How they Wrote The Office - 10 Screenwriting Tips from the Best Sitcom ever written

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10 Screenplay tips from Greg Daniels, Mindy Kaling, Michael Schur, BJ Novak

The Office is an American mockumentary sitcom television series that depicts the everyday work lives of office employees. Based on the 2001–2003 BBC series of the same name, it was adapted for American television by Greg Daniels.
The Office originally featured Steve Carell, Rainn Wilson, John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer, and B. J. Novak as the main cast.
The Office received significant acclaim from television critics as the show's characters, content, structure, and tone diverged considerably from the British version. It won four Primetime Emmy Awards, including one for Outstanding Comedy Series.
In 2016, Rolling Stone named The Office one of the 100 greatest television shows of all time.


01 - Picking the perfect writing room staff is similar to picking a baseball team; you need each person to be good at a different element of the screenwriting process.

02 - There is a hierarchy in the writing room. For example, the showrunner will get to choose the overriding arcs of the season, and the staff writer will pitch individual jokes and improve the drafts.

03 - It’s the job of the showrunner to try and make sure that everyone feels safe in the writer's room. However, it’s a balance, because if they feel too safe, they just talk and talk and talk and no work gets done.

04 - Start writing your season with all the writers in the room coming up with hundreds of ‘what if’ scenarios. Make sure nothing is off-limits and kick around ideas until something usable comes around.

05 - After someone has written the main a-story of the episode, all writers will gather in the room and break it down and add the b-story as well as individual jokes and bits.

06 - When adapting a tv show, you need to first understand what you are adapting - you have to take the show apart like a clock, and then convert it to the situation in which the new show will be, whether it will be set in a new country or a different time etc.

07 - Read hundreds of spec scripts for episodes and then meet with some of your favorite writers in person to see if you would want to spend the rest of the season with them.

08 - Setting up a recurring joke on the show can go from being a funny character catchphrase to being paid off as a very emotional moment when used in the right context.

09 - Allow actors to contribute to the writing process by giving them a seed of what a certain scene is about and letting them improvise it, but always have a cemented backup script everyone can follow if they don’t feel inspired to improvise.

10 - Writing a show is a substantial task so even if one person is heading the writing of an episode, everyone in the writing room contributes to making the episode as good as it can be.


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