As the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression — unless, of course, you’re the crew behind “The Office,” who decided to “re-pilot” their show midway through its fifth season.
The idea came about when NBC decided that “The Office” would take the coveted spot immediately following Super Bowl XLIII in 2009. In an interview with Vulture, writer Halsted Sullivan said it gave the series a unique opportunity. “We were tasked with making it a stand-alone episode but making it something that fans who have been along for the ride all five seasons could enjoy, but also people who tuned in to the show for the first time would be able to enjoy,” he said. “Greg [Daniels, producer] … was like, ‘Look, this is our opportunity to sort of re-pilot the show and introduce a whole new group of people to ‘The Office.’ It’s very important to have a really grabby opening.'”
Eventually, they settled on the idea of Dwight staging a fire drill. “Greg was in a place where he was like, ‘We need it to be bigger and crazier,'” said writer Anthony Farrell. “We just started adding all sorts of crazy s*** happening with the mayhem and the melee.” The result was one of the show’s best cold open scenes.
The cold open became an iconic part of The Office’s history
The cold open begins with Dwight (Rainn Wilson) booby trapping the office’s exits, then starting a fire to provide a real-world training scenario. The scene quickly devolves into chaos; Angela (Angela Kinsey) attempts to save her cat Bandit by throwing him to Oscar (Oscar Nuñez) as he tries to escape through the ceiling. “Well, you can’t injure an animal and so … We had to build a stuffed animal to match Bandit,” producer Randy Cordray told Vulture. “It was about $12,000.”
The opening scene has gone down as one of the best cold opens in television history. But NBC actually wanted the episode to be even bigger, pushing for celebrity cameos, something the writers balked at, according to Halsted Sullivan. “What we didn’t wanna do is have some stunt casting in our opportunity to showcase ‘The Office’ as a new pilot to the world,” Sullivan told Vulture. To appease the network, the writers created a b-plot where Andy shows a pirated movie to Jim and Pam starring Jack Black, Jessica Alba, and Cloris Leachman.
In the end, the Super Bowl lead-in did wonders for the series, with “Stress Relief” becoming the most watched episode in its history, and one of the best episodes of “The Office” in its nine-year run. “Stress Relief” also scored an Emmy win for director Jeff Blitz for outstanding direction of a comedy series.
