No Steve Carell? Steve Carell will not show up in the finale of “The Office,” according to reports on Wednesday.
Producer Greg Daniels confirmed that Carell, who played manager Michael Scott on the show for a number of seasons before he left, will not appear in the last episode, reported Reuters.
“After attempting to beat that (British) ending in a number of different ways, we ended up doing something very similar,” Daniels told the news agency. “We are trying to get more time and the network (NBC) is being very creative about scraping some more time without us having to start the finale at a weird time that will cause half the audience to miss the first 10 minutes.”
Carell left the show in 2011 and as a result, viewership has declined.
“I think Steve felt, and I agree, that the ‘Goodbye, Michael’ episode was his goodbye and he didn’t want to overshadow the ending that all the other characters deserved,” Daniels said.
Daniels, however, said that he was grateful to have worked producing “The Office,” which has its own brand of awkward humor, for so long.
“For the people for whom that sensibility was just hitting the sweet spot, they got a long drink of that comedy juice from the show, and it maybe encouraged other people who like that sensibility to do more along those lines,” he said, according to USA Today. “It was an amazing treat to be able to work for so long in that style, which I think beforehand was more like an alt-comedy kind of a thing. For a while, we made it very mainstream.”
