On this episode of The Office Deep Dive, Brian Baumgartner sits down with Kevin Reilly, the former president of NBC. “If it were not for Kevin Reilly, The Office would have been canceled after six episodes,” Brian says (a terrifying prospect!). “Kevin staked his reputation on our show and fought for us every step of the way.” Kevin’s tenure at NBC didn’t last, but obviously he was 100% right about The Office. He shares his memories about the “fantasy” casting process, why he was so sure about the weird documentary comedy when no one else at NBC was, why he thinks the iTunes webisodes worked so well, and much more.
Kevin was still working at FX when he started thinking about adapting the British Office for American television – but when he moved to NBC, he took it with him. After picking Greg Daniels to run the show, his focus turned to casting; executives get final approval on casts, “because it’s really everything. You have to get the script right, but the script right with the wrong casting, you’re dead – especially in comedy,” Kevin says. He calls it a “fantasy casting process;” since they weren’t on the usual pilot season schedule, they had a lot more time to find the right cast and cut together a good pilot. He remembers seeing the initial cut of the pilot “and it was very slow,” he laughs. Greg ended up editing it over 14 times to get the best version – something they normally would never have had time to do. “If we had done this during pilot season, even with my support and love, we would have been dead.”
He remembers that he used to dream about becoming the president of NBC, but when he went to sit in the office for the first time, “I had a sinking feeling that I made a horrible, horrible mistake. Which it was!” NBC had a solid history, but it was coming up on hard times, and Kevin “came in telling everyone that we needed a breath of fresh air – but after decades of winning, the feeling in the building was, ‘We know what we’re doing. Who is this guy?’” Everyone thought comedies needed to be funny but also have a sexy cast, and “this was a group of misfits…. I seemed to be advocating for things that look like what they’re not supposed to look like.” Only one screening room responded to the pilot: the room full of assistants and young people, who told Kevin, “This is kind of the only thing we would watch that’s on the air.” And now, of course, those same young people made it the biggest streaming show of all time. Hear all about Kevin’s struggle to get The Office on air, and the triumphant moment when they won their first Primetime Emmy and he knew he was really onto something, on this episode of The Office Deep Dive.
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