, were ghost ship totally? Do you
remember going to the TV Land Awards that was? That
was so crazy? Yes, I'm not. I have an R
(40:02):
s v P. At least for the next decade. I'm
going to stay away. But has anyone told the story
of that? No? I don't think so. Yeah, you should
tell we wont This was odd. The Office was still
on the air and we won the award for Future
Classic Television Show and Greg, you were there with me, yes,
(40:25):
And they had an opening number where I think it
was Vanessa Williams maybe it was singing, and she was
singing a song about all the different characters on different
TV shows, and it started off pretty respectfully with you know,
like the guy that played Greg Brady or something. I
forget that, but she would say the person's character name
(40:48):
and their or their actual name, and then that person
would slide in on a hook on a hook over
the auto of the audience zip lining in yeah, and
if it started off kind of cool and people are like, okay, okay,
and then she then she stopped using the the actual
actor's names, had just said the character's names, and it
(41:09):
was like horse shack and you'd slide in, and then
the people started banging into each other, like slabs of
beef in the slaughterhouse. And then then she started uh,
and then she didn't even know the character's names. Was
like the guy from the Great American Hero and he'd
slide in and bang into the other people, and they
were like on these hooks about the audience. And I
(41:29):
looked at you guys, and you're all looking up and
like oh go oh yeah, well yeah, we're we're all
stuck together, and it's it's uh, we'll see what what
happens in the future brings y um. Well, eventually they'll
turn on us. We can't be this successful. Where it's popular,
(41:51):
something will turn they'll be like, oh that generation Z
office love that was everybody. Yeah, um, thank you. I
mean we covered so much, you were here so long.
I'm so thankful, super fun. I just would have been
you know, even if they weren't recording, it would have
been nice to have the conversation over a coffee with you.
(42:25):
You know, I honestly couldn't think of a better man
to be stuck with. Thank you, Greg for coming on
and and for sharing so much with all of us.
And I couldn't possibly end this episode without giving thanks
to you, every single one of my listeners that has
(42:47):
been with me every step of the way on this
wild ride. I appreciate you so much, and I hope
that we have brought just a small fraction of the
joy into your lives that you've brought into ours. So
please go out there, hug your friends, hug your family,
(43:08):
and remember the lesson that Greg has burned into all
of our minds by now that each and every one
of us weird human beings, is deserving of love, and
there's always beauty in ordinary things. And since I believe
(43:30):
we're all deserving of love, I would like to remind
you about our call in episodes where I will be
showing you guys all of the love. So be sure
to send me those voice memos that you can record
on the voice Memo app on your phone. Email me
at the Office deep Dive at gmail dot com with
(43:53):
your questions, your comments, special requests, stories, take out orders, whatever,
Leave your name, your phone number, where you're from, and
then anything else you want to tell me. I'm so
excited to hear what you have to say. Oh and
of course don't forget to tune in next week because
we have a really fun episode coming up. I'm not
(44:16):
gonna lie. I'm going back to Scranton where it all started,
and you are coming with me. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. The
(44:43):
Office Deep Dive is hosted and executive produced by me
Brian Baumgartner, alongside our executive producer, Lang Lee. Our senior
producer is Tessa Kramer. Our producers are Liz Hayes and
Diego Tapia. My main man in the booth is Alec Moore.
Our theme song Bubble and Squeak, performed by my great
(45:03):
friend Creed Bratton, and the episode was mixed by seth Olandski.
Would you say your Name? And your role on the Office. Okay, um,
my name is Greg Daniels and I was the adapter
and showrunner for most of the Office. How about that.
(45:24):
I mean, that is such a long identifier that will
never play that. I'm Fred, I'm ver Hi, I'm Greg Daniels.
I was the showrunner of the Office. Well, thank you,
my friend. Now you're directing me. Oh yes, shoes on
the other foot. Oh my gosh.
Hi. I'm Greg Daniels. I was the showrunner of the Office. Hello,
Hello everybody, Thank you for diving in to another episode
(00:23):
of the Office Deep Dive. See what I did there.
I am your host, Brian baumb Gartner, and I am
so thankful that you are here. Yes, for those of
you listening in real time. It is Thanksgiving week here
in the States, and I love this time of year truly.
The Crisp Air, my birthday, the fall Leaves, my birthday, Football,
(00:50):
it is the best, all right. And as I mentioned
last week, working on this podcast with some of my
favorite people and the whole entire world has just been well,
it's hard to put into words, but it is definitely
the thing that I am most thankful for this Thanksgiving
(01:13):
my family aside, of course, but know this, my podcast,
this podcast, it has truly changed my life. And the
other thing that, without question has changed my life. Who
I'm so thankful to be talking to today is our showrunner,
(01:34):
Greg Daniels. His brilliance, his mentorship, his general aura of greatness.
