An Interview with The Office Creator Greg Daniels

Greg Daniels, co-creator of King of The Hill, former writer for Seinfeld, The Simpsons, and Saturday  Night Live, was the man tasked with adapting the hit UK series The Office for NBC. It became a daunting prospect once American audiences fell in love with the original via BBC America, and after the failure of the American adaptation of Coupling. But after a rocky start, the American version of The Office came into its own and has become one of the few bright spots on NBC's lineup, earning critical acclaim and solid if not stellar ratings.

I spoke with Daniels at the Banff World Television Festival, where he would later conduct a Master Class session to a group of industry professionals.

What do you hope to share with people at the festival?

Well I don't know. I'm supposed to do a Master Class, although it's only one hour. I'm hoping people will ask more craft type questions, because that's the most interesting to me, to go back and forth with other writers on the craft issues, and I'm hoping people won't be asking questions like "how do you get an agent?"

The Office seems to use the web really well to engage with fans. Do you think that's important to building an audience, too?

I think it is very important to building our specific audience. The audience we have may have a lot to do with all of our web efforts. We have a tech-savvy, younger audience. I love to do stuff for the web. I think the cool thing about the web right now is that the production standards are lower. To me that makes it like late night TV where the group that's watching is extremely pure and comedy interested, and is there for the ideas and the writing for the most part, not so much for the splashy Hollywood execution of everything. So if you have a good idea you can do really weird, funny stuff and put it on the web.

I thought our webisodes were pretty good, but they still were too much like little slices of the show. What I'd like to see us to do is take the more minor characters, see the very edges of the world we've set up on the show, to see how it continues i all different directions outside of the main characters. There are certain practical considerations about how to pay the people, how to avoid the guilds – well, not avoid them, but unfortunately right now there is no contract that covers them. Hopefully after the next contract there will be some standard payments that goes to the guilds. But I hope they're still cheap and disposable, because I think that will be the creative part.

Article Author: Diane Kristine Wild

Diane writes about boring things by day, pop culture things by night. She also runs the TV, Eh? website, a compilation of news about Canadian television. Follow her on Twitter @deekayw for more random thoughts.

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