‘The Office’ 20th Anniversary: Season 1 Oral History

On March 24, 2005, NBC aired the first episode of The Office, an American remake of the universally acclaimed, Golden Globe-winning BBC comedy of the same name. The premiere, a mockumentary that introduced the staff of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company’s branch in Scranton, Pennsylvania, pulled in a decent-sized audience that night. It drew 11.2 million viewers following an episode of The Apprentice — but even with that start, expectations for the show were not high.

NBC had produced a pilot for The Office, written by King of the Hill co-creator Greg Daniels, in early 2004, just after Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s BBC show won the Golden Globe for best comedy and Gervais took home the award for best actor in a comedy. The network ordered the show to series that spring but picked up only five more episodes. After premiering on a Thursday, the remaining episodes ran on Tuesday nights, where it struggled.

“We were [thinking] we did a great show, but the numbers were iffy,” Daniels tells Best In Business 2024. “I remember the upfronts for the following [season], just getting these minute-by-minute calls about we were probably not — wait, we might be [renewed]. We might be if we cut the budget and also give back every bonus and every profit that we could make out the show.”

NBC did renew The Office for a second season — and seven more after that. The show (and its British predecessor) became among the more influential series of the 21st century; think about how many mockumentary shows exist on TV now, and that almost none predate The Office. It was a bedrock of NBC’s sometimes shaky primetime schedule in the 2000s and early 2010s and helped make stars of several of its castmembers. Its writers have gone on to create and run a host of beloved, award-winning series.

To mark the 20th anniversary of the premiere, THR talked with some of the people who were there at the start — the writers of season one. Daniels served as showrunner for the first four seasons of The Office, and the writers room initially included Mindy Kaling, Paul Lieberstein, B.J. Novak and Michael Schur.

The Beginning

Daniels, a veteran of Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, co-created King of the Hill with Mike Judge, which became Fox’s second long-running primetime animated series. As he was nearing the end of a deal with Fox, Daniels began looking for new projects to develop free of any deal with a studio or network.

GREG DANIELS Ari Emanuel, who was my agent, sent me a VHS cassette called The Office and said, “Maybe you’d be interested in looking at this.” It was a sort of a boring title, and I didn’t really pay attention to it over the Christmas holidays. And then he called me the beginning of January. He said, “I’m going to send it to the next guy if you’re not interested.” And I was like, “Well, hang on, let me look at it.” At like 11 p.m. I popped it in the VCR, and I stayed up until 2 a.m. watching the first season. I just thought it was extraordinary and beautiful and hilarious.

I didn’t think it was really something that would be on American TV very easily, but I just wanted to meet whoever made it, to try to learn from them.

MICHAEL SCHUR I was a huge fan of the British Office. I thought it was a terrible idea to adapt it, as did everyone.

B.J. NOVAK (to the Chicago Tribune in 2015) The Office was not a good bet. The British show was so edgy and bleak and quiet; there was no music. It was a really unglamorous environment, but it was very cool. The American version didn’t even have that advantage because it was [considered] so lame to do an American remake.

Daniels met with Gervais and Merchant, as well as producer Ben Silverman, who held the rights to any potential remake.

DANIELS We kind of hit it off. One of the reasons was that one of Ricky Gervais’ favorite Simpsons episodes was one that I had written called “Homer Badman,” so that turned out to be super lucky for me. I was talking about how I would adapt it and about the attention to realism and sincere emotion that was on King of the Hill, and I felt like when I talked to them about The Office, that’s some of the stuff I was talking about. I think Stephen and Ricky liked that approach, and they were like, “Well, OK, let’s do this. You can be the one that adapts it in the United States.”

The thought was that it was probably going to be at something like HBO, because I felt like the closest thing [to The Office] in tone was The Larry Sanders Show, and HBO had made that. Then we found out in the selling of it that the person who was most excited for it was Kevin Reilly, who was the president of FX, and FX was also very cool and experimental. I thought, “All right, maybe that’ll be a good place for it.” But then Kevin became the president of NBC, but he still wanted it. At this point, I was starting to feel like, “Oh boy, I don’t know if this is an NBC show.” They were very much in the multicamera business, and Will & Grace was the top show [after Friends and Frasier ended long runs in 2004]. It was a little bit stressful to think of an NBC version of the show. But Kevin was really into it.

Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

NBC ordered a pilot, with Universal TV and Silverman’s Reveille producing. Daniels initially pitched an original script to start the series, where viewers would meet the characters via a company awards show — an idea that eventually came back around as “The Dundies,” which led off the second season. Then he reconsidered.