I am just so happy and feel so blessed that
this man is a part of my life. So I'm
going to bring you today the last part of my
(01:55):
conversation with Greg. As you know, he was the creator
of the Office, and he has gone on to make
Parks and Wreck and Upload and Space Force and so
much more. He also wrote the foreword of our new book,
Welcome to dunder Mifflin, So if you get a chance,
go check that out. But it was important for me
(02:16):
that on this week of giving thanks, that I give
thanks to my boss of almost a decade. And while
famously Michael Scott was the world's best boss, everything he
knew he learned from Greg Daniels. Is that a compliment?
(02:40):
I don't know, but anyway, give it up for the
best boss on the entire planet the galaxy, the incomparable
Greg Daniels. Love it bubble and squeak bubble and squeaker
(03:05):
cookie at every moment. Lift over from the nut people. Okay, well,
here's kind of a fun one. So you worked with um,
Steve Carrell, Yeah, John Krasinski, Rain Wilson, and well myself
(03:33):
and um I've heard it has been said that your
favorite actor of all time is Paul Aberstein. Paul is
very good. I mean, I'm certainly not gonna say anything
negative about Paul. I don't want to rank you guys,
I don't think that's fair. But Paul is like it
didn't expect him to be so good. You know, he
(03:55):
basically just filled in at the table read in season one,
and Kevin would go to the table reads and Paul
got laughs and Kevin was like, what happened to that
guy with the red hair? You know? Put him in
more And that's how he got on the show pretty much.
But he always had an interesting attitude about it. And
you know, Paul is like a jazz vibraphonist. Uh and
(04:16):
I feel like something about that jazz timing was in
his performance and was like a little bit unusual. Yeah,
I know he's great, but I don't I don't want
to say like, uh, anybody's better than anybody else. Why
why did you? Why did you choose Paul and Jen
to run the show after when when you left to
(04:37):
go to Parks. Well, Um, the interesting thing about making
the writer's performers is that that kind of bites you
a little bit. Like season one, we wrote all the scripts,
we shot all the shows, and then I went into
editing and just did full time editing. And that was
great because you could be physically presented everything it was
(04:59):
really on. And that was when you know, Paul became
a character, Mindy became a character. B J was always
a character, and there was no downside to that. Season
two we start and then those guys go off to
the set and I'm suddenly looking around. I've got like
half the staff, you know, I got Mike and Jen
(05:21):
and Lee Jean, and that's it. Everybody else is on set,
you know. And then they'd show up and they obviously
still did great stuff and wrote great episodes and everything,
but there were times when the room was a little
bit thin because they were acting and Mike was a
very mature, full package, like he could produce, he could write,
and he wasn't one of the main characters. And I
(05:42):
also felt very much responsible to the cast and to Steve,
and if Steve was not going to go do movies
and bug out and was going to stick with it,
I didn't want to be the guy who was, you know,
gonna do something to detriment the show, right, So I
didn't want to haven't be like, oh, you can't find
me into your pall on set because they're doing a
(06:04):
spin off or whatever, and it and I guess Mike
could worked there for four years, and he was gonna
go anyway, do you know what I mean. It's not
like he was gonna put the rest of his career
working there. He was pretty icious and headed places. So
I felt like he would be a good choice to
do it because I could set it up with him
(06:25):
and then he could run it and I could still
see the office throom. So and we had different ideas,
like the Parks is the idea of Okay, it's mockumentary.
Instead of being about business and the private sector, it's
about the public sector. But at the same time, I
had an idea that I thought was good, which was
(06:46):
all right, workplace is a good genre of TV comedy,
But an even bigger genre is family show. What about
a mockumentary about a family show? And and I had
a plan after Mike was going to spin off and
do Parks, I was going to do a show with
(07:07):
Jen and we were going to do the family sitcom
one And we had worked it out ed Helms was
gonna maybe be the lead with Catherine Tate as his wife,
and they were, and it was going to be the
mockumentary looking at a cul de sac, some kind of
suburban cul de Sac and then Modern Family came out
and you know, it was huge hit that kind of
(07:29):
put the end too that plan, right, Mike Sure said
about being asked to go and develop Parks and rec
they basically said that it feels like, um, Mozart told
me he wants to design a piano with me. It's
not Steinway Mozart both are designing a piano. Let's are
(07:53):
very incompetent piano maker. Yeah, but still somebody who probably
should follow. But yeah, that's cool, that's nice. Yeah, it was.
