Celebrity / TV

Michael Scott leaving The Office was by far and away the show's most challenging goodbye. But this made it even more emotional.

Published on October 11, 2019

Though The Office spanned nine incredible seasons, the first seven seasons are thought by most fans to be superior to the final two. A large part of that was due to the genius that was Michael Scott. Arguably one of the most colorful and hilarious characters in television history, the Regional Manager, (played perfectly by Steve Carell) was a huge part of what made Dunder Mifflin such an absurdly interesting place to work.

When Michael announced that he was leaving Scranton in favor of starting a new life with his fiance, Holly, in Colorado, his fellow employees were shocked but eventually accepting. Of course, Michael couldn’t go out without a bang, so he opted to host one final Dundie Awards. Like all Dundies’, the night eventually went awry. However, his employees managed to lure him back to The Office for one final goodbye song.

The cast says goodbye to Michael

The song, which is a remix of the classic Rent hit, “Seasons of Love”, is arguably the greatest displays of open affection that Michael’s employees ever shower him with. Throughout the song, you can see how emotional Michael is, but the emotion extends far beyond acting for several reasons. The biggest of which is that Carell was actually leaving The Office, and thus this was one of the last scenes that he was shooting with his beloved cast members.

But another reason that the song was so incredibly moving, was that Carell has never seen his fellow actors rehearse the song. In fact, the first time he heard was when they sang it on camera. Naturally, this caused some very real emotions to surface. “In the episode where we all sang to Steve the goodbye song, we all rehearsed that without him for a couple of days, and so the first time he heard it was when we sang it to him on camera, so his emotions there were real,” Jenna Fischer (who plays Pam Beesly Halpert) confessed in a recent interview with EW.

Jim and Pam’s wedding dance

Fischer also confessed that this wasn’t the only time something like this happened during her tenure on The Office. Something similar happened when the cast was filming “Niagra”, which is the episode in which Jim and Pam finally tie the knot. Fans of the show will recall the infamous flash-mob dance scene when Jim and Pam’s wedding is interrupted by their friends, family, and coworkers, dancing down the aisle to Chris Brown’s “Forever.”

Since Fischer wasn’t a part of the dance, she never saw the dance until they officially rehearsed it right before filming. The Office Ladies podcast co-host confessed that the scene was so emotional that it moved her to tears. “Since I don’t dance, that was a rehearsal that happened without me being there. I hadn’t seen it, they’d all been rehearsing it, and then I was very frustrated that I was stuck in the back of the church. I went up to the front to watch it and I was actually crying during the first rehearsal,” Fischer shared.

The actors’ emotional range

It’s so wonderful to hear that the cast of The Office experienced such genuine emotion throughout filming. Michael’s farewell and Jim and Pam’s love story are some of the most heartfelt moments in the show’s history. To hear that the actors were just as affected as those watching is likely what made those moments so sweet.

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