‘The Office’: Exec producer Greg Daniels on the departure of Steve Carell and tonight’s farewell episode, ‘Goodbye, Michael’ — EXCLUSIVE
One year ago, Steve Carell announced that he would be leaving The Office, leaving us more than enough time to properly send off our favo– Holy crap, he’s taking off tonight and we haven’t even set up our tear jars! Ready or not, Michael Scott will utter his final foot-in-mouth and walk out of Dunder Mifflin’s doors for the last time in “Goodbye, Michael.” The special 50-minute episode (which airs at 9 p.m. on NBC) was written by Office executive producer Greg Daniels, who spoke exclusively to EW about tonight’s landmark episode and bidding farewell to Carell.
GREG DANIELS: It’s basically him settling his affairs and saying his last goodbyes to everybody. And he has gifts for them. It’s about how he deals with his own feelings. There’s lots of little references to the history of the show that the super fans are going to really enjoy. A tiny mystery story — which I’m not sure anyone’s going to catch and will come out a few episodes from now — is being set up here … There’s other stories: Andy [Ed Helms] and Deangelo [Will Ferrell] are trying to hold together Michael’s clients who are starting to bail, and they’re driving around calling on the clients. And the party-planning committee is trying to figure out the best cake and the best way to send him off. All the former chairmen are reuniting to give Michael a good send-off.
Were there more tears or laughs on the set while shooting his final scenes?
I think there were both. But it wasn’t so much tears as it was just this weird sense of “Oh my god, this is his last this thing, this is his last that thing.” I kind of felt like a priest who was sitting with him as he ate his last meal. (Laughs) But the actors were very emotional. You know the concept of breaking? An actor bursts out laughing and drops his character. They kept doing it here because they’d suddenly get really sad that they weren’t going to work with him next week. They were sadder than their characters were supposed to be. They broke, but going to “sad”… I got choked up writing his last moment with Dwight [Rainn Wilson] in a Coffee Bean… [But] by the time I was at the set, I had worked through a lot of it. I was just concerned about keeping it funny.
Did you guys give Steve a piece of the office or something as a goodbye gift?
He’s a hockey player so one of the things we gave him was a hockey jersey with his number on the call sheet on it — it was one — which was retired. The way they retire a guy’s number. We made a little ceremony out of it.
What was the biggest challenge for you in making this episode?
The time. I wrote it as a half-hour and in the scenes with Will Ferrell, he was being very improvisational and funny and you didn’t want to cut that. And then the stuff with Michael was all about him getting his goodbyes with everybody, so you didn’t really want to cut out some of the people. And it needed to be able to breathe, because he was having these goodbyes. So it ended up being really long. As I was trying to cut it, I was like, “This isn’t going to be good if I cut it to a normal length.” I talked to NBC and they were very cool about [making the episode a non-traditional length], even though it was awkward from a business standpoint. [NBC Entertainment Chairman] Bob Greenblatt was like, “You do whatever is best.” They really wanted to give Steve the proper goodbye.
Do you have a favorite Michael Scott moment?
There are Michael Scott moments, which are character choices, but there are also Steve’s reads. Usually the things that I’m the biggest fan of are these weird reads that he does — just the way he’s interacting with other people. They’re often things on the show that if you were to extend the cut two frames, the other person just bursts out laughing. One thing I was watching recently which I just loved was in “The Client.” He was bragging to the camera about this relationship he’s developed with Jan [Melora Hardin]. She starts backing away from it on camera and he gets very flustered and embarrassed, and he hides under his desk and the camera goes to find him under his desk. (Laughs) In this week’s episode, his talking [to the camera] about a gift that he made for Oscar [Oscar Nunez] is one of his best.
What will you remember about working with Steve?
He taught me a lot about improv… When you see him roll with stuff that happens that’s not what he expected, that was very inspirational. If you’re kind of a control freak like I was coming from animation [Daniels was a co-executive producer of The Simpsons and co-created King of the Hill], where every single thing is controlled, it was very cool to see that he had this attitude of “Yeah, that’s not what we thought it was going to be, but it’s going to be good.” A time that really struck me was when we were producing the first Dundies episode, which was the season 2 premiere.
