Where every day is Pretzel Day.
B.J. Novak (“Ryan”) wrote a series of articles for TV Guide from Sept. 20, 2005, to Nov. 15, 2005:
(Unfortunately, these are no longer available …)
From B.J. Novak’s TV Guide blog, dated November 8, 2005:
The Office Presents: The Client
by B.J. Novak, aka “Ryan”This week’s episode of The Office is called “The Client.” It starts when Michael (Steve Carell) heads off to the local Chili’s to try to close a very big deal with a major client (played superbly by Tim Meadows).
Once Michael takes off, so does the episode, in a number of directions, leading to a bunch of moments that involve both literal and metaphorical fireworks. I don’t want to spoil the suspense (although I guess “suspense” is overselling it, since we’re a comedy…. maybe “surprise” is the better word), but here are some of the funnier moments, and the stories behind them.
While Michael Scott is gone, the staff discovers a screenplay he’s been writing, “Threat Level Midnight. It’s an action thriller about an FBI agent named Michael Scarn. (His love interest is creatively named Catherine Zeta-Jones.) The staff divides up the roles and performs the script out loud. Oscar plays the role of Goldenface. I play the role of Michael’s African-Asian-American sidekick, Samuel L. Chang.
Even though it lasts just a couple of minutes, the writers and actors generated a screenplay long enough to film. I hope the rest of it is published with the DVD or something.
Tim Meadows and Steve Carell share an Awesome Blossom.
Tim Meadows and Steve Carell have similar backgrounds in improv comedy, and they improvised an enormous amount together while the cameras were on. Even the way they ate their food was creative and funny. The week we were filming this, Steve was about to fly off to New York to host Saturday Night Live, and Tim Meadows, who spent years as a performer on that show, shared his knowledge with Steve during lunch breaks.There is a very surprising, very intense kiss in this episode.
Backstory: The kiss was rehearsed and filmed many, many, many times. Greg Daniels may have spent more time editing this kiss than any other moment in the show so far, bringing everyone he could into the editing room to weigh in on what was too short, too long, too much, not enough, etc.Dwight (Rainn Wilson) wakes up in his underwear in this episode.
As we were about to shoot this scene, the wardrobe department showed Rainn what he was to wear. Rainn, the actor, describes the underwear as “sexy” grey boxer-briefs “that are similar to something I would actually wear.” Rainn insisted that Dwight would not wear this underwear. Perhaps he knows the character very well, right down to his underwear; or perhaps Rainn was simply humiliated to learn that his choice of underwear is exactly the same type that a militaristic toady/part-time beet farmer would wear, and this was a denial mechanism. In any case, this actor tantrum set off a frantic rush to Kmart.com to find a replacement pair. I won’t spoil the suspense (sorry, “surprise”) to tell you what pair was chosen.There are fireworks.
Even to stage the most pathetically puny fireworks, it turns out that you need all kinds of licenses and permits and insurance. I can’t imagine more effort has ever gone into a less ambitious pyrotechnics display.***
This has been a happy week on the set of The Office. We just found out this week that we are picked up for the whole season of 22 episodes. There’s a very festive feeling around the set (though we’re also filming the Christmas episode right now which may have something to do with it.) Anyway, if you’ve been watching it, thanks. It’s exciting to know that this show, which feels like a tiny home-video project when we make it, is actually seen by so many people — more and more each week.
I want to write something funny or interesting at the end of this, but I’m out of time and this is way past due and I have to be back on the set. They are literally surrounding my laptop with fake bowls of eggnog right now. I’d end with a line from tonight’s episode of The Office, but I don’t want to ruin the suspense. I mean surprise. Okay, instead I’ll ruin the end of House: The doctor guy is going to figure out how to save the patient at the last possible second in spite of getting no help from hospital management while getting very warm looks from the doctor who has a crush on him but it won’t quite break through the tough walls surrounding his heart. I haven’t seen it or anything, just a hunch…
From B.J. Novak’s TV Guide blog, dated November 1, 2005:
The Office Presents: Karate Kidding
by B.J. Novak, aka “Ryan”Tonight’s all-new episode of The Office [9:30 pm/ET on NBC] is called “The Fight.” Around here, we know it as “Karate,” or “The Dojo,” since the most memorable scenes involve a karate fight. (I won’t dignify it enough to call it a karate “match.”)
