Welcome to Dunder Mifflin

The Ultimate Oral History of The Office

Brian Baumgartner, Ben Silverman

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780063082212
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television

New York Times Bestseller

"The ultimate behind-the-scenes account." — Washington Post

"The definitive history of the landmark TV show." — USA Today

Join the entire Dunder Mifflin gang on a journey back to Scranton: here's the hilarious and improbable inside story behind the beloved series.

Based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews with the cast and creators and illustrated with 100 behind-the-scenes photographs, here, at last, is the untold inside story of The Offic e, featuring a foreword by Greg Daniels, who adapted the series for the U.S. and was its guiding creative force, and narrated by star Brian Baumgartner (aka "Kevin Malone") and executive producer Ben Silverman..

In Welcome to Dunder Mifflin, the entire Office gang reunite after nearly a decade to share their favorite untold stories, spill secrets, and reveal how a little show that barely survived its first season became the most watched series in the universe. This ultimate fan companion pulls back the curtain as never before on all the absurdity, genius, love, passion, and dumb luck that went into creating America's beloved The Office.

Featuring the memories of Steve Carell, John Krasinkski, Jenna Fischer, Greg Daniels, Ricky Gervais, Rainn Wilson, Angela Kinsey, Craig Robinson, Brian Baumgartner, Phyllis Smith, Kate Flannery, Ed Helms, Oscar Nunez, Amy Ryan, Ellie Kemper, Creed Bratton, Paul Lieberstein, Ben Silverman, Mike Schur, and many more.

1

“Okay, Here’s the Pitch”

The Office Travels Across the Atlantic

BEN SILVERMAN (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): It was the summer of 2001, and I was staying with my friend [TV producer] Henrietta Conrad in London. She was out one night, and I was sitting in her living room, flipping through the TV for something to watch, and I came across this show. I remember just being mesmerized by it.

Ben Silverman was not used to being surprised by TV shows. Since 1995, he’d worked at esteemed agency William Morris, where he’d been promoted to head of the international packaging division. Which means he found successful TV shows in other countries and “repackaged” them for American audiences.

BEN SILVERMAN: I would travel around the world, looking for ideas and cultural nuggets that could be brought to life in America. I found everything from Who Wants to Be a Millionaire to a myriad of other shows, like Big Brother and Queer as Folk.

In 2001, Silverman left William Morris to launch his own TV production company, Reveille. It was during a trip to London to find potential projects that he first stumbled upon this mysterious show.

BEN SILVERMAN: At first, I was wondering if it was comedy or for real, but I pretty quickly figured it out. And I was laughing, which I almost never do anymore. Because I work in television, a lot of the visceral enjoyment of episodic television goes away for me. But this show, whatever it was, it was just so brilliant and funny, and I immediately connected. Then Henrietta came home, and I was like, “What the hell is this? How do I not know about this? This is my job.” And she’s like, “Oh, it just came on the air.”

That show, which was so new that most Londoners weren’t even aware of it yet, was a single-camera “mockumentary” called The Office, by the then mostly unknown (at least in the U.S.) comedy duo Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The show followed a suburban London branch of a fictional paper supply company, Wernham Hogg, starring Gervais as a needy, narcissistic middle manager named David Brent who described himself as “basically a chilled-out entertainer.”

BEN SILVERMAN: Henrietta told me that the best way to Ricky was probably Dan Mazer, who at the time was Sacha Baron Cohen’s partner. So we organized and had dinner with Dan that night. I started peppering Dan with questions about The Office, and he gave me Ricky’s cell phone number.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Within twenty-four hours of seeing The Office for the first time, you somehow manage to get Ricky Gervais’s phone number?

BEN SILVERMAN: [Laughs.] Well, I am in the business of show.

He called Ricky the next morning.

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HUMAN RESOURCES FILE

Ben Silverman

Job Title: Executive producer of The Office; cochairman of NBC Universal Entertainment (2007–2009)

Hometown: Manhattan

Training: Tufts University, Class of 1992, history major

Previous Employment: Warner Bros. intern, head of the international packaging division for the William Morris Agency (1995–2002), founder of Reveille production company

Post-Office Credits: Founded Electus production company (2009); executive producer for shows like The Tudors (2007–2010), Ugly Betty (2006–2010), Jane the Virgin (2014–2019), Untold (2021), and American Song Contest (2022); chairman of Propagate Content

Honors: Youngest division head ever employed at William Morris

Special Skills: Packaging international shows for American audiences

Personal History: Proposed to his future wife on a golf course (the ring was hidden in the cup)

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RICKY GERVAIS (COCREATOR OF THE OFFICE: I was walking down the street in London—I think I was going to see my agent—and the phone rang. “Hi, it’s Ben Silverman. You don’t know me, but I want to remake The Office for America.” And I went, “Okay.”