DANIELS I started to become worried that the NBC development machines would note it too much if it was a completely new script, and that it would be much harder to maintain this unique tone. So I said I’m going to do a little Americanization of the British pilot. We avoided all the notes process on the pilot, because it was just a small rewrite. Now, I ended up rewriting it more significantly, and you can see a lot of the stuff that I put in the long, superfan version of the pilot that’s on Peacock. But when it came down to cutting it down to air time, it did resemble the British pilot pretty closely.

Daniels very early on thought Daily Show regular Steve Carell would be right for the lead role of Dunder Mifflin branch manager Michael Scott, but there was a problem.

DANIELS The casting process was enormous. We started off thinking of Steve Carell, because the NBC movie executives had given Ben a copy of Bruce Almighty, where Steve had an incredible cameo as a newscaster who was taken over by outside forces and didn’t really understand what was happening to him. We saw that, and we were like, “Oh, this guy is fabulous.” I really wanted to crew up with Allison Jones, the casting director who had done Freaks and Geeks, and I thought she was the best casting director. While her deal was being made, we had said to Steve’s people, “Hang on, we really want to do it.” But they took another job that came [on another NBC sitcom, Come to Papa]. That was very frustrating. Then we began this months-long search for who else could play the character.

After seriously considering Bob Odenkirk for the role of Michael, The Office team got word that it would be OK to cast Carell as Michael, in second position to Come to Papa. The pilot was filmed in February 2004, with Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer and Novak starring alongside Carell. Ken Kwapis, who had helmed a number of episodes of The Larry Sanders Show and Malcolm in the Middle — one of the very few successful single-camera network comedies of the early 2000s — directed.

DANIELS We made the [pilot], and there were a lot of interesting stories about how to get the tone right and how to really believe in the idea that there’s a documentary crew there, so it can’t be perfect. We told the crew, “You can’t run on and fix somebody’s hair [between takes]. A boom shadow in a window is OK, because there actually is a guy with a boom in the room. We’re not pretending there isn’t.” We did a lot of stuff to try and really keep the [idea] of it’s a real thing that’s happening. The pilot has the tone, I think, that proved that we could make an object that looked like The Office and had the right cast and everything.

The Hiring Phase

NBC picked up The Office to series at the 2004 upfronts, making it a midseason show. Come to Papa wouldn’t air until that summer and was quickly canceled, freeing Carell from that commitment, while Daniels set about hiring writers and other crewmembers. One of the writers — Novak — was already in the fold, having played temp worker Ryan Howard in the pilot.

DANIELS B.J. was the first person I hired. It’s a little bit superstitious for me, because Johnny Hardwick, who played Dale and was a writer on King of the Hill, was the first person I hired on that show. I hired Johnny Hardwick because he was a stand-up and he had a fantastic joke about his father yelling at him to close the front door, and I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of a great [line] for Hank.” Also, I love Monty Python [where the troupe wrote and performed every sketch], and Ricky was the creator of The Office and also the star. It just felt to me like this is a really good place for writer-performers. I wanted to have a writer-performer vibe in the show.

Daniels read more than 100 script submissions but didn’t necessarily go with experienced sitcom writers in filling the writers room. Lieberstein had the most experience, having worked on series including The Drew Carey Show and The Bernie Mac Show, as well as with Daniels on King of the Hill (the two also have a personal connection; they’re brothers-in-law). Schur was coming off several years as an SNL writer, and Kaling hadn’t been in a writers room before. Novak had written for Bob Saget’s short-lived WB sitcom Raising Dad but was better known for MTV’s Punk’d and was doing stand-up comedy.

MINDY KALING I was hired as a writer. Greg Daniels had seen my off-off-Broadway play Matt and Ben, which had transferred from New York to L.A. for a very short engagement after we won the Fringe Festival. He’d seen it there and hired me as a writer because of that, and I had an Arrested Development spec.

PAUL LIEBERSTEIN It was a really easy sell, because I was a big fan of the British show. I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember telling him I was interested, or asking if he was, and he was like, “Of course, I think the show is made for you,” or something like that. We must have asked each other. A lot of times we used to go through our manager when it came to business. I remember it being very simple and that we were both very on board.

SCHUR I was at SNL, and my then-girlfriend, now wife, was out in L.A., and I realized I had to move out here. I started prepping really early to make the move. I wrote a Curb Your Enthusiasm spec script, which is a funny exercise for a show that’s mostly improvised, but I worked really hard on it.