The show takes place on a day when the boss, Michael Scott (Steve Carell), has one relatively simple task — initialing a large pile of forms — but instead embarks on a mind-boggling journey of procrastination. This — ultimately, amazingly — leads everyone to a karate dojo during the office lunch break, where Michael battles his underling Dwight (Rainn Wilson) before an audience of stunned coworkers.
In one sense, it’s an episode about procrastination carried to the nth degree. In the sense of what’s memorable… it’s the episode in which Steve Carell and Rainn Wilson jump-kick each other in public to try to prove a point.
Some background on the karate fighters you will see in this episode:
Steve Carell: Steve Carell has no background in karate, and, fortunately, it shows. (Steve does have an impressive background in ice hockey, which we have not yet figured out how to factor into an episode about office life. But who knows what the future holds?)
Rainn Wilson: Rainn actually used to study karate. Rainn is a certified yellow belt; his character Dwight is a purple belt. Fun fact: During the fight, Rainn wears a huge protective piece of wraparound headgear while fighting, and in the course of filming, the friction of this headgear cut Rainn slightly in the face. Actually, that fact is not so fun. It’s more like a sad fact.
The frustrated 11-year-old girl: One of the kids playing Dwight’s classmates is an 11-year-old girl who, in real life, is a black belt — but she had to wear a white belt in the scene. She was pissed. If you see a girl in the background giving a very overqualified kick, that’s her. Her attitude was, “OK, I’ll wear your white belt, but don’t think I’m going to hide my skills.” She practically knocked Rainn over when she kicked the pad he was holding. (In retrospect, she may have been fighting above her black-belt abilities, when you factor in the frustration element about appearing on television as a white belt when you know you’re a black belt.)
Lance Krall: Talented character actor Lance Krall plays Dwight’s sensei, Sensei Ira. In real life, Lance — who also has his own show on Spike and turned in a memorably deadpan performance on The Joe Schmo Show — is a black belt in tae kwon do and was at one point nationally ranked.
When we got to the editing room, we found, as always, that we had to make some cuts. In this case, we realized that to keep the entire jaw-dropping karate match, we had to cut a few extra moments that explained the background. Here are my two favorite moments that got cut:
One is the exquisite line spoken by Dwight, explaining why he doesn’t mind attending a karate class in which his peers are almost entirely 11-year-old girls: “I’m not here to make friends. I’m here to attack people.”
My other favorite extra moment is a prop. It’s the poster at Dwight’s dojo, explaining the “10 Rules of Karate”:
1. Obey Your Parents
2. No Junk Food
3. Do Your Homework
4. Keep Your Room Clean
5. Maintain an Indomitable Spirit
6. Don’t Fight with Your Siblings
7. Practice, Practice, Practice
8. Treat Others the Way That You Would Like to Be Treated
9. Be Loyal to Your Country
10. HAVE FUN!!!
The fact that Dwight is paying to attend a karate school whose agenda is, at least in part, to teach its students to “Do Your Homework” and “Keep Your Room Clean” says so many wonderful things about him as a character.Enjoy the episode, keep an eye out for the girl with the crazy-strong kick, remember that Rainn is fighting injured, and maintain an indomitable spirit!
From B.J. Novak’s TV Guide blog, dated October 18 2005:
Someone Gets Axed on Halloween!
by B.J. Novak, aka “Ryan”Tonight’s episode of The Office [8:30 pm/ET on NBC] is the Halloween episode.
It takes place on Halloween, during a workplace-wide party in which all the employees show up in costume. The much bigger story, however, is one that inspires far more fear in the employees than anything Halloween-related, and through very unfortunate luck it takes place on the same day as this party: October 31 is also the last day of the quarter, and the day on which Michael (Steve Carell) must finally, after months of procrastinating, fire somebody.
(Yet another level on which Michael is a bad boss: When it’s time for him to actually be a bad boss — i.e., make a simple decisive move and lay off an employee — he can’t bring himself to do it, and instead pulls off the Band-Aid interminably.)
If you’ve been watching the show for a while, you’ll know that the threat of downsizing has been there for a while — in fact, since our first episode, when Steve Carell’s character learned it for the first time. Over time the audience may have forgotten about it, and Michael has been able to put it out of his head as well. But tonight, there is no avoiding it, and somebody does indeed get fired.
