Let’s be honest, Michael Scott is a pretty awful person. Sure he may have his moments during his time on The Office but the negatives far outweigh the good, which makes you wonder what was going through the writers’ heads. Case in point: The writers thought it was a good idea to make a Halloween joke about mental health by having Michael pretend to commit suicide in front of a group of kids.
Yeah.
At the TV show‘s sixth season Halloween episode, ‘Koi Pond’, the Dunder Mifflin warehouse is transformed into a haunted house for children. It was all going well until Michael decided to go full “Michael Scott” and ruined it for everyone by pretending to commit suicide by hanging as a way to scare the kids while also educating them about mental health.
It’s so cringeworthy and inappropriate that you immediately forget some genuinely funny bits in the scene, such as Michael is wearing a then-already-outdated “Dick In A Box” Halloween costume, Creed dressed as a hustling vampire who wants to sell the childrens’ blood and Jim with the word “book” written on his face.
Having said that, there’s a chance you may have forgotten or missed the scene entirely. When ‘Koi Pond’ first aired, audiences weren’t particularly comfortable seeing Michael Scott fake-hang himself on a family-friendly show like The Office (unsurprisingly) and NBC quickly pulled the scene from reruns and DVD releases.
According to The AV Club, an anonymous producer said it wasn’t just public outcry over the scene that caused it to be cut. Apparently Caryn Zucker, the wife of then-president and CEO of NBC Universal Jeff Zucker, also urged her husband to cut the scene due to her work in suicide prevention.
Yet as you saw above, the cut scene was later uploaded in its entirety onto YouTube, where it’ll forever live as weird yet controversial relic from a show that hasn’t aged as well as many people think.
Given how its been over a decade since the ‘Koi Pond’ aired, it’ll be interesting to hear the cast and crew from The Office share their thoughts on the scene and how it somehow managed to get through the writer’s room and onto everyone’s TV screens (briefly).
Here’s hoping Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey talk about it on their podcast at some point and maybe share their thoughts on how Michael Scott is actually a problematic mess.
If any of the issues mentioned in this story affected you or anyone you know, help is available to you:
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