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It's no secret that The Office's Michael Scott and Toby Flenderson are mortal enemies. Though, throughout The Office's 9 Seasons, there wasn't a concrete reason for Michael and Toby's animosity. Until a deleted scene was uncovered showing the exact moment Steve Carell decided that Michael Scott and Toby Flenderson were going to hate each other. But what exactly triggered this character moment and changed the course of The Office for the rest of it's run?
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What are you doing? Oh, come on! You're ruining it! Toby, come on! Just look at that. That's wrecked
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Ass. That was the first time Michael Scott ever told Toby Flenderson that he was ruining something
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But it wouldn't be the last. The characters seemed almost scientifically designed to get
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on each other's nerves, and their unending feud provided the basis for some of The Office's
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funniest moments. Which is why it may be surprising to learn that this moment from a scene deleted in
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the show's fourth episode wasn't a part of the creator's original vision. In fact, Michael hating
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Toby wasn't the creator's idea at all. I hate so much about the things that you choose to be
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On March 24th, 2005, the world got its first look at the American version of the hit British sitcom
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The Office. The single cam workplace comedy had a mockumentary format which followed the day-to-day
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lives of the employees in the Scranton, Pennsylvania branch of the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper
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company. The star of the show was its incredible ensemble cast, and at the center of that
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at least for the most successful part of its run, was regional manager Michael Scott
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played by Steve Carell. Michael is, in many ways, the worst kind of boss
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I think that pretty much sums it up. I found it at Spencer Gifts
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He's a desperately lonely man who treats his office as his home and his employees as his
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friends and family. That's not a great situation in any case, but it's especially bad for Dunder
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Mifflin because Michael lacks any real social skills. He's highly prone to embarrassing both
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himself and his staff in his deeply misguided attempts to curry their respect. To that end
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Michael is perpetually neglecting the actual business of the office in favor of doing things
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that are fun and exciting, or at least what he thinks is fun and exciting. Every time I try to
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do something fun or exciting, you make it not that way. But we tolerate and even sympathize with Michael because the writing, as well as Carell's nuanced
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performance never lets us forget that at heart he just a sweet albeit deeply inept man who just wants to have people in his life that love and appreciate him Of course that doesn change that he a
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nightmare to work for, and that is where Toby Flenderson enters the picture
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I need to talk to you in your office. It'll just take two seconds. Literally two seconds
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An original character invented for the American version of The Office, Toby was played by series writer, director, producer, and future showrunner Paul Lieberstein
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After inviting Lieberstein to be a writer on season one, series creator Greg Daniels invented the character for Lieberstein to play
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on account of Daniels' belief that acting made writers better. It's the same belief that led him to cast writers BJ Novak as Ryan Howard
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Mindy Kaling as Kelly Kapoor, and co-executive producer Michael Schur as Moe's
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It's kind of a troupe of people who understand writing and performing all at the same time
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As a Dunder Mifflin human resources rep, it's Tobey's job to enforce the corporate procedures that protect the company's employees
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from, well, pretty much every allegedly fun or exciting thing Michael ever says or does
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My job is to make the office fun. Your job is to make the office lame
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And Toby does his job about as gently as anyone could possibly ask from a man in his position
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But from Michael's perspective, it makes Toby a perpetual wet blanket who's constantly
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preventing Michael from winning the love of his prospective workplace family. You still can't make fun of people for race or gender or sexual orientation
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who let who let the lemon head into the room you are a waste of life and you should give up
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exacerbating michael's contempt for toby is that the two have conspicuously opposite personalities
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michael is loud often b with manic energy and determined to be the center of attention
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whereas toby is a soft-spoken sad sack doesn't hr have some rules against talking about this kind
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of stuff you're in hr is a joke i can't do anything about anything everything about toby
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clashes with everything about Michael, and the two can't help but to irritate each other
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which is ironic because, at some level, both men just want to be liked by others
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In fact as different as they may seem on the surface it actually their deep underlying similarities as middle men who have grown lonely and unhappy working dead jobs that scares Michael so thoroughly
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No! God! No! God, please, no! No! Michael wants to see himself as a happy, well-liked, well-adjusted guy like Jim
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but the sight of Toby just reminds him of who he really is
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This is the worst. This is the worst. You are the worst. I hate looking at your face
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I want to smash it! The mutually antagonistic relationship is so brilliantly developed
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it's difficult to believe that the writers didn't design the Toby character with that specific dynamic in mind
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But the truth is, they didn't. Toby appears in two of the first three episodes of the series
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and while he and Michael do have their infamous confrontation over sitting Indian style..
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Hey, we're not all going to sit in a circle Indian style, are we? Get out
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It was offensive and lame, so double offensive. There's no evidence that there's any special animosity between the characters
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That's because, though many fans don't realize it, the idea wasn't first conceived until the filming of what would eventually become
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a deleted scene from the fourth episode of season one, The Alliance
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According to Lieberstein, We never had this meeting where we were like
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okay, what if Michael hates Toby? You know, it just happened. In the scene, Toby walks into Michael's office to sign a birthday card for Meredith
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Michael happily obliges and then watches over Toby's shoulder as he proceeds to sign the card
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After a few seconds, a suddenly pissy Michael, who has spent the day trying to come up with the perfect joke for the card, stops Toby
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He objects to the joke he is writing about Meredith's red hair on the grounds that he intended to mention her hair in his own message
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Then he orders Toby to cross the joke off the card. Even though Michael isn't actually his superior and can't fire him, Toby obeys
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But that only seems to make Michael angrier. He complains that Toby has now ruined the card, and then the scene ends with Michael
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throwing Toby out of his office to go find some whiteout, even though there's already
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some on his desk. "-That's wrecked, ass. Get some whiteout. some right there my whiteout Get your own whiteout It looks and feels like a classic Tobey moment but in reality Michael reaction was totally ad by Carell Lieberstein would later recall
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I just go in, write something quickly, and leave. That's the scene. But it takes me a while to physically write it
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and I could just feel Steve Carell watching me and feel that burning. Steve told me afterwards that it was that moment
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that he just decided to hate me so much. All the stars Jenna Fisher, who played Pam
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and Angela Kinsey, who played Angela, discussed Lieberstein's recollections on their podcast, Office Ladies, with Fisher adding
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That was when they ran with it, that Paul went to the writers and said
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Michael hates Toby. Because you know, if Jim took a long time to write a message
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he would have all the patience in the world. The fact that Toby would be an object of contempt and a source of resentment for Michael
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seems obvious in retrospect. But even with a room full of the best comedy writers in the world
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it took the comedic instincts of a master improviser like Steve Carell
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to recognize that Tobey ruining things for Michael was more than just a one-off gag
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It was their whole relationship. Tobey's divorced. He, uh, recently, right? You and your wife? And you have kids
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According to Lieberstein, it's terrifying acting with Steve. He misses nothing. Carell's powerful instincts about how his character should relate to Tobey
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led him to make a choice in the moment, and that choice changed the dynamic of the two characters in a way that
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would continue to pay dividends throughout the entire series. If I had a gun with two bullets and I was in a room with Hitler, Bin Laden, and Tobey
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I would shoot Tobey twice. The takeaway is that while it's tempting for many to credit writers with everything we see on screen
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it's important to remember that, at its heart, television is really an incredibly collaborative medium
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The characters we love and the stories that keep us tuning in again and again for years at a time
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aren't just the product of a single visionary creator, or even a brilliant writer's room
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They're composites of the creative talents of everyone involved in bringing the show to the
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screen. Creators, writers, directors, and certainly not least, the actors. You don't hear a line. I think you're great. You're my best friend
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