One fun thing about filming this episode was instead of our usual, realistically plain suits, we got to be on a set in which everyone was in a Halloween costume. Just as would happen in a real office, at first we were very excited by all the costumes. And then, eventually, we all got used to it and just went about our daily business as two-headed monsters and vampires and sexy cats and witches and Dorothy. Seeing the most serious of our plotlines play out alongside such silly and bizarre visuals was, I think, one of the most inspired ideas of the episode’s writer, Greg Daniels.
Without giving away too many surprises: Steve Carell spent the workweek dressed as a two-headed monster. Michael left this costume on the whole day, even as he called one person after another into his office to soberly talk to them about the risk of being downsized. Instinctively, several of the actors talked to Steve Carell’s second head, and I found myself doing this occasionally even when we took breaks. Rainn Wilson, who plays the boss’s intensely unique stooge Dwight, dressed himself as a Sith lord — though, in my opinion, the effect ends up making him look more like the face of death, which only added to the surreal quality of the episode.
Jenna Fischer, who plays the receptionist, Pam, and is, I think it’s safe to say, real cute to begin with, came dressed as a cat. Maybe this is less safe to say, but she looks really, really cute as a cat. One of our writers, Gene Stupnitsky, was especially struck by this and has since suggested several plotlines in which Pam Beesley must disguise herself as a cat. Which, if you watch the show, is hardly the type of madcap adventure that is a typical source of humor in The Office. The fact that Gene seems more than willing to ruin our show for the sake of bringing back this costume is a testament to how cute it looked. (Or, then again, maybe Gene is making cold calculations about how to bring scores of new viewers into our realm of otherwise realistic, observation-based office comedy. Mmmm… no.)
Paul Feig directed this episode, and it’s worth mentioning what it’s like to work with him. (He also directed our “Office Olympics” episode.) Paul has a great résumé, most notably as the creator of the show Freaks and Geeks, and is a very talented director, especially visually. Impressive fact: Paul Feig always wears a suit, every single day. It was mildly ironic that he was directing the one episode in which almost no one wears a suit — although, to be fair, Paul Feig’s suits are very stylish and expensive-looking, whereas the suits our characters wear range from “bargain basement at Kmart” to “bargain basement a JCPenney.” And now for an awkward fact: Paul wrote the book Superstud, a comic memoir about his early sexual experiences, which writer and costar Mindy Kaling read and warned everyone vociferously not to read before working with Paul, because the book apparently reveals way too much about someone you are supposed to trust with blind reverence while you film.
I would love to write more but I am being called into the writers’ room to write the episode in which Pam goes undercover as a cat in an animal-rescue clinic. If you get a chance to see the episode tonight, I hope you like the jokes, I hope you are able to focus on Steve Carell’s real head, and I hope you enjoy Halloween a hell of a lot more than these characters do.
From B.J. Novak’s TV Guide blog, dated October 11, 2005:
Which Office Stars Have the Write Stuff?
by B.J. Novak, aka “Ryan”I’ve been keeping a blog here about The Office for four weeks now, and it is time to come clean. This is not a real blog. A real blog is updated at random times at the whim of the writer. A real blog has a place for people to leave comments. A real blog does not involve an editor from TVGuide.com calling you and asking, “Hey, man, how’s your blog coming along?”
I’ll reintroduce this then. This is a weekly article about what it’s like to work at The Office. I can’t tell if people have been bothered by this — after all, there’s not a space for comments, since it’s not a real blog — but I’ve been self-conscious about it.
Tonight’s episode of The Office [airing at 9:30 pm/ET on NBC] is about a fire that temporarily drives everyone into the parking lot. Jim (John Krasinski) introduces a series of games to keep things interesting outside, such as the harmless “Desert Island” questions (i.e. “What would you bring? and the riskier “Who would you do?”) And Michael (Steve Carell) decides that this is the day to start serving as a mentor to my character, Ryan the temp, which inspires jealousy in Dwight (Rainn Wilson).
Since this episode, “The Fire,” is one that I wrote — I’ll explain what that means exactly a little later — this blog/article will be my excuse to talk about how these episodes are written.
