Greg Daniels, Part II: Long Skinny Notebooks, and The Five-To-One

NOT ONLY has Greg Daniels co-created one of the two best animated tv series of the last 20 years, King of the Hill, but he also wrote for the other one. (The Simpsons) He's written for Seinfeld and Saturday Night Live, and won Emmys galore. In fact, three of Daniels' Simpsons episodes are ranked as among the most popular Simpsons eps of all time. That's a feat.

This is the conclusion to my conversation with Greg Daniels, Creator and Executive Producer of the American version of The Office, which took place at the Banff Springs Hotel during the 2007 Banff World Television Festival.

For Part I, go here. To hear an NPR feature on writing The Office with Daniels and Mindy Kaling (writer, "Kelly") go here.


DTOS: I hate to go to the lame place -- this whole journalist driven, "death of comedy" thing -- but one of the great things about The Office that maybe points what's missing in a lot of other tv comedy today is the idea of truth. There is something true in the work you've done, both in King of the Hill and now in The Office. I recognize the America I see in The Office. And the America that I saw in your years of King of the Hlll. And I don't see that on Television a lot.


GREG DANIELS: Well, we have a couple of things that we do. And one of them is I get these reporters notebooks for the writers, and pass them out. And for King in the Hill we used to go to Texas and go around with our reporters' notebooks and here we're always going to offices, talking to people, and so there's a lot of observational comedy -- seeing what's going on and making humor out of that, rather than coming up with the comedy first. So that's one reason. But another thing is that the cameramen on The Office, specifically Randall Einhorn, although Matt Sohn his number two is also very good...but he's our DP and I used to sit him down when I told him what we were looking for and I'd say, "truth and beauty. we're going for truth and beauty." He really responded to that. "Cool," he'd say -- he lived in Australia, he'd go, "Truth and beauty, mate!" And then he'd go out...so he was always trying to find that moment of behavior, or that thing in the camerawork. So I think that's a lot of -- well, it's a combination of a lot of factors, but I'm glad you pointed it out -- because that's always our sort of secret thing we'd talk to him about.


DTOS: From a standpoint of...for the writer geeks reading this, now. Is there anything in your process that you've learned -- your secret "Office" weapon, the way that you do things that is a better way to do things than maybe a lot of other shows are doing?


GREG DANIELS: Well, I think surprise is extremely important. Which means originality. And I think people have to be really careful when they're doing creative writing that they're not remembering things. Because I think a lot of times you're going, "oh wow, that would be really cool if this happened, and then that happened" and you're not really thinking of it for the first time. You're actually remembering bits and pieces of things that you've seen on other TV shows. Or movies or something. And I would try and steer away from other shows and look toward real life to try and make the writing be fresher. And find stories that people tell you. Stuff like that -- not go, "remember that classic Lucy episode? Well a couple of tweaks and adjustments..." I think a lot of people do that, you know? "I know, how about a 'locked in a' something episode? That's always worked before." And I think that's just the wrong way to think about coming up with ideas. It's so much better to get these little skinny reporters notebooks that fit in your back pocket and try and go out and try and look at things and think of what would be funny in the things that you see out in the real world.

DTOS: Just because you've been so great with it, and have tried so many experiments with it -- what have you learned on the show about using the web, and the internet, and webisodes?


GREG DANIELS: Well, I would love to do way way more stuff on the web. Right now there's certain, um...Guild considerations, which I'm very respectful of, because I think the Guild is a great way to protect a good life for creative people and they've identified that these things are not appropriate for Guild members to do. And for some reason, the companies have not wanted to set a precedent by negotiating a Guild-covered agreement, which is silly because it's the same price, you know. But I guess these are issues that are coming up for negotiation in the next Minimum Basic Agreement, so no one wants to touch it now, which is too bad. If they did, I would be all over the web with all sorts of programming. As it is now, you know, once you pick around all the Guild issues -- we're still trying to do a lot of stuff. Just not as much as we would do. Why do it? To me it's because the whole thing with our show is that we've made it much more disposable because it's a fake documentary. So if there's a boom in the shot it's okay, and the lighting doesn't have to be perfect. And that kind of relaxes everybody in the sense of, they can try weird things. And if it works it works, and it goes in. And if it doesn't it doesn't and we haven't wasted an enormous amount of time and money. It's the ease of production -- and I think that's even more true with the web. Because nobody expects glossy, Hollywood values on the web now. So it's really all about the writing and the ideas, not the execution. And it makes it easier for people to just throw their ideas on. So to me if we have weird ideas, that we don't want to spend tens of thousands of dollars of the studio's money on because I can't justify it, cause it's just too weird. I still could maybe justify a couple of thousand dollars. And that, creatively is maybe is the most exciting part...these weird, late night kind of ideas. The 1am sketch at Saturday Night Live.


DTOS: The five to one, yeah!


GREG DANIELS: Yeah, the five to one, they just throw it on! Yeah, I'd love to do more of those. That's what the web is to me.

New episodes of The Office return to NBC this fall.