BEN SILVERMAN: I said, “I’d love to meet you. Are you in town?”

RICKY GERVAIS: I looked up and said, “I’m right outside the Starbucks on Wardour Street.” He went, “Wait there, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”

BEN SILVERMAN: As somebody who travels the world, I hate going to chains. But I almost thought that Ricky was testing me. Like, “Oh, you’re an American, you’ll love this.”

STEPHEN MERCHANT (COCREATOR OF THE OFFICE): Whenever they have a producer character in a Hollywood movie, he’s always like, “We’re gonna make you a star, kid.” Ben is like the Hollywood producer cliché you see in movies, but it works.

BEN SILVERMAN: We talked for two hours. [Ricky and I] very quickly got along because we both love television. We talked about the shows that inspired him, like The Simpsons and [the 1960 Jack Lemmon movie] The Apartment. We talked about reality television, which I’d been a pioneer of in America.

STEPHEN MERCHANT: At the time in the UK, there was a spate of what I guess you’d now call reality TV. Fly-on-the-wall documentaries about everyday subjects. There was a very famous one about a driving school.

Driving School, which aired on BBC One during the summer of 1997, featured student drivers in Bristol and South Wales. It created one of the first household-name British reality stars, Maureen Rees, who repeatedly failed her driving tests.

STEPHEN MERCHANT: It was just following normal people doing driving lessons. And these types of shows were incredibly popular. Nobody had seen everyday people on-screen in that way before.

RICKY GERVAIS: It was ordinary people trying to get their fifteen minutes of fame. Of course, now fame is a different beast. They’d try and get their own game show and make the most of it. But back in the nineties, it was more quaint.

STEPHEN MERCHANT: When we did The Office, we had those shows in our mind.

Ben Silverman and Stephen Merchant, cocreator of The Office (UK).

Courtesy of Teri Weinberg

BEN SILVERMAN: All these vérité reality shows set in these workplace environments in the UK clearly had informed Ricky on what he was mocking. I was explaining to him, we don’t yet have those formats to mock. So as we look at the show, we need to ensure where the characters are grounded and where the comedy comes from. It can’t just be through the faux documentary lens.

BRIAN BAUMGARTNER: Are you also asking him, “Is the show for sale?”

BEN SILVERMAN: No, I’m not asking that, because you don’t sell in our business. It’s not like the shoe business. It’s more like, “Are you interested in adapting your great work for America? And would you like to collaborate with me on this process? I know everything about getting a television show made in America. Which part of that process would you like to learn about? How much would you like to be involved?” He clearly had chosen this Starbucks for a reason, because he says to me, “Oh, good news. My agent is right around the corner. Let’s go meet with him.”

Even before talking to Ricky, Ben had reached out to the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). After all, this wasn’t the first time he’d negotiated to bring a British TV show to American shores.

BEN SILVERMAN: It helped one hundred percent not only knowing where to go but who to call at BBC Worldwide and having those relationships already.

B...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Greg Daniels
• Preface: How Did We Get Here? by Brian Baumgartner
• 1. “Okay, Here’s the Pitch”: The Office Travels Across the Atlantic
• 2. “Scranton Hot”: Casting the Lovable Misfits of Dunder Mifflin
• 3. “Everything That Makes It Harder Makes It Better”: Filming the Pilot
• 4. “Let Me Tell You Why This Isn’t Going to Work”: Season One
• 5. “The Office Needed a Billion Things to Go Right”: The Emotional Roller Coaster of Season Two
• 6. “John and I Are Not a Couple”: The Office Love Stories
• 7. “Inheritors of the History of Comedy”: The Comedy Tropes That Inspired and Shaped The Office: Season Three
• 8. “I Don’t Care, Fire Me!”: Inside the Office Writers’ Room . . . and the Writers Strike That Nearly Ended the Show: Season Four
• 9. “The Moment That My Life Changed”: A Wedding, New Hires (and Losses), and Other Shake-ups: Seasons Five and Six
• 10. “Losing the Captain of Our Ship”: The Long Goodbye for Michael Scott (and Steve Carell): Season Seven
• 11. “Who Should Be the Boss?”: The Search for a New Dunder Mifflin Regional Manager: Seasons Eight and Nine
• 12. “It’s a Wrap”: The Series Finale
• 13. “Beauty in Ordinary Things”: The Legacy of The Office
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Copyright
• About the Publisher