It was certainly fun to do Parks. I mean we
you know, we're so close to the Office that we
thought Parks was just completely different. I mean like we
I didn't see it as having any bearing it all
(08:15):
on the office, Like we got a female and it's
a completely you know, a different world and everything. And
of course, in the same way like it took season
one to be able to get free of the English show,
you know, like season one, Parks was too close probably
still and I think we figured that out. We didn't
have a pilot because Ben was now running NBC and
(08:39):
Ben hooked us straight to series for Parks, and so
by the time we looked at the footage of the pilot.
We already shooting episode three or something from Parks, but
we kind of steered it around. Part of it was
I remember thinking, like, Okay, it's not all about a
(08:59):
crazy central character. It's more like thirty Rock maybe, where
the central character is surrounded by crazy and like when
we kind of made that adjustment, it seemed to work better.
But but Amy is like very different from Steve. She's
a different type of performer in what way. Well, like
I don't think she can hide her intelligence. Like one
(09:23):
of to me, one of Steve's um real gifts is
you can stare at his face and he's doing something
really stupid and you can't tell that he is aware
that is stupid, you know what I mean. He completely
hides his intelligence. And Amy probably could if she wanted to,
(09:44):
but chooses not to, and she just she doesn't hide it.
And I think maybe it's also being a woman, you
know what I mean. It's like it means something different
to hide your intelligence. It's more retro and you know, uncool,
probably to hide your intelligence as a woman. So it
didn't fit great to have her play naive. She had
to be a little smarter. What do you think was
(10:08):
the bigger loss, Michael or Steve. Huh wow, Oh yeah, well, um,
I do think that when we said goodbye to Steve,
it became really clear how much the crew loved him,
(10:28):
and the stories from different crew members was really sweet.
I mean, I remember like when forty year old Virgin
was still in theaters and he was the biggest movie
star in the country and we were shooting I think
the Dundee's, and um, we were in a parking lot
like of a defunct Black Angus. It's two or three
(10:52):
in the morning, and his entire role is to drive
the car away from Jenna after saying his line. And
he's doing it at three in the morning, take after
take after take to support her in that scene where
so many people would have been like, yeah, you put
the photo double in goodbye, And I'm doing a show
(11:13):
with him now. I'm doing Space Force with him now,
and he's number one on the call sheet. Same deal.
We just had our rap party. The crew came up
to me. They were all like, it starts at the top.
The vibe on the set is so beautiful and everybody's
you know, such a great feeling and and everything, but
you know, one of the things that I got out
of working with Steve was like I didn't really have
(11:35):
an improv background, you know what I mean, Like I
had come from Sketch Comedy and then Simpson's. And when
we started working together, he told me about this book
Truth and Comedy, which is kind of like the bible
of the Chicago improv world, and I found that to
be really the key to kind of how he worked
(11:57):
and it saved us a bunch of times. When one
of my favorite memories of Steve as a producer or
as a you know, not as an actor, is we
were doing Dundee's and the problem was we went to
Black Angus and then we went to Chili's restaurant, and
we didn't actually get any money for it. You know,
(12:19):
it's not like what they paid us a lot of
money to use Chili's. What they did was they sent
us their branded decorations for set deck. So we say, yeah,
we've got the menus and we got some signs and stuff. Anyway,
so we're there. We're at this defunct Black Angus for
three days shooting with all the Chili stuff, and like
on day two, the Chili's lawyers call and they go oh, hey,
(12:42):
we just looked at the script, the part where Pam
is so drunk she throws up. That's not gonna work
for us. We're being sued for overserving patrons and we
can't that's a bad look, So you can't do that.
And I was like cocky at this point. I was like, yeah,
well we're shot two thirds of our shoot, you know.
(13:04):
And I turned to the Universal executives and I was like, well,
check the contract with the Chilis because obviously you know,
they don't have editorial control. And they're like, uh, there's
no contract. There's no written contract. We just thought we'd
say fifty thou dollars of set deck and we just
did it on a handshake. So then we were like, well, wait, wait, wait, wait,
what do we do? What do we do? And they
(13:26):
were like, well, you don't have to take that note,
but in that case, you can't show any of the
branded set decoration that we sent you, which meant that
we would have had to shoot go back to the
beginning and not used the two days that we already shot,
which we couldn't afford right because it was hundreds of
thousands of dollars. So I was like getting ill in
the corner freaking out, and Steve notices and it's like,
(13:48):
what's up. And I told them the situation and the
thing that was so cool to me was this improv thing,
like he had utter faith always that he would his
creativity would never flag, that he would be able to
find an answer when it was necessary, Like that's what
all that improv training was. And I completely shut down.
