Season Five of The Office kicked off with Jim finally proposing to Pam at a gas station halfway between Scranton, Pennsylvania, where he lives, and New York City, where she’s taking a graphic design class. It’s more romantic than it sounds. It was also an unexpected gesture because, as Jenna Fischer explained on the Office Ladies podcast, you rarely see big life events — proposals, weddings, births — in the season premieres.
“I just want you guys to know that [showrunner] Greg [Daniels] spoke with us about this. He said that he really wanted Jim’s proposal to Pam to be in the season premiere. He thought, number one — that would be unexpected. You usually end seasons with proposals,” she said (via Entertainment Weekly). “He said he also wanted to throw people off by having it in a very ordinary location. So, he wanted [it] to feel special, but he also wanted it to feel like Jim made the decision without a whole lot of planning.”
Fischer also revealed that the gas station where Jim gets down on one knee isn’t real — it was a set built in a Best Buy parking lot over a former-toxic waste site. The crew even “built a four-lane, circular race track around the gas station set,” she said. “They set up cameras on the other side of this raceway and they had cars drive around it at 55 mph.”
The scene did benefit from some special effects: the California mountains were edited out and replaced with trees seen on the East Coast. “In the end, this was the single most expensive scene ever shot in the entire run of the show. It lasts 52 seconds, and it cost $250,000,” Fischer revealed, to [Angela] Kinsey’s great shock.
Spending a quarter of a million bucks for 52-second shot in a Best Buy parking lot?
Still a cute scene, though. You can watch it below.
(Via EW)
