by Rainn Wilson
After getting passed on at CBS due to financial wrangling between them and 20th Century Fox Studios, we ended up finding a home at the Foxy Network. The next year we shot twelve more episodes and were on the air in the winter of 2015.
And then, a few months later (a few short weeks before I’m writing this), we were canceled. Just like that.
There were so many things I could blame our show’s failure on, but ultimately we just didn’t find an audience. Sure, we were given one of the toughest time slots in the history of television to try to establish a foothold, opposite the runaway hits Scandal, The Blacklist, and the final season of Two and a Half Boob Jokes. And our ad campaign, featuring me chomping on a cigar with the words TOTAL DICK above my head, while punchy and attention grabbing, didn’t really make viewers feel like cuddling up for a nice character-driven crime story with a bowl of pretzels and a glass of Chianti. I also think that the tone of the show was somewhere betwixt and between cable and network—generally too dark and edgy for prime-time TV and yet too warm and accessible and predicable for, say, Breaking Bad fans.
I will always wonder what that disturbed and difficult character I birthed is up to. Probably brilliantly solving crimes, drinking himself into oblivion, and flying lonely kites while longing for some human connection to break through the thick scar tissue of his cynicism. I can relate.
Chapter 14
DWIGHT K. SCHRUTE, ASSISTANT (TO THE) REGIONAL MANAGER
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(Note: I’m going to be talking about working on the television show The Office for a couple chapters now. If you are not interested in The Office and purchased this book because you are a big fan of Charmed, SoulPancake, or double-reed instruments, I suggest you either skip ahead or cut these chapters out of the book with a pair of cuticle scissors.)
I was the very first person to audition for The Office. Literally.
Our incredible casting director Allison Jones (who casts all of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig’s movies as well as Veep and myriad other brilliant comedies) had recently gotten to know me as an actor, and I was starting to get some notice because of my role on Six Feet Under.
She called me in to audition for both Michael and Dwight, and I was excited beyond words as I loved the project so much. I sat in the waiting room, clutching my pages, literally more eager for this audition than any of the hundreds I had been on in the past.
My friends Sam and Julie had somehow found some early episodes of the British Office on BBC America. They had recorded them and Sam called me one day to tell me about it.
“You have to see this TV show. It’s unbelievable. It’s comedy and tragedy and documentary all rolled into one! Come over for dinner and we’ll watch the first three.” Something like that.
Holiday and I watched, astounded. I had never seen anything quite like it. If a young Anton Chekhov and a young Woody Allen were making a TV show together, The Office on the BBC would be it.
What was so transcendent about it? Too many things to list. But I’ll try.
THE DOCUMENTARY STYLE
The documentary/reality style where the lo-fi cameras awkwardly became characters in the world of Wernham Hogg was the foundation of the show. One of the central comedic ideas is the self-conscious relationship the characters have with the cameras and the film crew working around them. Some, like Gareth, are completely unaware of their own boobery and see the camera as a drinking buddy. Others, like Tim and Dawn, use the camera as an ally as they double-check their own sanity in a workplace gone mad. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing? Can you BELIEVE this person?” they say in a subtle arch of an eyebrow.
And for the David Brent character, of course, the cameras provide the chance to showboat and preen for a captive audience. A demented star is born.
And all the wonderful things you could do with those cameras! Run alongside characters, push focus deep and capture a moment in the background, whip back and forth capturing a conversation, and, best of all, sneak “spy shots” through venetian blinds and discover those poor souls who don’t know they’re being filmed, sharing heartbreaking or ridiculous moments in imagined private.
And don’t get me started about the “talking head.” A brilliant element of direct address to the camera and crew that the creators, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, perfectly lifted from documentaries and reality shows and then twisted to their own comedic ends. In a handful of lines, a character could 1) move the plot forward, 2) reveal something hidden about them as a character, and 3) deliver a perfectly crafted, personality-laden joke.
