nothing is what it seems

Television had learned before that a single scene could justify huge budgets if it served to fix a series in the collective memory: game of Thrones burned millions in battles and dragons to redefine the television epic, lost Its story began with a pilot as expensive as it is risky to “leave the viewer nailed” from the first minute, and Friends turned special episodes into truly global events based on of astronomical checks. Therefore, what is truly surprising is not that a series spent a lot of money on a key scene, but that a small and apparently cheap comedy like The Office decided to do it at “that” moment.

The millionaire exception. The Office was always built from budget containment, relying in scripts, rhythm and characters rather than in large technical displays, but that logic was consciously broken with a specific scene: the proposal from Jim to Pam at the beginning of season five.

What on the screen seems like an everyday moment, one almost improvised and without artifice, ended up becoming the most expensive sequence of the entire series, a deliberate contrast between narrative simplicity and technical complexity.

The simplest proposal… And more expensive. The scene that we are going to see next lasts just 52 seconds and cost around a whopping of 250,000 dollarsa totally disproportionate figure for an office comedy almost always shot indoors.

The original intention was for Jim Halpert’s proposal to Pam Beesly to come up in a completely ordinary place and common in the United States as a highway gas station, and it was to reinforce the idea that important moments do not always occur in special settings. It was precisely this normality that forced an extraordinary production.

Let’s see the moment:

A fake highway in California. Filming in an authentic East Coast service area it turned out to be impossiblepartly due to security restrictions imposed after the 9/11 terrorist attack, so the team decided rebuild it from scratch in a parking lot in Los Angeles.

As? Apparently inspired by a real Connecticut stop that series creator Greg Daniels knew about as a child. The team used images of Google Street View to replicate every detail and then built the set in just nine days.

Trucks, rain and invisible tricks. Not only that. To simulate real highway traffic, built a track four-lane road around the set on which cars and trucks traveled at more than 80 km/h, vehicles driven by dozens of specialists, so that the wind and noise were real.

Added to this were enormous rain machines and a later digital work to erase Californian mountains and replace them with trees from the East Coast, completing an illusion that the viewer was never supposed to notice.

A decoration that was not what it seemed. Furthermore, the gas station seen on the screen was, in reality, almost flat: The interior of the minimarket was barely eight feet deep and many of the products in the back were simply printed and laminated photographs.

As the author Andy Greene said in the book The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000severything was designed to fool the camera, not to exist as a functional space, reinforcing the paradox of a scene that appears to be the most realistic and spontaneous in the series.

Romanticism on toxic terrain. As a final irony, the place chosen to build the set was neither more nor less than a former industrial site with toxic waste sealed under the asphalt, a detail that did not affect the filming but added another layer to the story.

However, for its protagonists, the memory of filming of the scene in question was genuinely romantic and the result fit perfectly with the tone of a unique series: a great emotional moment hidden within a seemingly insignificant scenario.

Image | The Office

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