I went and met Greg, and my interview with Greg was like two hours long. We went deeply in depth about the British show and about adaptations of shows. In the middle of the interview, which was at his offices for King the Hill, he said, “My back is kind of hurting me. Do you mind if I lie down?” He lay on the floor in front of me. To a person who was looking at the meeting through the [office window], it would have vaguely looked like I was Greg’s therapist sitting in a chair, and he was lying prone and sort of pontificating to the ceiling. It was a weird meeting, but I loved every second of it. I left, and I had a BlackBerry, and I sent my agent and manager a BlackBerry message that said, “I still don’t think it’s a good idea to adapt The Office, and I don’t think it’s going to work, but if that guy offers me a job, I’m going to take it, because I’m pretty sure he could teach me how to write.” They still send me that email every couple of years.

NOVAK (on The Tim Ferriss Show in 2015) The people working on it were brilliant — Steve Carell’s improvisations and Greg Daniels’ story pitches and joke lines. And pretty soon we had this very lean writing staff of Mindy Kaling, Paul Lieberstein, a really lean group. Creatively it was extremely exciting.

Daniels also made another key hiring decision in bringing on Randall Einhorn and Matt Sohn as directors of photography. Both had extensive experience in unscripted TV and would bring that sensibility to the documentary element of The Office.

DANIELS In the course of [meeting with writers], you really have to pitch your show to the writers too. That was very interesting, because I kind of developed more of the aesthetic of the show by having to pitch it over and over and over again. I had this whole thing about how multicam was great for people who grew up on theater, because it was theatrical, but for people who grew up with camcorders and iMovie, this is the first show for them. By the time I finished all those formulations of what was cool about the show, I realized we should probably get a crew from a reality show. Teri Weinberg, who worked for Ben, knew this guy Randall Einhorn, who had been a camera operator on Survivor. He had a lot of experience with reality, and he brought in Matt Sohn, and the two of them were our DPs for the rest of the show.

SCHUR Randall Einhorn put in so much work to make sure that the look of the show was consistent and that it felt real, and the [camera] operators were so good. Randall and Matt Sohn were empowered — you’re documentary filmmakers, shoot what works. We didn’t have shot lists. It wasn’t like, “OK, do this, but close-up on this.” It was like, “You’re documentarians. You know what the scene is; shoot what’s interesting.”

The Remake Problem

The news that NBC was remaking The Office was initially met with skepticism, both from fans of the BBC series and a general sense that remakes lost something in translation. NBC also had a specific remake disaster in its recent past: Coupling, a remake of a well-regarded British sitcom that the network had positioned as a potential Friends successor (and had Silverman among its executive producers). It premiered in fall 2003 and flopped badly; NBC canceled it after just four episodes had aired.

NOVAK (to the Chicago Tribune, 2015) I knew the pilot was good and I thought the staff was good, but I remember Googling “The Office pickup” and going on IMDb message boards 100 times a day, probably. Some of the comments were like, “Great, they’re gonna bring it on American TV, it’ll have a laugh track and fail right away.” I was like, “Oh my God, we’re gonna fail — wait, this guy doesn’t know anything. I was there! I wrote some of the lines. I’m in it!” I know way more than these people, and still I was like, “Yeah, they might know.”

DANIELS I remember hearing from the people inside Coupling. They were like, “We’ve got to wait till episode seven or eight or whatever [to write original scripts],” but they didn’t get to episode seven [on air]. I was like, “We’ve got to do originals immediately.” To me the goal was, can we write completely original scripts that still are faithful to the tone of the British show?

SCHUR My then-girlfriend, now-wife had written for Coupling. Greg was typically sort of scientific and analytic in terms of trying to understand where that had gone wrong and why it didn’t work and what lessons could be taken from it. Coupling, I think, walked so we could run.

Season One

The cast and crew had five episodes after the pilot to fill out their first season, a small order even for a midseason show at the time. The writers got to work breaking stories and writing drafts of scripts — and then doing lots of rewrites.

LIEBERSTEIN All of season one was written and rewritten and rewritten and rewritten in the room. The room was a big part of all of it. Season one of any show I’ve been on, you have to rewrite to death, because you’re really discovering it as you go. I remember doing the script [for “Health Care,” the third episode and Lieberstein’s first credit on the show] several times, and I think what we kept doing was taking out story and taking out story. We were just finding these big scenes that allowed everyone to be funny and have a point of view and really tried to sit in a very simple idea.