THE AWKWARD PAUSE
Cringe humor has actually been around for a very long time. Many a sitcom and movie have used the uncomfortable pause for comedic effect, from Chekhov to Bob Newhart to Albert Brooks to Steve Coogan, but no one has wrung as much embarrassment, humiliation, and train-wreckishness from a moment as Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the ringmasters of discomfort.
After a cringe-inducing debacle by David Brent, there is usually a delicious pause in which the characters swing in the breeze, too uncomfortable to talk, move, or even speak. This was the glorious comedic bread and butter of the original Office.
HEART
There was a real, living, beating heart under the British Office. The love story between Tim and Dawn was simply heart-wrenching. We’ve all had some kind of experience with unrequited love, and the longing looks and doubt-filled moments were perfectly executed. Every character has their hopes and dreams living under their pasty skin, if you just look hard enough. David Brent, as much of a colossal ass as he is, is a sad, failed man who is simply looking to be loved. This subcurrent of despair, longing, and vulnerability made the show and its bleak landscape riveting.
Our version (all two hundred episodes) was able to delve even deeper into the emotional underbelly of the characters, and our show-runners, thank God, were not afraid to allow true emotion to occasionally shine through the awkwardness and silliness.
GARETH
Gareth, the British Dwight-prototype character, was a revelation. I was in awe of Mackenzie Crook’s performance. Nobody had ever seen a character like that before. He was singular. You couldn’t put your finger on what exactly Gareth was. Was he a toady ass-kisser? A nerd? A bully? A reactionary? An annoying idiot? A nut job? All of the above?
After so many years of auditioning for oddball characters in terrible TV pilots and movies, I was used to the one-dimensionality of the typical comedic sidekick. There was the stock nerd with the plastic pocket protector and adenoidal voice. (Hey! Someone should make a whole show about them! Oh wait, they did.)
Sidekick tropes: There is the uptight, know-it-all lackey. The coarse, back-slapping, wingman, women-hating slobby guy. The arrogant but actually dumb guy. The innocent, slow dumb guy. The wacky, scheming eccentric neighbor. You know the types. You’ve seen them portrayed sometimes brilliantly, most times stereotypically and grotesquely. But Gareth contained various elements of most of those characters rolled into one skinny, unpredictable, and completely real human being.
I will be forever grateful. Mackenzie (and Gareth), I salute you.
THE LANDSCAPE
Sad, drawn, pasty, forlorn faces of lost souls under fluorescent lights. Why had nobody ever made a show about them before? Dressed up in wool/poly blends that can be found in any local Sears or JCPenney. Bad hair. Bad teeth. Deep sighs.
Real conference rooms and microwaves and gray mottled carpeting. Cubicles. Cluttered desks. Venetian blinds. Phones and faxes echoing in the distant soundscape. Not a Hollywood set built on a soundstage, but a real, actual office just like the ones we’ve all slogged around and toiled in before.
The English Office created a distinct world that WAS our world. A world ripe for mocking and cherishing.
When people visited our set they would wander around amazed at the minutiae and detail. The Scranton take-out menus, stuck to the refrigerator with ridiculous local m
agnets. The cupboards filled with office supplies, the kitchen filled with actual food. The motivational posters adorning walls covered in finger smudges. The family photos intricately lining each character’s desk. The fake plants. Every room was filled with the tiny details of everyday life, bursting with personality and ennui.
THOUGHTS ON BBC OFFICE FANS
Fans of the BBC Office were passionate, vocal, vitriolic, and, yes, snobby as hell. Throughout my time on The Office I would constantly hear or read two related refrains (sometimes directly to my face, other times online or in articles):
“Why would they even make an American Office? Hollywood is so out of ideas. Why don’t they just show the British Office! I won’t even watch, I don’t want to see how they’ll ruin it. Ugh! Nothing can ever be better than the original BBC Office.”
“I wasn’t going to watch the US Office because I loved the British Office so much. I was put off by the idea. After a few years I saw an episode and was really surprised at how good it was and now I watch it all the time!”
