Jenna Fischer Believes That ‘The Office’ Seasons Without Steve Carell Were Okay After All

Everyone loves Michael Scott. If she were being completely honest, one viewer who might have agreed that the Carell seasons were best is Jenna Fischer, who played Pam Beesly/Halpert. “I think there was this lore, especially among the cast and the creatives, that maybe we hit our peak in Season Three or Season Four,” Fischer told Dana Carvey and David Spade this week on the Fly on the Wall podcast. “And also this belief that the two seasons after Steve left, we were just treading water and maybe they weren’t as good.”

Emmy voters showed The Office a lot of love in its first three seasons, then got enamored with shiny new shows. “I think some of the award nominations stopped after Season Three,” Fischer ed. “So I think maybe we got in our heads and thought, ‘Oh, I guess we’re not creating as great.’”

But one advantage of hosting a rewatch podcast like Office Ladies is viewing all 209 episodes from a fresh perspective, no longer embroiled in the process of making the show. Some of those episodes surprised her. “When I watched everything, some of my favorite episodes were in Seasons Eight and Nine after Steve had left,” Fischer explained. “There were still these amazing storylines.”

Even though the awards stopped coming (for the most part) after the third season, Fischer believes The Office was still delivering the goods. “I have to say now, when I look back, some of my favorite episodes were also in Seasons Four through Six,” she added.

Episodes she called out as favorites? Season Four’s “Dinner Party,” the classic comedy nightmare in which Michael and Jan host a gathering straight out of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, for one. There’s also the Michael Scott Paper Company arc that dominated Season Five. “That’s just great TV,” she argued. 

Fischer says having writers as cast (Mindy Kaling, BJ Novak and Paul Lieberstein, to name three) was a blast. “They would be pitching alternate jokes right there on the set,” she recalled. “We did a lot of improvising, but I don’t know how much of it actually made the cut. We got to play and have fun, but I would say 90 percent of what you see on the screen was written on the page.”

Being forced to rewatch her own performances over the course of nine seasons has been a blessing and a curse, said Fischer. “Sometimes I watch it, and I’m like, ‘I’ll never do work that good again,’” she observed. “‘Shit, that was great!’” 

“But then there’s other scenes where I just cringe, where I’m like, ‘Oh, God, I how I struggled with that and I couldn’t do it, and now here it is for everyone to see, and I guess I just have to move on,’” she said. “So I’ve had both reactions.”