Paper Clips and Yoghurt Lids - The Official Diary of Pam Beesly

March 5, 2004

8:52pm

It was so SURREAL watching the pilot, diary! Let alone ME when the camera cut to my talking heads.

It took everything I had in me NOT to look away. Jim let me hold on to his hand :)

Luckily the lights were off so Roy couldn't see our hands intertwined, it was kinda romantic... But I shouldn't overthink it, diary. It was just a friendly thing of Jim to do, since we were friends. You could call it a reassuring squeeze :)

By the end, I really thought that we had a shot at this pilot succeeding. It wasn't horrible, and it wasn't excellent, either. Which, I think, is okay. Somewhere in-between would be perfect for NBC to order more episodes and building on our stories from there. As a viewer, I could just think of many unanswered questions that I would hope to find out more about.

The rest of the office were kinda pissed by the end of the taping, as they were rarely featured talking, if at all. Except for Toby. Toby was the only one who wasn't in the entire pilot due to him being in New York, but he didn't make a big fuss about it. Which is what I most admire about Toby. He may be quiet, but he never tries to overanalyze things or yell his frustration about them.

Michael, on the other hand, relished in Toby's absence in the pilot and was determined to make him feel miserable. I literally don't know why he loathes Toby so much. In that case, he should have fake-fired him instead of ME.

During the whole taping, he kept whispering loudly and hooting, "OOOOOH, where's TOOOOOOOBBBBBYYYYYY? I don't think I've seen him YEEEEEEEETTTTTT!" every few minutes while nudging poor Toby, until Greg shushed him.

Kevin was disappointed that the only shot of him was when he was talking to Angela about downsizing. Angela complained to Greg that they should have filmed a talking head about her talking about her love for cats and career ambition to work in a cat café. Meredith kept asking Greg if he would add a shot of her flashing herself while the credits were rolling :0 Why does Meredith have to be so gross :0 :0

Greg politely declined and said that the pilot was best kept PG. He understood their feelings but said it wasn't realistic to squeeze in every single office worker possible on the pilot episode, otherwise the viewer would become bombarded with all this new information.

As much as they were pleased with how the pilot had turned out, Greg and Mike shared one concern which is now putting us all on edge:

Our pilot had clear similarity to The Office's original aired pilot.

From cinematic parallels of staplers in Jell-O (Jim admitted that he was inspired by Tim Canterbury for that particular prank), the coined phrase "assistant regional manager" (Dwight started saying it after Gareth Keenan) and "the fake-firing", to name a few. But somehow, until now, we had never even thought about it!

My twin Dawn Tinsley literally suffered the same hardship from David Brent, WHY hadn't I seen it coming???? :0 :0

I, for one, was so focused on getting this right that I had forgotten about The Office, even it's pure existence, at ALL. Which is ironic, because without The Office and permission from David Brent and Stephen Merchant, this would NOT be happening.

We were freaking out. This was plagiarism! We had already copied the idea of the documentary, and now we had copied their ideas without even realizing it. We were gonna get sued for copyright by David and Stephen and then this whole remake would be a failure. I could just imagine us being a laughing stock from TV critics and British news presenters.

THIS WAS BAD NEWS, DIARY! BAD. NEWS.

*struggles to breathe*

Not so fast, diary. Greg and Mike told us that they had called David and Stephen earlier to let them know about the slight (aka ninety percent) copied material, and thank God they weren't gonna sue us. They understood that most of it was purely coincidental, and said that it was up to NBC to make the final decision.

The good thing about our pilot, Greg said, was that because most of the scenarios were similar to The Office, the NBC execs couldn't give many reasons to cancel the show. They would have to ask for more episodes to get the full gist of Dunder Mifflin :)

I agree with Greg's point one hundred percent! This would leave NBC with no choice. And you would definitely want to give a remake a shot, wouldn't you?

Until May 15 (ugh, that date can't come any sooner!) we will be crossing our fingers and our toes.

I don't think I can write for a while.

:0 :0 :0