These two statements indicate a cultural problem of vast proportions with deep, grotesque implications for the future of humanity.
Let’s examine these statements a little bit.
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First of all, let’s try to shine a little light on the differences between British and American television. In England, for some inexplicable reason, they are able to do “series” that have a very small number of episodes. Like six. Seriously. The original Office had thirteen episodes. Total. Thirteen. Over two and a half years. That’s how many episodes we would make in a three-month span. That’s nothing.
The BBC is a government-funded television organization for news and programming. They do not run commercials. This means that half-hour shows that run on the BBC can be literally twenty-eight minutes long. Half-hour television shows in the United States are 21:20 or so. The brilliant idea of “Why don’t they just show the original episodes in the US?” is impossible. You would need to cut more than a quarter out of each episode. And what would need to come out? All the uncomfortable pauses. Then the show just wouldn’t be funny anymore.
Not to mention the fact that most prime-time TV watchers in Kansas and Michigan don’t really understand English accents and lingo. All that talk of “the boot of your lorry,” “cheers, mate,” “bloody ’ell,” and “bollocks” goes completely over the heads of most corpulent mid-Americans who have grown up watching The Brady Bunch, Dr. Phil, and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch.
The American television model, unless you are working for PBS, is entirely different. A prime-time show is only profitable if it reaches enough episodes to achieve syndication—eighty-eight or more, give or take. So our television business model is not to make thirteen episodes that are half an hour long but to make over a hundred episodes that are basically twenty-one minutes long.
Both shows were entirely successful in their respective countries, fulfilling the business requirements that they needed to. The BBC Office format was also re-created in other cultures for other markets, such as French Quebec, Israel, Chile, Germany (which tried to rip it off until the BBC threatened to sue), and France. Some were successful, some not. We ended up making 202 twenty-one-minute episodes of television. One of the longest, most successful runs of a TV show in history. (But you probably knew that.)
The strange snobbery that was elicited toward our show by (mostly) Brits and some snooty Americans is absolutely mystifying to me, and if you really examine the tendency, nauseating.
Let’s examine the underlying issues of all this television outrage. What the hypothetical TV snob is emphatically saying is:
“There are thirteen episodes of a brilliant TV show that I love and is SO GOOD that no one should ever do another version of it, EVER. Aaaaahhhhh!!!!!”
“All the BBC episodes will somehow disappear from existence if the Americans, French, or Germans make their own versions! DVDs will melt and all record of the beloved show will disappear and we’ll never be able to watch the British Office again if it’s remade in America. AAAAAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!”
“The world will be a worse place if stupid Hollywood messes up this gem like they have so many other transplants from across the pond. This will cause me such psychic and artistic pain that I will be personally adversely affected and our entire culture will be degraded by this potentially heinous act.”
Some said: “The pilot of the American Office was literally ripped off from the BBC Office! It was exactly the same! They don’t have an original idea in their heads! How dare they?!”
Others said: “The other episodes of the Office are different from the BBC Office! Why don’t they use the plots and ideas from the original Office? How dare they?!”
My response:
This hypothetical person we’re talking about is a TV snob. Television, in and of itself, is really not something to have snobbery about. We’re not talking about a television remake of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Waste Land, or Guernica here. We’re talking about THIRTEEN EPISODES OF A TELEVISION SHOW, IDIOTS!
There are so many things to be upset about in the world. Hunger, education, the environment, all those needless stickers on fruit. But this hypothetical BBC TV snob is wasting amazing, huge amounts of time and energy being upset by something SO incredibly minor.
There are so many things to be loyal to in this world: one’s faith, the cause of social justice, a spouse or family, the idea of furthering progress. But fervid loyalty to a television miniseries is exceptionally misguided.
You get the idea.
