The Office’s Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer), AKA one of our favourite TV couples, made it through to the end of the show as a married couple, despite a few challenges they faced in the final season.
But it turns out that the showrunners almost broke them up in season nine.
Andy Green’s new book, The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s, reveals showrunner Greg Daniels wanted to shake things up between Jim and Pam.
We know that when Jim takes a job in Philly, he and Pam are seriously struggling with their relationship and Pam even turns to Brian, a guy from the camera crew who had been in the background the whole time.
It turns out that Brian was also secretly in love with Pam and thus the show was able to create a love triangle out of seemingly nothing.
John Krasinski also wanted to do something different at first, which probably inspired what happened in season nine.
According to Collider, John told Andy, “My whole pitch to Greg was that we’ve done so much with Jim and Pam, and now, after marriage and kids, there was a bit of a lull there, I think, for them about what they wanted to do.”
“For me it was, ‘Can you have this perfect relationship go through a split and keep it the same?’ which of course you can’t. And I said to Greg, ‘It would be really interesting to see how that split will affect two people that you know so well.’”
It turns out the original plan was to have Jim and Pam break up in the middle of the season and then reconcile in the show’s finale.
Writer Brent Forrester said, “Greg really wanted to do something extremely risky and high-stakes, which was the documentary airs and we see what effect it has had on these characters. And there was going to be a reunion episode where you see that Jim and Pam have split up by this time, and they will have their reunion in the reunion episode.”
Warren Lieberstein, who was a writer for the show, says the idea “wasn’t universally loved”, but Greg had the final say so they began working on this idea back in season five.
Greg said, “[This] was something that came up in season five, I think. It was a pitch. I think Mindy [Kaling] was the first or one of the first champions of it. The idea was to introduce some romantic triangle with Jim when they were such soul mates that you had to say, ‘How could she possibly be interested in somebody else?’
“You think to yourself, ‘Well, I wouldn’t believe it if I just was introduced to the character.’ You had to see it happening from scratch. What if that character had been secretly there the entire time and predated the relationship with Jim and had been a shoulder that she cried on for years?’
“It just seemed very intriguing. But we also were like, ‘If we break the fourth wall in season five, it feels like that might be the last season for the show.’ So we kept putting that off.”
Writer Owen Ellickson said one of the ideas raised was that Pam and Brian might end up “hooking up a little bit”, but Greg says he never wanted their relationship to go that far.
“Ultimately, I didn’t think it was about actually going there. They never did anything. It was just to introduce worry in the audience, which I think happened,” Greg said.
“I mean there are people who in season eight were like, ‘They’re so boring. They just hang out together and there’s no angst. We used to love the angst with their relationship.’”
However, the Brian twist didn’t go the way the writers and producers hoped, and they were forced to rework the entire story during the middle of the season.
Brent recalls how John implored him to have Jim and Pam get back together ASAP, “We had to pull the ripcord on it because it was so painful to the fans of the show. John Krasinski said to me, ‘Brent, this final season is for the ultra fans of the show. They’re the only ones really still left watching, right? This is for them. Jim and Pam splitting up is too painful for them to sustain all the way to the reunion. We have to get them back together immediately.’
“I was like, ‘Wow, we can’t allow this beautiful couple to be really like on the verge of divorce. It’s too awful for them.'”
They were then forced to re-edit episodes where it showed Jim and Pam splitting up completely and the pair ended up together, thankfully.
Phew!