There's a layer to The Office even the most diehard fans may be oblivious to: the many
hours of deleted scenes that never made it to prime time. Some episodes have so many
that they nearly constitute separate episodes unto themselves, and many are just as funny
as the jokes we still quote endlessly.
It's hard to forget Michael, fresh off his trip to a Jamaican resort, banging on a steel
drum and serenading his employees with the news that he's feeling:
"Feeling hot hot hot! That's all I know so far, but I'm gonna keep practicing."
"It's good."
He has no idea that he isn't introducing his colleagues to "island living," but preventing
them from doing their work. And simultaneously, no idea that the sunbathing photo of Jan is
about to blow up his office.
In this deleted scene, he's almost sweet in his sincerity. Michael sounds ridiculous as
he attempts to remember the lyrics to Harry Belafonte's "Day-O," and no, he's nowhere
near pulling off this vibe. He describes wanting every day to feel like it did for him in Jamaica,
when he woke with the sunrise, ate a mango, and looked forward to hours spent with someone
he loved. Michael has no idea how silly he looks, how messy things are about to get with
Jan and his job, or how much he's going to annoy his employees. He's just happy to be
enjoying his new found sense of vacation identity.
Ryan's descent from good-natured temp to sleazy, pretentious grifter was one of The Office's
most satisfying character arcs. It's not that he was ever diabolical, just deeply and unrelentingly
smug. Even at the depths of his low points, from sporting bleached hair in a bowling alley
to being driven to work by his mom, he never lost his grip on his own unearned sense of
superiority. Audiences loved to hate Ryan because the world is so full of Ryans. He
tried on being a hipster photographer, the world's laziest startup mastermind, and even
the dad dumping his baby on a stranger to follow an unendingly codependent relationship.
This deleted scene gives the viewer a bit of insight into how Ryan rationalizes being
Ryan. As he explains to Kevin, someone else does everything bad he's ever perpetrated,
and that guy is always and forever the "old Ryan." He's Ryan 2.0 now and now still has
to bear the weight of another man's misdeeds. Why should he be punished when the sins of
this other man already press down upon him each day? It's utterly obnoxious and makes
total sense. Plus it makes the moment when Kevin pulls the same trick on him all the
more sweet.
Jim and Michael's relationship took many forms. Like when Jim confided in his bumbling boss
about his feelings for Pam, it was a genuine friendship. Other times, it became a game
of Jim seeing just how much he could get away with under the nose of his boss. Once in a
while it grew openly adversarial. But it never stopped mattering, from the moment they were
introduced to the day Michael left for Colorado.
This deleted scene from "Local Ad" is an example of the kindness that was always the foundation
of Jim and Michael's camaraderie. Yes, Jim is pulling a fast one on Michael, culminating
in Michael's surrender of his own office, Michael is made to look silly in contrast
to Jim's knowing prankster charm. But Jim is genuinely helping his friend get into the
right headspace, and by the end of the episode, he arranges a special screening of the Michael
Scott director's cut at Poor Richard's Pub. When Michael needs a suit to play off, Jim
steps in to provide. Michael, meanwhile, gives him a creative outlet in his workday.
Perhaps The Office's greatest trick was its casting of real-life rockstar Creed Bratton
as a fictionalized version of himself. Bratton's performance never entirely strayed from the
truth of his origins. The former musician was in the 1960s band The Grass Roots, and
ended up playing a bizarre, alternate universe interpretation of himself in The Office. The
character was a flower child through and through, from the mung beans he sprouted on a damp
paper towel in his desk drawer to his fake-ID machine. He sometimes forgot to do his job,
but he'd find a way to cover.
In this deleted scene, Creed behaved as he never had before: competently. We get to watch
the man who once toured with the likes of Janis Joplin and the Doors rock out on a Pennsylvania
party boat, playing the electric guitar like he was born to it.
"And now I do quality assurance for a paper company. As you can imagine, drugs played
a part."
Had this been included, it would have been the only acknowledgment of the history of
the actor/character prior to the finale, in which he finally plays an acoustic song. The
lateness of that reveal is a lot of fun to watch, but the deleted scene shows the Dunder
Mifflin crew completely baffled at their colleague's skill. He might not be able to last more than
90 seconds on a phone call, but he can play like he never left Woodstock.
The fake fire that led to Stanley's heart attack has become legendary on The Office.
It was a great opening scene, from the escalation of Dwight's cigarette in a trash can to the
moment Angela's cat falls out of the ceiling. But social media has given the clip new life,
circulating everywhere from Tumblr to Twitter. Stanley collapsing is just the cherry on top
of a strange comedy sundae.
"I'm gonna give him mouth to mouth."
"No, no, no, don't give him mouth to mouth for this. Michael."
"Open your mouth, come on don't swallow it!"
"I'm fine, leave me alone!"
In the deleted scene, Michael buys a portable defibrillator and you're fairly certain he
won't actually electrocute someone, but The Office has never been a show afraid to hurt
its characters. After all, someone already had a heart attack, and there was that episode
all about Michael hitting Meredith with his car. But the funny comes from Michael getting
into it with his arch nemesis in the office, Toby.
