Theday.com:
Creating an “Office” episode is quite a process:
“Basically, there’s a couple times during the season where the writers will go off and try to generate dozens of stories, and then they’d pitch those stories to the executive producers. In our final year, we were head writers of the show, so we were involved in helping to select what stories would go. For some of the stories, you’d start piecing together the season – ‘Oh, OK, that nugget someone pitched can go really well with that other thing we were talking about.’ And things start taking shape.
“Then, from there, you split up into smaller rooms of maybe four people, and you start pitching jokes, storylines, and ‘The Office’ has a lot of arcs- romantic arcs and business arcs. The goal, as my former boss Greg Daniels said, what we try with a lot of the episodes is to really stuff the sausage – just trying to cram in as many jokes, as many things we think the audience will like that make us laugh. …
“The average ‘Office’ episode, when it’s shot, is probably about 39 minutes long. We have to cut it to 21 minutes for commercials. What that means is, you’re essentially cutting 40 percent of what you spent weeks writing and rewriting and shooting. You really have to find the story and make sure it still makes sense … and (keep) all the jokes you really like. It’s a tricky process.”
