Watching The Office

Last week, in preparation for the launch of the newest webisodes, the Celebrity Family Feud appearance, as well as The Office Games in Scranton, Brian Baumgartner and Mindy Kaling indulged the press with a conference call which took, according to Office Tally, several pages long to transcribe.

“ Press: Brian, I was wondering your opinion, do these webisodes present any additional challenges for actors as compared to full length episodes?
Brian: Well that’s interesting. I mean I think that the challenge in — I mean obviously as I understand, we were sort of the first primetime show anyway to sort of do these extra episodes, so that was a couple of years ago when we did the accountant series and this just being our second one as well.

I think that there’s a particular rhythm that you have to find that’s different. I mean you have to sort of — the idea anyway is to sort of wrap up a sort of at least semi satisfying story within two, two and a half minutes. But also make it connect to sort of the whole series as a whole, if you look at sort of the whole thing as an episode or a mini episode or whatever.

So I would say that would be the challenge. You know, practically, we’re dealing with just a much smaller crew and fewer people which in some ways because Mindy isn’t around it makes things much easier but it’s also more people are having to do more things which I think is cool. It’s sort of an old school like create a theater piece kind of guerrilla, you know, filmmaking.

But the crew is still the same and so, we all have a short hand of working together and so it doesn’t present too much of a challenge in that way. And I think most of the challenge actually is sort of in with the writers and having to sort of wrap up some sort of satisfying morsel in two and a half minutes and also connect it to something larger.

Press: Right. And Mindy I know that you and BJ have both written on the show and I was curious as to what made you decide to also step in front of the camera and do additional events like The Office game?

Mindy: Well initially, it wasn’t our decision, it was Greg Daniels the show owner. BJ had been cast from the very beginning before the pilot as an actor and a writer, but I and Paul Lieberstein, who plays Toby, we came aboard later during the pilot when Greg said our look was — and I guess this is slightly insulting, but I think he meant it in a good way — sort of like average and ordinary enough that we would fit into the world of the office. So that’s sort of how that happened. And then as obviously Toby is now a really popular character so that sort of took off. I’m sorry, what was the second half of your question?”

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