Only One Episode of The Office Was Never Rewritten (It's Also Its Funniest)
It's only natural for scripts to get tweaked in the process, but some of them are perfect as they are.
The Office has plenty of hilarious episodes, and everyone has their own favorite moments in the legendary sitcom. However, when it comes to the general opinion regarding the series' absolute best episode, everyone is surprisingly unanimous.
Dinner Party, the thirteenth episode of the show's fourth season, is undoubtedly an icon of its own. Turned into memes, learnt by heart, it is a pinnacle of The Office's cringeworthy humor that is so uncomfortable you just can't stop watching.
Turns out, it was also the only episode that was not rewritten a single time, as the show's co-writer Gene Stupnitsky revealed to Rolling Stone.
"Most scripts get rewritten, and I think this was the only one ever done that didn’t. The only thing that was changed was that in our first draft Jan hits the neighbor’s dog and kills it on purpose," he recalled, with another co-writer, Lee Eisenberg, adding that was "too far."
Angela Kinsey, the actress behind The Office's one and only Angela Martin, said that everyone was "laughing hysterically" when they first read the script for Dinner Party. Stupnitsky, in his turn, recalled that the table read turned out to be so hilarious he "was just sweating through [his] T-shirt."
If you need to refresh your memory (as if this episode isn't engraved in our brains forever), Dinner Party mainly revolves around Jim and Pam visiting Michael and Jan for a casual dinner, which quickly descends into a chaotic mess sprinkled with family drama, candle-making, and "that's-what-she-said" punchlines.
Feel free to delve into nostalgia and stream Dinner Party, as well as the rest of The Office, on Peacock.
Source: Rolling Stone