SCHUR If memory serves, Greg, if he had wanted to, could have taken full writing credit for every one of those six episodes, and probably most of them from season two as well, because we wrote and rewrote and rewrote and re-broke and re-broke [stories] over and over and over again. But with “The Alliance” [episode four, Schur’s first Office writing credit] I would say, of the first draft I turned in, maybe 14 percent of what I wrote probably made it in the [final] script. But that was just the process. What Greg told us early on was that we break these stories together. One person goes off and writes them and does their best job and puts their own voice into it, and then the script returns to the collective of the writers room, and the writers room does the work of rewriting it. So it was to be expected. It was like, yes, this is the process of how comedy shows are made.

KALING I wonder if I can accurately describe the dynamic [in the writers room] because I was so low on the totem pole and so terrified. I have to say, as a disclaimer, the dynamic was through the eyes of a terrified staff writer. I’m sure it was very different for Larry Wilmore [a consulting producer on season one], who was coming off of many successful Emmy-winning series. I found the dynamic to be exhilarating and stressful, because I had never been in a writers room before. Not only that — even though they’re my very good friends now, I would say that B.J. Novak, Mike Schur and Paul Lieberstein were very intimidating and continue to be intimidating to people, just because they’re so talented. I was learning the process of pitching jokes and rejection and success and writers room etiquette with this extremely talented, very small group of writers.

DANIELS We also had Larry Wilmore and Lester Lewis — they were consultants because we couldn’t afford them [full time]. It was an absolute powerhouse, super room of Mindy, B.J., Mike, Paul, and Lester and Larry. Lester Lewis had been on Frasier and just was very good at psychology, and Larry Wilmore, he’s brilliant.

KALING To this day I think that no one has turned in a first draft of an episode better than “Diversity Day.” Now, as a successful comedy writer, I can look back and feel nothing but excitement for my very dear friend B.J. At the time when that episode came out in 2005, I was so angry, and it like filled me with anxiety how good that draft was. I remember it because B.J. turned in like a 30-page draft. It was just so lean and funny. Besides just being a funny episode of TV, because it was the second episode, it was very good for the rest of us, because it sort of was like, “Here’s the bar.”

Along with writing, Kaling and Lieberstein also joined Novak in the cast starting with the second episode, “Diversity Day,” in which Michael’s inappropriate behavior prompts a visit from diversity consultant played by Wilmore. Kaling plays Kelly Kapoor, the branch’s customer service rep, and Lieberstein plays H.R. officer Toby Flenderson.

KALING [Kelly] wasn’t a character that Greg consciously decided to have in the world. It wasn’t like he came into the writers room at the beginning with Kelly as a character. It kind of developed organically, because the second episode was “Diversity Day,” and I think it was sort of out of necessity — this episode will be funnier if it’s a pretty diverse office. It was sheer luck that because “Diversity Day” was the second episode, and because a man being offensive about different cultures is funnier when different cultures are represented in the office, that I got this role — and it’s kind of a pivotal role for the episode, since I get to slap [Michael] across the face.

LIEBERSTEIN I had no interest in performing. I had never really thought about it.

DANIELS Paul was never intended to be on the show. This was kind of hilarious. You don’t [always] have all the roles worked out when you read a script. Paul, as one of the writers, was reading the Toby role, and Kevin Reilly was at the table read, and he said, “That redhead guy is really good. Just use him. He looks great.” Kevin just kept saying, “More of that guy, he’s funny.” So Paul kind of fell into being on the show.

LIEBERSTEIN (Laughs.) That’s exactly right, I was temping in Kevin [the role eventually played by Brian Baumgartner] and some other guys, and Kevin [Reilly] liked it. And then Kevin saw some dailies too, and said, “Hey, he’s funny, more of that.” I think without those two comments, there wouldn’t have been Toby.

All six episodes would be finished before The Office premiered on March 24, 2005. Before viewers got to see the show, though, the writers thought something good was happening — even if they weren’t sure audiences would warm to it.

DANIELS I think “Diversity Day” is still maybe one of our top three episodes. It’s a really good episode. That was the very first time we wrote an original script. And I loved the pilot. I was very happy with the show from the beginning.

LIEBERSTEIN I did feel like we were doing something pretty good. I felt like we were doing something special, but I also felt like we were doing something that was so different. What was killing on NBC at the time was Friends and Seinfeld, so I thought we were doing something that would not find an audience. When we said goodbye after the six episodes, I thought, “forget it.” I did not expect us to come back.

