"What really made The Office stand out was its cast. Their faces were unfamiliar-apart from Daily Show correspondent Steve Carell, the actors were virtually unknown, unless you happened to remember who played "Messenger No. 3" in the Jimmy Fallon vehicle Taxi-but, more than that, they were different. The standard pitch for a TV sitcom was to make the cast look like a friend group you were dying to join, so funny and charismatic you could come back from an evening with them"
"Some of that was due to a deliberate overall de-glamming. Brian Baumgartner, who played the lumbering, slow-witted Kevin Malone, recently said that while the actors went through a traditional hair and makeup process before the beginning of the shooting day, they were forbidden from getting periodic touch-ups afterward, the better to preserve the sense that the characters, like the actors, had spent hours wilting under the lights."
The Office debuted on NBC in spring 2005 and used a single-camera, observational documentary style that differed from traditional multicam sitcoms. The cast was largely unfamiliar aside from Steve Carell, and the actors were intentionally de-glammed so characters appeared ordinary rather than glamorized. Hair and makeup were applied before shooting but not touched up during the day to preserve a wilted-on-the-lights look. Casting favored improv-trained performers for supporting roles, expanding the pool of actors who could appear on network sitcoms and contributing to a tone of everyday awkwardness rather than idealized friend-group charisma.
Read at Slate Magazine
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]