The nine-season running show The Office is so captivating, that even six years after it last aired on television, it still manages to keep a gigantic legion of fans all around the world. The characters are always present on Halloween party costumes and iconic lines from the “world’s best boss” Michael Scott (Steve Carell) still can be easily spotted on T-shirts and tweets. Well, it’s no surprise that, with such a success, people start to ask for revivals and spin-offs. However, what we’re going to talk about today manages to be even better than any of that: a brand new podcast presented by two of the stars in the original show cast called Office Ladies!
The project, headed by the two brilliant actresses behind Pam (Jenna Fischer) and Angela (Angela Kinsey) in The Office, has a really simple concept: each week, they re-watch an episode of the series and make some comments over it. This way, not only do they give the audience the nostalgic feeling of watching their favorite show all over again, but they also give a touch of intimacy to it, since everything that is said comes from a perspective of someone who was literally a part of it during its production.
- The Pilot
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Before a proper episode was released, Earwolf – the network responsible for Office Ladies – posted an initial teaser of the podcast on September 17th. It has only three minutes and forty seconds and, on that very same day, it became the number one podcast on the Apple charts. That was only a sneak peak of the success it would make when it finally aired officially on October 16th.
The first episode, called “The Pilot” is just as exciting as the fans expected it to be: Jenna and Angela, who, by the way, are best friends in real life, break down memorable stories of how the pilot was shot, their first impressions on the cast, easter-eggs in the background of some scenes and even inside jokes that only two people who were there can know. For an example, we discover that Angela Kinsey actually auditioned for the role of Pam before getting her part as the accountant Angela Martin. And that the fact that her role was fascinated by cats came up because of a drawing she did for a scene in the pilot – only then it became a running gag for the rest of the nine seasons that would come.
- That’s What ‘They’ Said
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Besides from giving the audience the urge to re-watch the episodes they go through, Fischer and Kinsey are able to keep the whole 50-minute show interesting and funny enough for listeners to break in laughter in the middle of the street.
At one point of “The Pilot”, Jenna reveals that one of Michael’s most iconic speeches, the one where he talks about his personal heroes, was actually created by Steve Carrell. According to her, the showrunner Greg Daniels asked him off-cameras who he thought Michael Scott’s heroes would be, and that’s when they came up with the memorable line: “Bob Hope. Hmm, Abraham Lincoln, definitely. Bono… and probably God would be the fourth one.”
- ‘Fast Facts’ and ‘Kinsey Tidbits’
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If you consider yourself a Dundler Mifflin expert, get ready to be challenged. The actresses known for Pam and Angela bring, in each episode, some of what they call “Fast Facts”. Basically, they spill out some fun curiosities about the making of the show that will probably make you rethink a lot of the scenes. One of them is that “it was only six months later [after the shooting of the first episode] that [they] started filming the rest of the episodes” from that season – that’s something Jenna tells us in order to explain why the role of Meredith was played by two different actresses, for example.
Angela also likes to point out some details in the background of the scenes that people might let go by unnoticed, something that she calls “Kinsey Tidbits”. Just another fun idea to make the podcast even more captivating – which, as its numbers show, works perfectly.
Since it has just been launched, Office Ladies has only a few available episodes. That means you’re still on time to catch up with its schedule and listen to the new ones every time they air! But, listen, here goes a warning: make sure you have time to watch the show again, because you’re going to want to! In case you take our advice, Office Ladies is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Stitcher, RSS and RadioPublic.