One unique thing about our show is that we have a lot of writer-actors, including me, Paul Lieberstein (Toby) and Mindy Kaling (Kelly). And a lot of our main cast members are writers in “real life,” including Steve, who cowrote his movie, The 40 Year Old Virgin; and John, who just adapted a novel. Jenna [Fischer, Pam] and Rainn are both married to successful writers. Rainn also writes poetry, but I read it and it sucked.
We start a batch of episodes with a handful of comedy writers, always in jeans and sneakers (except for Mindy Kaling, the Beyonce of our writers’ room, who is typically all blinged out), procrastinating and trying to make each other laugh with story ideas. (By procrastinating, I really mean procrastinating, as in painting chopsticks to resemble Harry Potter wands.) Then we narrow it down to the stories that are the most interesting, funny and realistic, and we start outlining those ideas as a group. Each writer is then assigned one script idea and goes off to write a first draft. Sounds simple, right? Think again. Still sounds simple, even after you thought again? Fair enough.
People ask how much of the show is improvised. I’d say a good 10 percent. We try to write the dialogue to sound natural, so a lot of the ums and pauses are actually scripted. Steve and Rainn usually improvise some of the later takes of each scene, and they often write better dialogue on the fly than the writers can come up with over days and nights of Diet Coke-fueled effort. Sometimes we ask John and Jenna to improvise some casual conversation or flirting, which they do surprisingly (suspiciously?) well. Steve and Rainn are something else, though. Whenever I am in a scene with Steve or Rainn, I feel like an improvisational genius just by coming up with simple lines like “Yeah” or “Sounds good” to stay in character with whatever jaw-droppingly original thing they’re coming up with.
This episode was a fun one to film. It’s the third episode that I’ve written that Ken Kwapis directed, which is always a fun time because 1) when Ken was a young man he directed Big Bird’s Big Adventure, which I love talking to him about, and 2) he directed The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, and I have some hope that if I’m nice to Ken he will somehow set me up with Alexis Bledel, and 3) he’s an okay director. Also, we filmed outside in 100-degree weather, but we couldn’t look hot. Also, we film in a bad area of Van Nuys, Calif., but had to pretend we weren’t scared, even though every car that is left next to our set overnight is stripped to the bone for parts. Also, the firemen were real firemen. Also, a really, really unbelievably sexy thing happened, but I will have to save it for the DVD commentary.
I hope you enjoy the episode. As a writer, creating something that makes people laugh is a great feeling. And if you don’t like it…. Look, again, television is a very, very collective process. Any number of people could have messed up what was a pristine script. It was probably that Ken Kwapis guy I told you about earlier. Also, Gene and Lee (their last names are Stupnitsky and Eisenberg, FYI) pitched some terrible jokes. And did I mention Rainn’s poetry? I did, right?
Until next week…
From B.J. Novak’s TV Guide blog, dated October 4, 2005:
Michael and Co. Hit the Road
by B.J. Novak aka “Ryan”It’s Tuesday again. Tuesday, of course, is a tough day for a lot of people, because it’s halfway between the weekend and Hump Day. This is why many people call it “Tuesday the Bluesday.” Or at least they will, now that I just invented it here.
The good news about Tuesdays this fall is that there are all-new episodes of The Office [airing at 9:30 pm/ET on NBC], and, in turn, all-new stories on TVGuide.com — stories about what it was like to make the show.
Tonight’s episode is about the “Office Olympics,” an impromptu event that organizes all the weird little office games that people play into one giant, “point”-ful event. This takes place while Michael (Steve Carell) and Dwight (Rainn Wilson), the two people who would normally prevent these games from taking on epic proportions, are out of the office on a mission to purchase a condo for Michael.
There were a lot of fun elements to making this episode. On the Office set, we got to play a lot of games and do the small, observational things that we always have liked doing. But we also got to make a field trip outside of the office to the condo location.
And we got to shoot a scene between the office and the condo — in Michael’s car. Choosing cars for the characters is always a lot of fun. Our producer, Kent [Zbornak], usually comes into the writing offices with a bunch of pictures of cars that are available for the week’s shooting. We get to tell a lot about the characters through their cars.