By the time Michael makes his way to the annex and asks for a handshake from his greatest
enemy, you're nearly convinced that Michael might just send a second employee to the hospital.
Lucky for Toby, the prank is obvious, and Michael doesn't succeed. But for a moment
the audience is perfectly suspended between horror and hilarity.
Who could have imagined that Phyllis, with her love of gaudy makeovers, charming handicrafts,
and overwhelming perfume would have ended up so truly bizarre? Her marriage went from
being a lovely facet of the office park to the most sexual relationship on the show.
She took revenge on Angela for crimes committed in the name of party-planning. And hey, remember
that time she revealed that she gave up a child for adoption and wondered if Erin might
be that very baby?
Phyllis' depths were strange, funny, and often pretty endearing. But in one deleted scene,
things take a turn for the wildly morbid. Phyllis straight-up confesses to manslaughter
that she and Bob only narrowly got away with, a crime she isn't even able to convince herself
into dismissing. It's humor so dark that it makes sense that it was cut. But as a deleted
scene, cast into the quasi-canon of the show, it's truly, horrifically hilarious.
Before Andy was in and out of love with Erin, before he was the boss, he was a fumbling
salesman with nothing but a Cornell degree to his name. Among the earliest hits he would
take was the moment he realized the young woman he'd been seeing was, in fact, an underage
high-schooler.
The Office pulled a bit more comedy from the otherwise criminal situation in this deleted
scene. Andy cartoonishly confronts his girlfriend, Jim attempts to keep Andy from incriminating
himself, and it becomes more and more clear just how thoroughly she and her friends were
using him for access to the adult world. Cutting this scene made the plotline more focused
on Andy's failure to establish himself in Scranton, and made it less cringeworthy.
Sometimes, comedy comes from the stuff you don't see. It makes sense that we don't get
to see much of Michael splashing around in the titular Koi pond of this sixth season
episode, especially when much of the story hinges on exactly how he fell in. But a deleted
scene, which shows the security camera footage of the fall and its aftermath, reveals the
whole affair as a showcase of comedy greatness. Carell shows off his slapstick chops to an
extent rarely seen in the show, somehow managing to drag the event into an operatic odyssey.
He repeatedly underestimates how far the edge of the pond is, as he slips and stumbles.
The fish are bewildered and as we learn later in the episode, endangered by Michael's pratfalls.
"Um, Michael, the custodian called again, apparently a koi has died."
"Aww!"
"Man."
"It's a fish."
And through it all, the security camera sweeps calmly back and forth. There's just something
perfectly absurd about it and reminds us of just how good physical comedy can be.
Jim and Dwight's rivalry was a pillar of The Office from beginning to end. What made their
tension so special was the fact that Dwight never stopped believing himself to be the
superior man, despite the many, many times Jim took him down a peg. Dwight is, according
to himself, the true authority in the office, an alpha male, a genius, and so entirely perfect
at being himself that his Second life virtual persona just happened to also be a Pennsylvanian
paper salesman who owned and operated a small-scale beet farm.
It's Dwight's ego which makes this deleted scene so special. Dwight's password is Frodo,
because of course it is, and then he changes it to Gollum, because of course he does. A
lesser show might have reduced Jim to a bully and Dwight to the kicked-around patsy, but
the cast and crew of The Office knew that Dwight would never allow himself to be reduced
to such a cringing caricature. He's the volunteer sheriff and would never show any kind of weakness
around his rival. But the audience roots for both of them, because no one's really getting
hurt and Dwight and Jim need each other to get through their days at Dunder Mifflin.
In this deleted opening scene, Dwight is faced with the greatest dilemma of his life: when
authority is compromised, who should he obey? He walks in to find his entire desk circled
in police tape, wondering what happened. His first instinct is to look at Jim, who is the
obvious prankster. On the one hand, Dwight believes himself to be the greatest of all
leaders, evidenced most dramatically by the time in which he was manager. He became something
of a dictator, commissioning portraits of himself for the conference room and painting
his office as black as possible to intimidate the employees that he, of course, only ever
refers to as subordinates. And yet, Dwight is just as defined by his servility. He never
loses a chance to play assistant to Michael and all who fill the managerial role after
him, even if it comes at the cost of his dignity. To Dwight, there is no dignity without hierarchy.
Essentially, he becomes a robot faced with a paradox. We often saw Dwight reduced to
ridiculousness, but rarely did we ever get to see him play a part in it himself.
Season 4 starts off strong, and not just because Jim and Pam finally decide to act on their
feelings. That long-running plotline plays second fiddle to the real star of the season
opener, the moment Michael hits Meredith with his car. The entire show came from that moment,
poised on the edge between horrifying and hysterical that The Office kept sharpened
to a wicked point. It became a TV legend. What could ever top Michael Scott's Dunder
Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run
Race for the Cure?
The deleted scene of everyone visiting Meredith in the hospital comes about as close as anything
could. It's a symphony of awkwardness, a perfect blend of these characters at their most vivid.
Angela's bad attitude and Kevin's blunt narcissism are held barely in check by Michael, who of
course, is working overtime to convince everyone that he is not at fault here. The scene is
everything that made these characters so weird, lovable, and ultimately, unforgettable. They
might not have wiped out rabies, but they cemented a place in our hearts.
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