I was like going to blow my brains out, and
(14:08):
he was like, okay, all right, well, all right, and
then he came up with this notion of the manager
being interviewed and saying that Pam had a lifetime band
from Chili's and it solved everything. And I really was like, huh,
that's a different way to live than I'm used to.
You know, the overthinker doesn't doesn't do that right. I
had all my plans had just been thrown for a loop,
(14:30):
and uh so I feel like I tried take that away.
I think it's like a little bit of a religion
for him to be an improv guy. What do you
(14:58):
remember about because you obviously you came back for Goodbye
my call Um, How did you feel writing him off?
I mean, did you did you feel like the show
was going to should go on past him. Um, yeah,
I did, because you know, part of the painful part
(15:18):
of my job is as the showrunner, you're not done
when the rap right. You've got to go edit all
of the things. So, like at least the third maybe more,
my job was sitting with the editors cutting the show
down and it then it made a huge difference in
our show because our rough cuts were thirty eight minutes
long and we had to get down to three or whatever. So, um,
(15:42):
that's an enormous amount to throw out, and it was
very painful because we could get the show down to
twenty six minutes or something with with just cutting the fat,
but then after that you got to cut the muscle.
You know, there's good scenes that are not going to
be brought cast. And you know, once we got five
or six years into the show, the full ensemble was
(16:05):
really working and capable of doing really good stuff. And
so the best argument to me to continue was it
would let all these people who didn't have as much
screen time have more screen time. And Steve didn't obviously
didn't want us to shut down, so I kind of
felt like it was it was good that we would
(16:26):
do Okay, Now, the difficulty is that people are not
created to be leads and you know, all that stuff
that I was saying the beginning of positioning Steve in
in season two and finding you know, ways that he
has good intentions and is more of a lead and everything.
(16:47):
Like I knew the Dwight had been created to be
the foil to these people and was a charactery creation
to begin with. Andy Bernard was created to be the
Stanford version of Dwight, you know, in season three, like, uh,
(17:09):
you know, Jim shows up in Stanford and he's got
this weirdo who's like a preppy weirdo, like a different
type of weirdo, and um and well and also he
was an idiot, like unlike Dwight, who you know, Dwight
was an idiot in his own way, but I mean,
like sorry bad at his job, Like he had been
(17:30):
positioned as being not good at his job. He was
not very good at his job. He punched holes in walls.
You know, he would have needed a lot of the
same kind of moving the character over that we did
in season two, and I believe Paul was doing that
with Andy, but it was different because we were everybody
was paying close attention to the show at that point,
(17:52):
so there was definitely a lot of like, there was
a lot of for some reason. The thing with the
Office is like people get super into it obviously, which
is great, but then there's then there's so much attention
and worry about changing it or touching it or you know,
don't touch my my beloved thing. Right. So in the
same way there was all this negative attention about adapting
(18:13):
the British show. I think that there was a lot of,
you know, worry about making any changes to it, right. Well,
but I think you you think of the Office right
as this place of stasis, right, and we're all there
in one room, and there's the whole bullpen and everybody's
there all the time, and it's all the same. But
I think one of the special things that you did
was you created sort of a kinetic energy by changing,
(18:40):
by constantly changing it and not keeping it the same.
Bringing in the Stanford Branch and Ed and Rashida or
Jenna leaving and going to art school or so much
of that was being driven by Pam and Jim and
the romantic storyline and the way those two characters were
set up. They were soul mates. And what I didn't
(19:01):
want to do was, like so many shows, they come together,
they break apart, they come together, they break apart. You know,
it didn't seem real. I felt like, when they finally
get together, they're going to be together. I don't see
anything breaking them up. So then the question was, well,
how do you spend this out for a certain number
of years? Right? So? Um, you know, so a lot
(19:24):
of it was what are the obstacles? And we you know,
when I was trying to figure out what came next
in the show, I didn't have an entire season broken.
I would be able to have about a half a
season arked out. And the thought with Pam and Jim was, okay,
you know season one, she's obviously with Roy. Well, actually
(19:48):
season one there the only kind of thing was he
was obviously pining, and then he starts dating first girl,
right right. So season two she's with Roy and he's
getting closer and close short to confessing his feelings and
he rolls the dice. And you always feel like when
you're watching a TV show, we're worry about the yank,
(20:09):
you know, that's what we call it in the writer's
room where the Jeopardy of the episode is something you
don't really believe because it would change the show. You know,
like you don't really believe like Rain is going to
go work for Staples. Why it's going to leave the show.