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And, as for statement number two, when your loyalty to a handful of episodes of a brilliant TV show actually prevents you disdainfully from watching another version, something is wrong with you. Just check it out. Give it a gander. It’s not gonna hurt you. You’re not going to lose hipster street cred by saying, “Yeah, I checked out the NBC remake of The Office and I liked it/didn’t like it.” Back in 2004, when our show premiered, this was in the cultural groundwater. Back then, saying you would never watch the American Office was the equivalent of saying today, “I don’t own a TV” or “I don’t have a Facebook.” It was a badge of ridiculous pride.
There was an ancillary form of TV snobbery/idiocy that ran as a strain throughout this whole BBC vs. US Office debate that raged in the first few years of our show. This was: “Hollywood doesn’t have any original ideas of its own and needs to constantly pilfer and raid other people’s great ideas in order to provide content.”
This is ridiculous. There is SO much to complain about with Hollywood and what it stands for. BUT I will say this: It is an IDEA FACTORY.
Let’s look at the television business. There are four or so major networks that develop lots of scripted content each year (never mind the countless cable outlets). Let’s examine them for a second.
Many of you probably know this, but every year each network develops approximately eighty to one hundred pilot scripts each for what is known as “pilot season.” Of those scripts, twenty or more will “go to pilot” and be shot. Of those, only a small handful will be “picked up to series” and only a small percentage of them will actually last on the air. So that’s four major networks shooting around eighty television pilots EVERY YEAR.
Yes, many of the shows are crappy rehashes of old, worn-out ideas: unlikely roommates, fat guy/hot wife, sexy doctors hooking up, lone detective who just can’t play by the rules (guilty!), etc. . . . But many if not most are also completely original ideas, like Lost, House, Seinfeld, 24, Freaks and Geeks, 30 Rock, etc. . . . Some, but a very small percentage, are remakes or reimaginings of movies or shows from other countries or other formats from other places. Some of these shows end up working quite well, like Ugly Betty, All in the Family, and Sanford and Son. Many don’t, like Coupling, Kath & Kim, and American Idol (jk).
So, to posit that Hollywood is devoid of origin
al ideas and needs to steal all the great ideas that come from other lands is a truly silly thing to say.
But back to the audition.
The sign-in sheet for the first day of auditions for The Office. Some GREAT names on this list, including Adam Scott, Mary Lynn Rajskub, Hamish Linklater, and, of course, Jenna Fischer.
I gave the world’s lamest audition for Michael Scott. (Allison Jones has it on tape somewhere or other.) I simply did a very bad Ricky Gervais imitation with a lot of tugging on my tie and eye rolling. In the back of my mind, I knew the best was yet to come.
Occasionally—you can ask any actor—there comes along a part that you just instinctively know EXACTLY how to play. I knew that Dwight was the role for me. I knew in my bones that no other actor in Hollywood had that combination of absurd intensity, white trashiness, and total goofball nerd in them the way I did. I knew the part was mine from the get-go. Most of the time I fumble my way through awkward attempts at roles during auditions and am filled with doubt, so when a role comes along that I feel such a deep inspiration from and affinity toward, I am truly grateful.
(Later, after I was cast, I sat down to lunch with the writers and brought in pictures of my family—my achingly odd, offbeat, working-class weirdo family. I also brought in pictures of my achingly gawky teen self. I told them tales of my suburban Seattle upbringing, raspberry picking, heavy metal, chess, the bassoon, and muscle cars. I told stories to them of Chris Cole, my self-serious Dungeons & Dragons pal who wore actual Battlestar Galactica–brand glasses and later would study fencing and become a coronet player in the Marines. [Chris was a great inspiration for Dwight in many ways. He was skinny as a whippet, but his D&D characters were always immensely muscled barbarians who looked like Vin Diesel with Fabio hair. He had that amazing balance of nerd and bully as well as a ridiculous haircut. If you’re reading this, Chris, thank you. And I’m sorry. Both in equal portions.] I like to think that this glimpse into my odd past influenced the way the writers thought of Dwight and his background and allowed them to help make him as complex, bizarre, and indefinable as he ultimately was.)