Michael Scott, we always knew, would drive a gleaming new Sebring convertible — we figured it’s the showiest car that he could afford, and it’s worth it to him to drive a convertible even in a cold-weather climate. Originally I thought that the toxically alpha-male salesman Todd Packer should drive a Mustang, but when those weren’t available, Kent chose a red Corvette, which I thought was even better. (Todd Packer’s license plate, displayed in last week’s episode, told us about him in far more explicit terms — WLHUNG.) In next week’s episode, “The Fire,” we get to see Dwight’s car as well as Ryan’s car. Big car episode coming up.
“Office Olympics” brought multiple incidents of minor bad luck involving cars. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a curse, but… you can decide for yourself. During the scene in Michael’s car, our cameraman, Randall, broke the back window of Michael’s Sebring, which cost the production $859 to replace. The same week, the writer of the episode, Michael Schur, was involved in tiny accident that set him back $836, but not before he raised over $30,000 for hurricane relief while trying to shame the other guy into not replacing his bumper. (It’s a long, good story, and you can read more at saabbumper.blogspot.com or in the Oct. 3 issue of the New Yorker.)
Too much about cars; back to Office territory. Some overall updates on the show: Our ratings are up a lot over last year, thanks in large part to airing alongside My Name Is Earl, which has a similar audience to our show since it’s a similarly off-beat, smart comedy. NBC ordered seven more episodes of Office last week. And Nate, our P.A., got a haircut over the weekend. It looks pretty OK.
Sometimes we get into potentially offensive areas on The Office, sometimes we don’t. It’s important to us to make the show feel funny and real by reflecting the way that people actually talk and act in offices. And, of course, it’s different from week to week. Last week’s much-talked-about “Sexual Harassment” episode aired with a “Viewer Discretion Advised” warning, and in Kentucky the episode didn’t air at all.
We hope that this week we will be allowed to air Steve Carell’s real-estate freakout in all 50 states.
Until next week…
From B.J. Novak’s TV Guide blog, dated September 27, 2005:
The Boss Man and “Packman”
by B.J. Novak aka “Ryan”Previously, on B.J. Novak’s blog…
— “Have you ever seen that show The Office on NBC? The place where I work is just like that.”
— “I work on the NBC show The Office. I play Ryan the temp, and I’m also one of nine writers who come up with ideas for the show and then take turns turning them into scripts.”
— “Like many people who work in offices, I am going to start keeping a blog — in my case, for TVGuide.com.”
— “Don’t open the hatch!”This week’s episode of The Office is entitled “Sexual Harassment.” First, let me say that I like it when things have very straightforward titles, so that the audience knows exactly what they’re going to get. The 40 Year Old Virgin was about a 40-year-old virgin; Wedding Crashers was about wedding crashers; The Constant Gardener was excruciatingly boring.
This our first episode in which viewer discretion is advised. So if you view this show, please be discreet about it. I imagine TV-MA ratings are pretty rare for network comedies. But it’s good for NBC — the more comedies reflect the way people actually talk, the more refreshing they are, in my opinion. I’m glad they’re airing it.
Another “first” of this episode is that we meet a new character who is very entertaining in his own right: Todd Packer. “Packman” is the larger-than-life friend/idol/bully of the boss, Michael Scott. Todd Packer is a bad influence on Michael who sweeps into the office and unleashes a torrent of inappropriate behavior and language.
To cast the part, we needed to find a comic actor who could really go head-to-head with Steve Carell. Our first choice was David Koechner, a great comic actor who was also one of the stars of Anchorman. We had to delay production of the episode so that he could carve out time in his schedule, but there are few people who are talented enough to make Steve Carell break up on set, and we figured it was worth it.
I feel like this blog isn’t that funny. I hope the episode tonight makes up for that. In the future, I will try to divide my mental energy so that the balance is more 50-50.
Until next week…
From B.J. Novak’s TV Guide blog, dated September 20, 2005:
Have you ever seen that show on NBC, The Office? The place where I work is just like that.
I play Ryan, the temp, on the The Office. I’m also one of nine writers who come up with ideas for the show and take turns turning them into scripts.
If you’ve seen the show before, you’ll know that Ryan is the new guy, sort of an observer in the office. He’s a character who exists to provide a crucial, impartial point of perspective with which the audience can identify. This is a nice way to say that I don’t have that many lines.