SCHUR I thought the scripts were hilarious, and I remember being on the set when we were doing “Diversity Day” and being like, “I don’t know anything, but holy god is Steve Carell funny.” He was such a point guard — he was incredibly funny, an incredibly good improviser, but also was always most interested in making the team good.

I remember thinking that I don’t have any idea if this is going to work. I don’t know enough about the world to know if people are going to like it, but I know it’s funny. It was just very clear that it was funny from the beginning. I loved it. I thought it was great, and I was very proud of it.

KALING I thought every moment of that first six episodes was a miracle. I was so blown away and starstruck by Steve Carell, by Greg’s ability to communicate as a showrunner, by this material that we were writing. But I was also aware that I had so little experience in TV that I wasn’t sure: Is it always like this? But I always thought it was so special.

Ratings were decent for the premiere, and reviews were mixed but leaned somewhat positive. THR said of the show, “It is ironic that this series, though an adaptation, is one of the most unique and creative new comedies on NBC in years.” After moving to Tuesday the following week, however, ratings dropped. The remainder of the season averaged about 5.4 million viewers — a low number at the time, even as NBC struggled in its first post-Friends season.

DANIELS The ratings are not great. I have my own complaint, because we were only advertised as being on Thursday [for the series premiere], and then they switched us to Tuesday after the first airing. I don’t think people really even knew when the show was on, or we didn’t have much of a lead-in when it went to Tuesday [Scrubs, which was critically loved but never a big hit on NBC]. It didn’t look great.

NOVAK (to The Tim Ferriss Show, 2015) We had come to think of it as the show where for the rest of our lives, we’d meet one or two comedy fans who would be like, “That’s a classic.” That’s what we were going for — like Mr. Show cult status.

SCHUR There was a moment when we were shooting [late in season one]. There was a scene in the parking lot, and Steve and a bunch of the actors were waiting around while they were setting something up. And we were all sad, because it was like, this is ending. Steve said, “We got to make six of these. Who knows what’s going to happen — maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t, but man, are we lucky we got to make six, because this is a rare thing to have a show like this with this kind of thought being put into it, and this kind of creative freedom. And we should all just feel really lucky that we got six.” I remember being very sad hearing that conversation, but I also knew that he was right. Even though I had never worked in L.A. before, I understood, and I think we all understood, what a lucky thing it was that we had gotten to do even six episodes of TV like this. And then they made 200 more.

Turning the Corner

Despite the modest ratings, NBC ordered a second season of The Office and was rewarded with substantially improved viewer numbers, a new revenue stream and a creative flowering that resulted from some subtle but important changes in the way the writers approached the show.

DANIELS The learning process for me over the course of the first two years was to not be as reverent of the original. The main thing was that Michael Scott was pretty heavily criticized by the show. He was not a good person in the first season.

[After season one] I was like, “OK, we were very faithful to the British show, and we are barely surviving.” I decided to be less faithful to the British show and to incorporate more of what I had learned on King of the Hill. In the very first iteration of that show, Hank Hill was a little bit more of an unlikable character, and I made various changes to articulate to myself what was unlikable about him and then fix it so that by the time the pilot aired, he was in good shape.

So I said [to NBC], “I think I know how to change Michael Scott,” and I made a list of maybe eight things that I would do to change Michael in the minds of the audience, and each one of them became the ending of an episode. For instance, in “The Dundies” I was proving the point that the staff can complain about him, but when someone outside the staff picks on him, they defend him. It was basically nudging him from a person who is not part of your group, and you don’t really like them, to a person who you’re frustrated with often, but is part of your group — he’s more of the frustrating uncle or something. There were other things. We had an episode where he actually turned out to be very good at sales, and that his incompetence was more a Peter Principle thing of being promoted past what he was good at to being the manager.

KALING Season two to me is just a top-to-bottom delight. I think that staff was really, really incredible. What was great about that season was that everybody’s personalities are really present in their episodes, which I think was really helpful. Obviously Greg is our leader and had a defining sensibility for the show that we were all aiming for. But when I think about episodes like “The Injury” or “The Carpet” — that is so Paul Lieberstein and so funny. We loved it so much. “The Injury” is very much the kind of thing that I think is funny.