It's like, no, he's too important to the show. You're
not gonna set him to the Staples. So we set
up the situation where Jim was like, well, maybe I
(20:30):
should take that job in Stanford, and um, we were
like us, that a yank. I don't know, We're worried,
is that a yank? And then we were like, let's
let's put him in Stanford, you know, let's really make
it happen, and that'll give us a whole new lease
on the Jim Pam thing because it's a new obstacle.
And that cooled it off a lot. And then by
(20:50):
the time he finally came back, he had Karen and
that gave us another thing. And then around the like
Beach Games area, the obstacle was Okay, the obstacle is
now Pam. It's in Pam's court. She wants to be
with Jim, but she's too timid, and so then she
walks on the fire and we were like kind of
got past that obstacle and then eventually was like, well,
(21:12):
I can't see any more obstacles. Got to get it together,
and get them together sooner, like slightly sooner than the
audience thinks, so that you could preserve you know, a
surprise to it. Uh yeah, so, but that drove an
awful lot of the changes and bringing people in and everything.
Another thing that was super unique about what you did,
(21:33):
and I remember you talking about it when it was
going on, but that you wanted the episodes to air
roughly when they were happening, right, So it's obvious every
network just show Christmas around Christmas time or whatever, but
that it was happening sort of within the calendar year,
and that you chose to keep the form and the
format of each episode is one day. It takes place
(21:54):
over one day, and in the summer, the camera crew
goes on their holiday and their vacation and they're not there,
so we don't see it as opposed to Ross and
Rachel kissing and then four months passing and the next
moment is the same moment that we left with, because
the audience now has to work and find out what happened.
(22:16):
What happened? Right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I think
that that was um, you know that that works well. Uh,
I mean obviously Friends did good too, Oh I know,
but that was a conscious decision for you that it
was important that it seemed real. And again also like
if you're going to try and stay in the pace,
(22:36):
you got to catch up over the summer somehow. I
mean we did it with weight loss. We we did
a different type thing, yes, but yeah, I don't know.
I mean it helped with the storytelling to jump a
little bit, because the other thing is like, with the
Office being so realistic, sometimes it is hard to do
a restart or to jump and you sometimes you have
(22:58):
to shoot down ideas because you're like, well, how did
they get there from yesterday? So sometimes a little uh
time jump is really good for that, right, why did
you come back? Well, two questions and two questions one. Um,
(23:19):
the Office has a beginning, a middle, and an end,
and it was my belief that you knew fairly early
what that end was going to be. Well, it did
shift though, because like my idea for the end in
the beginning was like around season two, I had this
idea that you know, I was a big fan first
of all, I love documentaries and I was a big
(23:39):
fan of seven Up. If you remember that one, well
seven Up changes every seven years. It was fourteen up up.
And what it is is they are following a group
of British seven year olds. This is guy Michael Appted
and and he's been doing it. They just did like
sixty nine up or something. Okay, that's that's how old
(24:00):
the segmentary is. They're following these guys for every stage
of their life. And um, I think that is like
a reality show thing too, of like, oh, it's Survivor
Survivors over and let's get them together on a stage
and see what happened. And I thought, well, this is cool, right,
we could get them together on a stage and you
(24:22):
think that it didn't work out for certain things that
you want, but the documentary is still filming. Things are
going to happen backstage at the wrap up. That was
kind of my notion was that I would provide an
unhappy ending for Jim and Pam in the last episode
that looked like the series, and then I would do
the wrap up and I'd have a happy ending at
(24:43):
the wrap up something like that. Anyway, this is the
obviously five seven years out, So this is just a thought.
So then the idea of a wedding also is a
good one because it attracts people back. So I mean,
I think the idea was, let's jump a year, you know,
like if you jump a year, you can really find
out what happened everybody in more of a rappie up way.
(25:03):
And then we're like, well, let's do both, you know
what I mean, And it made sense kind of like
the if I was the documentary crew and I knew
Dwight was getting married, that's when I would do my
reunion show because everybody's coming in for the wedding, because
otherwise I don't think I can get everybody, like I
can't get Toby to come back from wherever he was
Poland And were you were you ready for the show
(25:27):
to end that season nine? I mean, for for me personally,
this was the most wonderful, you know, experience in all aspects.
