Jenna Fischer talks about putting her foot down to save Pam's Office painting
A new episode of Office Ladies reveals the lengths Jenna Fischer went to to cut a plotline about the painting being destroyed
Pam Beesly’s painting of the Scranton office building, introduced in the third season of NBC’s The Office, is an iconic prop from the long-running sitcom—to the point that a shot of it closes out the show’s deeply sentimental grand finale. Its purchase is a major moment in the development of Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, his relationship with Jenna Fischer’s Pam, and the whole ethos of sweetness that helps to undercut the show’s frequent bouts of cynicism.
All of which, apparently, was argued vigorously by Fischer herself, who revealed in a new episode of her podcast Office Ladies how aggressively she had to lobby not to have the painting destroyed as a joke.
Said destruction was apparently plotted for “Mafia,” a sixth-season episode that takes place during Pam’s honeymoon with the ever-smirking Jim. As originally scripted, the episode would have seen replacement receptionist Erin attempt to clean the painting, only to accidentally destroy it in the process. As Fischer noted to co-host and former co-star Angela Kinsey, the moment she first read about the plotline at a table read a week before filming, she got immediately angry, and began trying to persuade everyone she could get her hands on not to go through with the plotline.