Whenever a TV show goes on for too long, it inevitably reaches a “jumping the shark” moment. The Office managed to avoid this (mostly) but there was a moment in time when the show almost went too far (at Jim and Pam’s wedding no less) while also risking the wrath of PETA.
In a EW retrospective on the Jim and Pam’s wedding episode, show creator Greg Daniels revealed he really wanted to incorporate a horse in the nuptials as part of a convoluted gag that would culminate in the horse going over a waterfall.
I’ll let Jim respond accordingly to this one:
Daniels’ original idea was to have Pam’s ex-boyfriend, Roy, rock up to the wedding on a horse in an attempt to win her back. Concurrent to this plotline was a running gag where Dwight has a theory that horses swept over a waterfall will survive due to their (supposed) ability to swim.
You can see where this is going.
Anyway, Roy’s intended romantic moment ultimately fails and the horse gets abandoned. Dwight being Dwight decides to take the horse and test out his aforementioned waterfall theory. At the last second Dwight and the horse go over the falls, he bails and leaves the horse to suffer its watery fate.
We never find out whether a horse can survive a tumble over the falls but that’s kind of besides the point isn’t it?
Unsurprisingly, Daniels was the only one who thought the horse idea was funny and it took everyone working on The Office to say no for him to drop the idea.
DANIELS: “Then we got to the table read and I was the last defender of the horse. The entire staff and actors were yelling at me: ‘Don’t ruin Jim and Pam’s wedding with a horse!'”
[PAUL] FEIG: “We were all like, ‘This is insane. You can’t send a horse over the falls.’ And Greg was like, ‘No, it would be really funny.’ And there was this whole debate that went on in the writers’ room, people are like, ‘I don’t know, I think this is kind of dark and weird.’
DANIELS: ‘I finally backed down and took the horse out.’
Just imagine the commotion PETA would’ve kicked up had Daniels put his foot down and kept the horse scene in, even though the horse in question would’ve almost certainly been fake.
Anyway, since the Jim and Pam wedding episode now needed a new ending. The desperate writers eventually came across the infamous JK Wedding Entrance Dance viral video on YouTube, said “screw it, let’s just do that,” and that’s how the episode’s hilarious dance entrance scene came to be.
In the end, it all worked out for the best. The Office avoided its own “jump the horse” moment, Jim and Pam got their fairytale wedding (sorta), no horses were harmed (as far as we know) and there was no PETA drama to top everything off.