It was like creatively super interesting, It was successful. It
had a great story in the sense that it didn't
look like it was going to be successful and then
(25:48):
it turned out to be successful, which is obviously the
best kind of story. And also it was me being
kind of daring a little bit like to take on
doing the remake was a little bit fraught with danger,
so I did something a little bold, you know. And
(26:08):
it was also like there hadn't been shows like this really,
so it was a little bit artistically bold. I don't know.
It was a great story, obviously, and I really loved
the whole experience, and everybody was so much of family
by the time, and part of it was the fact
we were in this weird little lot all by ourselves
and we had every meal together, you know, and it
wasn't that show busy. So it was a tremendous, tremendously
(26:31):
wonderful experience. So when definitely what I knew was I
wanted to be there to do it at the end.
And I also realized how much more pleasurable it is
to be the show runner than to be an executive
producer who gives notes that sometimes they're taken and sometimes sorry,
(26:51):
you know, it's not as much fun, uh of an experience,
And there is something very personal about show. I mean,
part of it is the whole docu thing, the realism
and the people and the truth and beauty and all
that kind of stuff like that was everything I felt
was important about writing for TV, and it all was
(27:13):
able to happen in that show. So after the show
was over, I was pretty spent, do you know what
I mean? I was like, well, I did it. You know,
I'm done. I don't know if I need anything else,
you know, And so yeah, so it kind of felt like,
when you're gonna get this opportunity, let's see what a
great ending is, you know. So I guess maybe I
(27:34):
like the idea of of that. I do think it
plays well now when you look at Netflix, like, I
think the fact that it hasn't ending is a positively.
I think people like it that has an ending and
then you can start up up again if you want it. Ye,
(28:08):
last year, The Office was the number one show on Netflix,
streamed over fifty two billion minutes. Why do you think
that it has endured? Mm hmm, Well, I mean we
did put a lot of good work into it. You know.
I think there was a lot of talented people assembled
(28:30):
for that show. It was kind of a dream team.
And I think that the approach that we took to
value character, comedy, and behavior as opposed to jokes, Like
jokes kind of don't last that long, but you fall
in love with the characters, and you you always have
something to see like and the stuff. The work that
(28:52):
you guys did also gave so much rewatchability to it,
you know, because you could follow the sorry, but you
guys were constantly acting in all moments, Like you can
watch the entire show looking at one character and it's
interesting because they're doing their thing, they're being in character,
(29:12):
and they're working the way and being funny in the background.
I think the layers maybe help the rewatching. And I
think that the voice of the show is a very
humanistic voice too, you know. If there's a message or
something that that was maybe in the finale just about
the importance of just decency and ordinary lives are worthy of,
(29:39):
you know, being on TV. I don't know. That's all
good stuff. Yeah, it's it's occurring to me truly that
I think about who the show appeals to now, and
it's so often it's young people and even younger and
people who are potentially marginalized or they don't quite fit
(30:02):
in this awkward teenage years or high school college. And
the show appreciates people of all shapes and sizes, and
but it does it in a funny way which young
people like too, yeah, you know, yeah, everybody gets to
(30:24):
the pluses and minuses. It's not like where anybody's excluded.
It's a pretty inclusive show, yeah, which I think is great.
And uh, the other thing about kids, like, I didn't
understand why it would be appeal to kids because a
lot of people were like, well, you know, it's the workplace, right,
what do kids know about the workplace? But it's actually
(30:45):
really similar to the experience of being a kid in school,
because you know your teacher is your boss, and you're
sitting at your little desk next to somebody else, so
you may or may not like you know, and you're
compelled to listen to whatever or ring crap. You know
it's coming down there, down from above. So I think
they relate to it from that standpoint. I also think,
(31:10):
I wonder what you think that I think the show
is subversive in a way. It's looking at issues or
race or the brilliant gay witch hunt episode that you wrote,
and it's looking at things in a subversive way, which
I feel like the older you get is less appealing.
But that sort of young idea of doing something a
(31:33):
little bit under the radar, and that it's become cool.
I don't know. It's tough. You know, it's hard to
talk about what you're doing. I think that there's something
um that always makes me worried when you talk about
comedy or whatever. At some point you start to be like,
I don't want to lose the ability to do it.
(31:54):
I don't want to talk about it too much. Interesting. Yeah,
there's that power ruble of the centipede. I think it
is where they have hundreds of legs and when the
centipede tried to think about how it was that his
legs all worked properly, they all got taggled up, but
he couldn't he couldn't walk. I don't know. What do
you think the legacy of the Office is? Well? I
(32:17):
do think that it did. Like that thing that I
was saying about, maybe if we go to NBC will
change the boat of comedy. I think it did. You
know that seems like a lot of the shows that
came after are, if not completely doc you definitely have
that style. And the people went on to do a
(32:38):
lot of great things, and I loved it all this
new people like the show so much. We used to
have a lot of visitors from different make a wish
type things, and I always thought that was indicative of something,
you know what I mean, Like people with all these
health problems would get at so much solace out of
(33:01):
the show. And I always was proud of that, but
I didn't really know what what what what it was.
