When I recently interviewed Brian Baumgartner for the film “Electric Jesus,” as a superfan of his long-running television comedy “The Office,” I also wanted to get to the bottom of a story I haven’t heard as much about. The NBC comedy starring Steve Carell, which everyone knows is a remake of the British version, wasn’t a runaway success when it premiered in 2005. I have always heard that because of that, the stars took the brand-new world of social media to connect with fans and create a following. Back then, MySpace was the jam and one of my personal highlights was messaging Pam (Jenna Fischer) and Angela (Angela Martin), who were kind and funny.
Brian, when I first heard of “The Office,” tell me if this is true, because it may be an urban legend, that social media kind of helped “The Office” take off. Some of the stars got on MySpace, created an account. I was brand new to MySpace, and I had friends who said, “Oh, these actors are on MySpace.” So, I got on there and friended them. I don’t know if you were one of them.
I was one of them. Yes, I was one of them. That was 100% true. There were a lot of reasons that “The Office” eventually took off. But yes, it is absolutely true. In the first season, we only did six episodes, and we were absolutely going to be canceled. And we came back for the second season. What a lot of people don’t know, because we ended up doing a full season, we were only given six more at that time as well. And really, we were dead. There were a lot of things that happen that kept us alive. But one of the things that we tried to do, and we were sort of the first show to do this. We were the first show that did we call them at the time “webisodes,” which was original content online that didn’t appear an episode. No one had ever done that before. But part all these things were an attempt to use social media to try to grow an audience because we were about to be out of jobs. We thought, “What are people in offices doing right now?” And the answer we came up with was MySpace. So if we take the idea of this being a documentary, and these are real people working in Scranton, Pennsylvania at a place called Dunder Mifflin, that would probably be on MySpace. So we all created accounts, not Brian Baumgartner. Brian Baumgartner did not have a MySpace account. But Kevin Malone had a MySpace account, then I know, Jenna, Pam Beesly. Angela, Angela Kinsey, or Angela Martin. Ryan Howard, who was played by B.J. Novak. I think he was involved. And then I think Rainn kind of picked up the reins.. But he was king of Twitter, early on. He started Twitter and would kind of tweet like Dwight and say funny things and, it really helped build that platform early on.
I don’t think the story is told enough that basically, the actors through social media helped build “The Office.” It’s just fascinating that, “Hey, we got to keep this show going. So, let’s, you know, you have some control here.” And you connected with fans in a way that they had never been connected with before.
I think that’s right. And I think part of it was the uniqueness of that show, right? I mean, now, everybody is on social media and trying to get attention for their shows. The difference is that it’s always the actors, right? It’s not the characters. Now, there would probably be conversations about, “What’s legal? And are actors allowed to write words pretending to write that are written by other people and the show?” At the time, it was like, “Let’s give this a try.” And so we just did it. We didn’t ask permission. We just did it. And they ended up liking it. But again, it was because of the specific show that it was supposed to be a documentary. So, we were not actors. We were the real people. That was why it was partially unique.
Can you tell me a little about your podcast?
We’ve just launched “Off the Beat.” It’s a new podcast available on iHeart, Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts. We’re talking to different people and entertainment. We’ve talked to virtually everyone from “The Office now, and last week, we started talking to some more folks. So, we have Eric Stonestreet coming up from “Modern Family” and Alyson Hannigan from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “How I Met Your Mother” and Rob Riggle and a bunch of others coming up. So, I’m really excited. I’ve really been enjoying the process of finding out the moments that helped build all of these people’s careers so I’m having a great time with that.
Brian is now starring in the new film “Electric Jesus.” Subscribe to his podcast “Off the Beat” at this link.
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