"The Office" Writers

It took me a while to start watching the NBC sitcom, "The Office". I saw the show a couple times during it's second season and just thought it was stupid, and not at all funny. Face it, it is not your traditional sitcom: it has no laugh track and it's not a multi-camera show. The zoom-in shots of the characters seemed off-putting to me, like it was some documentary show. Every character broke the fourth-wall by awkardly looking into the camera, and again it really wasn't that funny!

Fast-foward a year, and it became one of my favorite shows! The first couple of episodes I watched I really got involved in the diverse characters of the series and forgot about the strange camera movements and having no laugh track. Each character, especially Angela, Michael, Dwight and Jim have their own unique personality and work ethic. But, at the same time, each character makes up for the other one's faults. After I began to really understand the differences in each character and what they bring to "The Office", I saw the comedy that inherently exists in these characters when they're stuck together in one room for hours a day.

I have recently discovered that the episodes are actually funniest when one of the actors on the show also writes an episode. I had no idea how involved the characters of Ryan (played by B.J. Novak) and Kelly (played by Mindy Kaling) are on the show beyond being part of the cast. They both have written several episodes of the series. Mindy Kaling, for example, doesn't appear in every episode, but when she does, her character appears pretty ditzy and pretty annoying. That must be a facade because she is a brillant writer! I remember one episode she wrote that offended her own character's nationality. The episode put Michael in charge of conducting a "Diversity Meeting". The funniest scene was towards the end where the office played a game that used index cards stuck on people's foreheads that only revealed a certain nationality to another person. The other person had to act out stereotypes so the first person could guess it correctly. Watch the "Diversity Day" episode here!

The other main cast members are also much more involved in the series than just being the actors. Both Steve Carell and Paul Lieberstein (Toby) are also producers and rotating writers for the show. All the cast members of "The Office" are very close-knit, and this obviously makes for a show where you can actually believe the situations their characters get themselves into!