NOVAK (on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend in 2022) You could write [Carell] the most insane thing. No human being grills his foot on a George Foreman grill because he wants to wake up to the smell of bacon and then tells his office to treat him as a handicapped person. But when he performs that, you buy it. I think he has a writer brain that’s coming up with the funny things to say, but then his actor heart is playing the human being.

SCHUR It was only through a series of incredibly fortunate events that the show survived — by the way, events that had nothing to do with whether the show was good. The 40 Year-Old Virgin coming out [in the summer of 2005, which starred Carell and raised his profile considerably], and My Name Is Earl being put on as our lead-in, which was a huge hit. All those things conspired to allow us to just barely hang on long enough to find an audience.

DANIELS It was very much fun to be there in season two, just because pretty much every episode, things started to grow. There were a lot of reasons [for that]. It was Carell being a movie star. It was changes to the character. Some people point to technological things — we had an iPod in our Christmas episode, and we were somehow featured on the [iTunes homepage] or something. I just feel like word was getting out, and people were liking it. By the end of season two, I think the show was pretty successful.

LIEBERSTEIN iTunes had just started [selling TV shows] — the first video iPod with the tiny screen had just come out and all of a sudden, by that Christmas, The Office was the No. 1 downloaded show on the iPod. I think it made NBC go, “Huh, it might not all be about the ratings. There might be another income stream here.”

The ‘Office’ Legacy

Season two would win the Emmy for best comedy series, and The Office went on to a hugely successful run, ending in May 2013 after nine seasons and 202 episodes. Season one’s writers would go on to create and run a host of series. Kaling is responsible for The Mindy Project (in which she also starred), Never Have I Ever and Running Point, among others. Schur and Daniels co-created Parks and Recreation, and Schur then went on to create The Good Place and A Man on the Inside and co-create Brooklyn Nine-Nine, among others.

Lieberstein succeeded Daniels as showrunner of The Office and later was an exec producer of HBO’s The Newsroom, ran AMC’s Lucky Hank and wrote, directed and starred in the feature film Song of Back and Neck. Novak wrote, directed and starred in the 2022 film Vengeance, created FX’s The Premise and has written two best-selling books. In addition to Parks and Rec, Daniels created Upload and Space Force (the latter with Carell) and is working on both a King of the Hill revival and a new mockumentary set in the same world as The Office and chronicling a struggling newspaper.

The show also found another life in syndication and streaming: It was the most streamed show in the United States in 2020, its final year on Netflix, and has been one of Peacock’s best-performing shows since moving there in 2021.

LIEBERSTEIN It feels really cool [for The Office to have such a long afterlife]. It just keeps on giving. People are still discovering the show and telling me all about it. It feels immediate to a lot of people, still. I’m kind of shocked it’s not dated. I’m watching it now for the first time since we since we shot it with my son, and it’s very interesting to see it now.

I never could have imagined, and I still can’t completely explain it. There are other great shows that don’t seem to have that. I mean, 30 Rock was hysterical, but it has kind of slipped away from the zeitgeist. They were on the same time as us. It’s hard to explain why one stays and one doesn’t.

SCHUR There were times in the writers room early on where I had this notebook where I would jot down ideas or whatever. And there were times when we would be discussing a story, and Greg would say, “Let’s just hold on a second and stop pitching and think about what makes a good story.” He would start expounding on how he thought story structure in the half-hour comedy format functioned. I would realize that suddenly I was in school, in the best way. I would start taking notes about what he was saying, as if I were in film school. I still have them. I still look at them from time to time. They still matter to me, and they still have affected me and how I approach my job.

NOVAK (on Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend) I learned all my comedy lessons from Greg Daniels, being in that room. He has these sayings … one was, “You don’t eat your seed corn.” It’s like a farming term — you don’t sell out a character for a great joke in the moment, because you’re going to need that character later. In terms of [The Office] being evergreen, one time someone mentioned a year — and the show was not popular at this point — and he said, “Let’s try never to mention a year,” so that it doesn’t jar people if they’re watching it in syndication. We didn’t even know about Netflix. I learned everything from him.

KALING I’ve never gone to grad school or done a writing program or anything like that, although I probably should have. But to me, being on The Office for eight years was like going to grad school twice, in comedy writing and comedy acting. Learning from Greg, B.J., Mike, Paul and Gene [Stupnitsky] and Lee [Eisenberg, both of whom joined the show in season two] was incredibly informative. I think that for my shows after, they could not be more different than The Office in terms of setting and characters and tone. But the thing that’s the same is the pacing and the bar for comedy. That is just completely from my training at The Office.