Jenna Fischer compares making a television show to a person's high school or college years in that you forge very close, very intense relationships with the people around you.
For the cast of "The Office," though, the nine years they spent together "was high school and college and grad school combined," said Ms. Fischer, who plays Pam Beesly Halpert on the Scranton-set NBC comedy.
"Imagine spending all that time with one person. You get very close to people," Ms. Fischer said during a recent phone conversation.
She's going to miss her co-workers, and can say exactly the same about the fictional characters they portrayed. "I'll never get to talk to Dwight or Angela or Andy again. And I loved that," she said.
For fans of "The Office," of course, there's a mutual sense of loss as the May 16 series finale approaches. What's nice, though, Ms. Fischer said, is that fans and cast members will have the opportunity to get together and celebrate the show this Saturday during "The Office" Wrap Party in Scranton.
Ms. Fischer will be making her first trip to Scranton. Many of her fellow cast members visited for the three-day "The Office" Convention in 2007. