We need it to be big and crazy and wild and this is the first thing they’re gonna see, so we want people to stick around,'' writer Anthony Farrell recalled. 'Greg was like, 'It’s the Super Bowl episode. To pull it all off, it was crucial that the episode's opening minutes be absolutely unforgettable, pulling in all those new viewers who'd stuck around after the game. After a while, when it was clear the idea wasn't quite working for the Super Bowl episode, the writers concocted the notion that Dwight would stage an elaborate fire drill and cause panic, eventually leading to a heart attack for coworker Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker) and thus launching the 'stress relief' phase of the episode. He was like the father of us all and we were like, 'Dad … Your idea … We’re not so sure about it.''ĭespite their reservations, the writers went to work trying to flesh out Daniels' idea into an hourlong broadcast, built around the concept that Jim would 'lose' Pam in a card game.

'Basically the idea was that Jim loses Pam in a poker game. 'That was a very stressful time because Greg came in one day and he had a big idea inspired by some French film he saw,' writer Gene Stupnitssky recalled in the oral history, excerpted from Andy Green's book The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s. RELATED: Here Are All The Major Characters on The Office It's absolute pandemonium, but according to a 2020 oral history of the scene posted over at Vulture, it almost didn't turn out that way. With a single cigarette left to burn in a trashcan, Dwight sends smoke drifting through the office, and sends his coworkers running for their lives. It starts with a typical day at the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin, and the camera follows Dwight Schrute ( Rainn Wilson) as he moves through the office, disabling doors, heating up doorknobs, and preparing for the most chaotic fire drill in the history of the company. What the writers eventually came up with was 'Stress Relief,' a two-part episode that opens with one of the most elaborate and bonkers sequences in the history of the series. Most importantly, in this case at least, it had to be the kind of episode that would instantly make people rethink changing the channel after the game was over. That meant creator Greg Daniels and the show's writers had to come up with something big, an episode that would be friendly to millions of new viewers who'd never seen the show before, while also continuing the storylines already established by Season 5's first half. That year, NBC chose The Office as the program to follow its broadcast of the 43rd installment of the Big Game, also known as the biggest television night of the year.

Watch every episode of The Office on Peacock.

Office fire drill