Angela wasn’t invited.
Angela Kinsey, who starred as Angela Martin in “The Office,” revealed that she was excluded from a spinoff show about Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson), which was in the works before NBC pulled the plug.
Kinsey, 53, explained what happened on the most recent episode of her podcast with fellow “The Office” co-star Jenna Fisher, “Office Ladies,” released on Aug. 14.
Fisher explained that the Season 9 episode “The Farm” was filmed in 2012 and was supposed to be a backdoor pilot to a spinoff about Dwight.
Kinsey, whose chilly character, Angela, was Dwight’s love interest, said that Wilson took her aside to drop the bombshell.
“He said, ‘Angela, I’d love to talk to you about ‘The Farm.’ And I went to his trailer on my lunch break, and he said, ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘Ang, I’m gonna do this show,’” she recalled.
Kinsey continued, “And he said, ‘You know, I sort of saw your character like Lilith for the ‘Frasier’ spin-off, you know, where Lilith is the mother of Frasier’s child, and she pops in every once in a while. But, really, the show is about this new journey that Frasier’s on.’ And that’s how Rainn told me he envisioned the show.”
She said they wanted him to have “a clean break” for the planned Dwight spinoff show.
“Dwight would be part of a whole new world, his family on the farm, and they really didn’t want my character kind of bogging down Dwight’s future. So, my character did not go to the funeral,” Kinsey explained, referring to Dwight’s aunt’s funeral.
So, Angela “was not included in ‘The Farm’ pilot,” Kinsey said.
It was planned to air as an ordinary episode of “The Office” in the final season, but the regular cast would only be in the beginning. The rest of the episode would have followed Dwight as he leaves Dunder Mifflin to go to his strange family and their beet farm.
“The Farm” show would have premiered in 2013 and aired with the last episodes of “The Office,” which was on TV from 2005 to 2013.
But NBC decided not to move forward with “The Farm.” So, they reworked the episode to include another plot line involving “The Office” character Todd Packer (David Koechner) at Dunder Mifflin.
Fisher said, “There was actually a lot of the first half of season 9, particularly with the character of Dwight, that was written with the idea that his character would be leaving in the middle of the season.”
She added, “All of that had to be changed when ‘The Farm’ didn’t move forward.”
Fisher also said several earlier plot points in “The Office” were working toward “The Farm” show that never happened.
For instance, in the Season 8 finale, a DNA test revealed that Dwight was not the biological father of Angela’s son.
“That was done only because they were sort of already writing toward this idea that there was gonna be this spin off,” Fisher noted.
“There was also that plot line, remember, when Dwight finds the pills and he starts taking them? He was depressed at work. All of that was going to support him leaving Dunder Mifflin.”
Fischer and Kinsey both said that when “The Farm” episode aired, it ended up being “clunky” because it didn’t fit with later plot points, such as Dwight and Angela tying the knot in the series finale.
