The Office by Andy Greene

Author:Andy Greene [Greene, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

chapter 18

SEASON FIVE

(“I feel like I’m in a horror movie and I’m the only one that sees the monster.”)

The great television shows of the modern era are expected to make just about ten episodes a season, and audiences are forgiving if they take an occasional year off to make that happen. But back in 2008, The Office was forced to make up for a strike-shortened season four by grinding out twenty-eight episodes in their fifth season. Making matters worse, they had to do that while building in a long break to allow Steve Carell to film a movie. It was a brutal slog of a season for everyone involved, even though they miraculously pulled off a stellar run of episodes. They got the season off to a nice start by bringing Amy Ryan onto the show as Toby’s HR replacement Holly Flax. She quickly became Michael Scott’s love interest.

Anthony Farrell: We were in a place where the Jan thing had run its course and we wanted to see Michael in a better place. Jim and Pam were together and so we were trying to figure out another love story, another way to keep people invested. When we were discussing people to replace the Jim-and-Pam thing, Michael came up, and, I think, rightfully so. We were like, “Yeah, let’s do it with Michael. We just need an amazing person to put up against him.” Everyone at the show was a huge fan of The Wire, so any time we had another character, it would be like, “Well, what about so-and-so from The Wire?”

Brent Forrester: The Office writers were obsessed with The Wire, Mike Schur in particular. They couldn’t believe how great the show was.

Amy Ryan: I had just been nominated for an Oscar [for the gritty thriller Gone Baby Gone] and I knew I was going to get a bit pigeonholed with playing hard-drug-addicted-mom kind of roles. And I said to my agent, “If there’s any chance that people would take our phone call, it is now. I want to do comedy. Can we call The Office?” There was a little bit of coincidence in [the] timing since I’d known Paul Lieberstein from years earlier when we both worked on The Naked Truth with Téa Leoni, but [we] hadn’t really been in touch in between that show and The Office. But a lot of the Office writers were fans of The Wire, so I think my name was being thrown around in that time. It just happened to sync up with my agent calling them saying, “Is there anything that Amy’s right for on the show?”

Brent Forrester: We were asking ourselves, “What actress could come in here and be the great love interest for Steve Carell in this incredible character of Michael Scott that he’s created?” I remember Paul Lieberstein and a couple other handpicked writers were being shown a tape of Amy Ryan in the main conference room. It wasn’t even an audition for The Office. It was an audition for some other show that they had gotten their hands on.

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