Category: People

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…