Who decided The Office should end? Jenna Fischer answers
Jenna Fischer is naming the person who decided The Office would end after 9 seasons—care to guess who?
On Jesse Tyler Ferguson’s podcast Dinner’s On Me, Jenna Fischer said the push to wind down The Office with a deliberately planned final season came from John Krasinski. He wanted the writers to know, going in, that it would be the last run so they could build to a goodbye—and so the core cast and alums could actually reunite for it.
“It was actually John Krasinski who said, 'Gosh, it would be great if we could like call her out. If we could know that this is our last season and we could write toward that." Yeah and we can end it all together,”
Fischer said on the podcast.
By the later seasons, key people had already moved on—Fischer named Mindy Kaling and Michael Schur—and the cast worried that stretching the show longer would mean even more departures. Krasinski, who was also a producer, argued for calling the shot then so the team could craft a sendoff worthy of nine seasons.
Fischer added that NBC may have preferred another year, but the cast and creative side pushed to wrap while they could still bring everyone together. That plan paid off with returns in Season 9: Steve Carell, who exited at the end of Season 7, popped back in for a surprise appearance, and both B.J. Novak and Mindy Kaling came back for the finale stretch.
About that spin-off
The world of the show lives on in The Paper, a mockumentary from creators Greg Daniels and Michael Koman that follows the same documentary crew to a new workplace: the Toledo Truth-Teller, an Ohio newspaper trying to survive the digital age.
- Domhnall Gleeson
- Sabrina Impacciatore
- Chelsea Frei
- Melvin Gregg
- Gbemisola Ikumelo
- Alex Edelman
- Ramona Young
Oscar Nuñez also returned to reprise his role. The Paper premiered in September 2025 and has been renewed for a second season, which is set to return in September.