Melora Hardin says she and Steve Carell improvised about 90 percent of one of The Office’s best-known Michael-Jan fight scenes, a revealing behind-the-scenes detail she shared on Wednesday’s episode of the Office Ladies rewatch podcast.
Hardin, discussing an episode dedicated to Jan, said the scene came together while the production team sent the actors off to improvise as writers rewrote it. She said they were still working toward one specific beat, but the rest was theirs. “That was one where we got given the candy bag,” Hardin said, adding, “I would say, 90 percent improvised.”
The moment in question came in season 2, the 16th episode, “Valentine’s Day,” when Michael lets slip that he slept with Jan, setting off a confrontation with CFO David Wallace. Jenna Fischer highlighted a Jan non-verbal in the same sequence, in which Jan and Michael fight while walking to and riding an elevator together.
Hardin praised Greg Daniels for creating the kind of room that made that possible. Daniels adapted the American version of The Office from the original British Office and, Hardin said, allowed a high level of collaboration between writers and actors. She called that approach “extraordinary.”
That openness helped turn The Office, which ran on NBC from 2005 to 2013 and won five Primetime Emmys, into a long-tail comedy franchise rather than a one-off hit. Its legacy has already carried into The Paper, the first spinoff, which premiered on Peacock in 2025. Hardin’s account answers the question the scene itself left behind: the awkwardness that made it work was not an accident, but the product of an ensemble trusted to build the moment in real time.