Sometimes I’m doing amazingly exciting things like improvising scenes with Steve Carell and revising scripts that we can’t believe the network censors are actually going to allow on television. And other times, I’m just sitting in the background for hours, staring at my computer, “in character.” For all the excitement of this job, I wind up spending a surprising amount of time actually doing what a lot of people do at their offices — sitting quietly in a suit, at a desk, in front of a computer, trying hard to look busy.
Starting today, I’m going to add to the list of things I do when I’m pretending to be hard at work. Recently, I’ve gotten through these less-exciting hours talking to people on IM, forming lifelong friends on MySpace, and, giving in to the recent craze on set, staring in fury at empty sudoku boxes. But starting today I’m going to do what a number of my friends do while they’re trying to look busy at their own 9-to-5 jobs: keep a blog — in my case for TVGuide.com. We’ll see how it goes.
Hmmm. OK. I got it. Here’s something that I’m (hopefully) allowed to write about: the backstory of this week’s episode. Tonight (at 9:30 pm/ET) is the season premiere of The Office. The episode, “The Dundees,” is about the office’s annual awards ceremony, which the boss thinks is everyone’s favorite night. Because it’s an episode that really allows Steve Carell’s character to cut loose — performing, among other things, horrendously misguided versions of the songs “O.P.P.” and “Mambo No. 5” — we always thought it would make the best season premiere.
And we know that the premiere is likely to be a major episode, especially because it’s also going to be one of our most-watched episodes to date: It’s the first new episode since Steve won new fans in his movie, The 40 Year Old Virgin, and it follows the premiere of the much-hyped My Name Is Earl. So… yeah, I made my point. We cared a lot about doing this episode the way we wanted to do it.
Anyway, in the show, the awards ceremony takes place at a local Chili’s restaurant, which we thought would be fun and true to the show. We didn’t want to invent a fake, similar-sounding restaurant, like “Peppers,” or “T.G.I. Wednesday’s.” Since this is supposed to be a realistic show, about realistic offices, we thought setting a place like Chili’s would be refreshing. We got permission from Chili’s and spent weeks, with their help, reconstructing with painstaking detail a Chili’s restaurant in an empty abandoned building. On the first day of shooting, it turned out that Chili’s hadn’t read the script, which involved, at a crucial moment, a drunk woman vomiting and a character responding by running through the Chili’s yelling, “A woman has vomited!”
Well, for some reason, a vomit-filled pit of inebriation not how the Chili’s people wanted their restaurant to be portrayed on television. They said they wouldn’t allow us to use the set. We wrung our hands for a couple of hours while we figured out other ways to tell the story without forever linking our corporate sponsor to graphic images of public regurgitation. Eventually, we came up with a compromise that we felt was at least as funny, dramatic, and realistic.
Here’s another story about tonight’s episode. John Krasinski, who plays Jim, will be mad at me for writing, this but it’s worth it. The extras playing the waitstaff at Chili’s are all actual Chili’s workers from around the state. One of them, a pretty, friendly blonde, appeared to have a crush on John. She told people that John reminded her of the comedian Dane Cook, and went out of her way to strike up conversations with him. John is a single guy but, understandably, didn’t feel all that comfortable with the situation; the more she talked to him, the more uncomfortable he got. One day toward the end of the week, John freaked out and showed me a letter that the girl had handed to Steve Carell for him to pass on to John:
Perhaps you’d join me for a night of romance?
A dinner, a movie… maybe a dance?
The whole thing rhymed. It wasn’t a letter; it was a poem. John was freaking out.Hours later, Kim from the hair department confided to me that she had written the note, and Steve had been her accomplice in convincing John that he had graduated to a new level of fame: the target of an obsessed fan.
Anyway, if you catch The Office tonight, that’s some back story for you to keep in mind. When you see the Chili’s, know that we fought hard for it; if you see a pretty waitress in the background, maybe that’s the one who practically gave John a heart attack.
And if you notice a guy in a blue shirt, seemingly oblivious to the action, typing away in the background… you’ll know a little more about what I’m actually doing.
OK, now I really have to run. [Series cocreators] Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant just showed up on set unannounced. They just watched “The Dundees” and they have feedback. Everyone is dying to hear what they say and desperate to not seem like we’re dying to hear what they say.
Until next week…