But it seems like it's a it was a valuable
thing to have made. We did a good job making it.
People like it and it provides something good for them.
I was at a children's hospital last year and um,
(33:23):
we were going room to room and one of the
administrators would go to the next room and make sure
that the kid was able to be seen and we
could still kind of go on our little tour. And
she came back and she said, so, he doesn't know
that you're coming. And I turned the corner and I
walked into his room and he's got tubes everywhere and
(33:44):
he's watching The Office Hiss TV. And it like took
my breath away. That's something that we've created. It can
really mean something to people and give them comfort or
a laugh in a moment month that they have a
difficult time. That's something valuable. Yeah, I definitely, I definitely
(34:07):
agree with that. That is nice. I mean you guys
in the cast feel it more than I do because
I walk around and doesn't come up all the time,
but like if I walk around with Paul, it comes
up all the time. Like like I was just walking
down the street with Paul the other day and I
hear the squeal of you know, breaks and somebody you
(34:28):
know just turned his car around and did a you
turn because he saw Paul out of the corner of
his eye and you know, jumped out to tell him
how much the show meant to him and everything. It's
it's it's crazy. It is way bigger now than it
was when it was on Thursday. Interesting, I knew it
was big now, but I didn't know it was felt bigger.
(34:50):
But you know, like sometimes I feel almost bad that
you guys are walking around and unable to escape it
for the slightest second, you know. I mean, I'd never
have wanted to be an actor, so maybe this is
just maybe it's fun, But it's a heavy. It's a
(35:12):
heavy thing in a way, right because it's like, oh yeah, yeah,
it's very very constant, and and it's television and it's
special and they're watching it as they lay in bed
or there in their box or shorts or you know
there and their underwear and they're watching you and they
think they know you, you're intimate with them, And I
wonder also, like to what extent um, you know, the
(35:35):
changes in the TV business have changed things, because like
it doesn't seem like there will be a lot of
two episode shows made in the future, and the amount
and that stuff, the sausage thing that I was talking
about before, Like when I turn on the show, there's
bits and jokes and like, like there's so many with
(35:57):
two episodes, plus all the subplots and all the like
cold opens and the little side. There's really a lot
of ideas packed into that, you know, into the show
and all the stuff happening in the background and performances. Yeah. Right,
I think it's it's worth me saying to you the
degree to what I mean, you are a director, you're
(36:20):
an actor, Fern, you played Fern in the office. You're
fantastic performance um. But you the degree to which you
made decisions from the beginning and are so purposeful in
terms of actors is amazing. The idea that you wanted
(36:41):
reality and that behavior was so important for you on
this shows. It's really good for actors. Yeah, well thanks
for saying that. Yeah, no, I um, I do love
that part of it, and and maybe part of it
is just that it's not my part. Right if I'm
(37:02):
writing a script, it's hard to say. And now he
touched his head in a very you know, important way
or whatever, you can't really put that in the script.
So it's always really fun to see other people adding
all this creativity because you you've gotten you know, you've
gotten it too as far as you can get it,
and then you hand it over and then you just
like marveling at the people that run with it. And
(37:24):
then I guess that's sort of improv because like I
think part of the yes and spirit of improv and
the team aspect of improv is you take something and
you add to it. You don't contradict it, you kind
of elaborate on it. And like in the Halloween episode,
I had written a whole scene between Dwight and Michael.
(37:47):
I don't know if you remember this, but there's a
scene where Dwight comes in and is agitating for Michael
to get rid of Jim or somebody. Yes, He's like
he's like a sith lord and Michael's got another head
on it and just just at the very end, it
was like no, no no, no long scene. At the very end,
I had some like notion of Michael talking to his
(38:08):
head about Dwight in his presence, and they just ran
with that and we didn't end up using anything that
was written in the scene. We like started the scene
two lines after their improv began, you know, And it
was so good. It was such a joy to watch
that the run with this notion. But like, when you
think about it, improv is this mix of writing and acting,
(38:31):
and it's more well known. I think that actors will
do that, right, They'll they'll be in the moment, they'll
be in their characters and they'll make up what they
have to say. But it's the same process mentally that
we're doing in the writer's room, you know what I mean.
