The Office is back for six new episodes before the end of the season, to continue to explore all the issues raised earlier this year. Series creator Greg Daniels admits he has no long term plan, but at least Jim and Pam's reconciliation and Ryan's inclusion as a foil will continue to develop.
Greg Daniels' Office
"I don’t really see much more than about a half a season ahead," said Daniels. "That’s how far the headlights go on this bus. Jim and Pam never were together before. This is the first time that they’ve gotten together. They were almost together. Certainly we didn’t have it planned in Season One, what was going to happen to them. I know what’s going to happen to them for the next maybe ten episodes but that’s about as far as I can see. I thought of [Ryan] some time in Season Three. He seems like a funny statement about corporate America, just how the guy with a business school degree manages to rise."
With the strike cutting into the season, some of Daniels' plans for the year have been pushed aside. "We had some stuff that we were planning for the end of the year and we didn’t end up having enough time to do what we had planned, but we came up with some other alternatives, things which we really like a lot and it’s probably good that way for the creative process. We didn’t have a lot of stuff that we scrapped because we only had the one episode ready to be shot and that’s the one we came back with where they’re invited out to the dinner party."
Even missing a holiday was not a total loss. "We had a whole Christmas episode. It wasn’t 100% finished, the script. But we’ll cannibalize it and use pieces of it, and stuff."
Existing storylines will have to be wrapped up a little more quickly. "In the very first season, we did six episodes but they ordered seven scripts. So I had written an episode called Pet Day that never aired. What generally happens is whatever was good from Pet Day got chopped up and used in other episodes just because the ideas were there. We have a really fun Christmas episode that we wrote that is fun right now but by the time, you know, a year from now if you look back on it, you’ll realize that pieces of it are going to be used, I’m sure. And that’s okay. The process is like very creative and kind of churns, and bubbles and everything until it actually hits the air. Then that’s what happened to this group of people. There's a lot of other footage that the documentary shot that they just threw out for one reason or another."
The Dinner Party actually pays off a running gag where Jim and Pam have been making excuses for not visiting Michael Scott. "He finally manages through this kind of scam to destroy all their excuses. It just happens to be after the previous episode which is when he went to New York to try and help Jan with her deposition and he kind of blew her wrongful termination lawsuit. So there’s a lot of tension between them in that episode. Then, coming up we have some episodes that follow off on that. Some of them involve the character of Ryan whose website initiative started the season off and is kind of crumbling underneath him and for some reason has become like infested with sexual predators. We have episodes coming up where Dwight and Michael are going to have joined Ryan in some of his club-hopping New York partying and I think get involved in his life a little bit more. There’s some cool, weird things happening that I can’t talk about and you’ll just have to see it to truly enjoy all the twists and turns."
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