We're we're thinking of what to say and then we're
pretending really hard to be the actor in the situation
(38:53):
in order to see what comes. What's the next line?
You know, what can you think about? So we're sort
of coming out from two two angles. I guess, right,
what are you most thankful for? Well, I'm really thankful
obviously to have had the experience, like I said after
every season, because it was exactly what I wanted from
(39:17):
an artistic point of view, you know, just the kind
of stuff I like. And to be able to have
so many people with me on the ride who were
so much fun, and that we managed to do it
and still like each other is pretty cool. I don't know,
it was just the best experience. Well, Greg, you changed
(39:41):
my life, and you change the lives of every single
person you invited to join you on this journey, and
we're stuck with each other. Now, that was what I
was going to say, were ghost ship totally? Do you
remember going to the TV Land Awards that was? That
was so crazy? Yes, I'm not. I have an R
(40:02):
s v P. At least for the next decade. I'm
going to stay away. But has anyone told the story
of that? No? I don't think so. Yeah, you should
tell we wont This was odd. The Office was still
on the air and we won the award for Future
Classic Television Show and Greg, you were there with me, yes,
(40:25):
And they had an opening number where I think it
was Vanessa Williams maybe it was singing, and she was
singing a song about all the different characters on different
TV shows, and it started off pretty respectfully with you know,
like the guy that played Greg Brady or something. I
forget that, but she would say the person's character name
(40:48):
and their or their actual name, and then that person
would slide in on a hook on a hook over
the auto of the audience zip lining in yeah, and
if it started off kind of cool and people are like, okay, okay,
and then she then she stopped using the the actual
actor's names, had just said the character's names, and it
(41:09):
was like horse shack and you'd slide in, and then
the people started banging into each other, like slabs of
beef in the slaughterhouse. And then then she started uh,
and then she didn't even know the character's names. Was
like the guy from the Great American Hero and he'd
slide in and bang into the other people, and they
were like on these hooks about the audience. And I
(41:29):
looked at you guys, and you're all looking up and
like oh go oh yeah, well yeah, we're we're all
stuck together, and it's it's uh, we'll see what what
happens in the future brings y um. Well, eventually they'll
turn on us. We can't be this successful. Where it's popular,
(41:51):
something will turn they'll be like, oh that generation Z
office love that was everybody. Yeah, um, thank you. I
mean we covered so much, you were here so long.
I'm so thankful, super fun. I just would have been
you know, even if they weren't recording, it would have
been nice to have the conversation over a coffee with you.
(42:25):
You know, I honestly couldn't think of a better man
to be stuck with. Thank you, Greg for coming on
and and for sharing so much with all of us.
And I couldn't possibly end this episode without giving thanks
to you, every single one of my listeners that has
(42:47):
been with me every step of the way on this
wild ride. I appreciate you so much, and I hope
that we have brought just a small fraction of the
joy into your lives that you've brought into ours. So
please go out there, hug your friends, hug your family,
(43:08):
and remember the lesson that Greg has burned into all
of our minds by now that each and every one
of us weird human beings, is deserving of love, and
there's always beauty in ordinary things. And since I believe
(43:30):
we're all deserving of love, I would like to remind
you about our call in episodes where I will be
showing you guys all of the love. So be sure
to send me those voice memos that you can record
on the voice Memo app on your phone. Email me
at the Office deep Dive at gmail dot com with
(43:53):
your questions, your comments, special requests, stories, take out orders, whatever,
Leave your name, your phone number, where you're from, and
then anything else you want to tell me. I'm so
excited to hear what you have to say. Oh and
of course don't forget to tune in next week because
we have a really fun episode coming up. I'm not
(44:16):
gonna lie. I'm going back to Scranton where it all started,
and you are coming with me. Happy Thanksgiving everyone. The
(44:43):
Office Deep Dive is hosted and executive produced by me
Brian Baumgartner, alongside our executive producer, Lang Lee. Our senior
producer is Tessa Kramer. Our producers are Liz Hayes and
Diego Tapia. My main man in the booth is Alec Moore.
Our theme song Bubble and Squeak, performed by my great
(45:03):
friend Creed Bratton, and the episode was mixed by seth Olandski.
Would you say your Name? And your role on the Office. Okay, um,
my name is Greg Daniels and I was the adapter
and showrunner for most of the Office. How about that.
(45:24):
I mean, that is such a long identifier that will
never play that. I'm Fred, I'm ver Hi, I'm Greg Daniels.
I was the showrunner of the Office. Well, thank you,
my friend. Now you're directing me. Oh yes, shoes on
the other foot. Oh my gosh.
Host
Brian Baumgartner
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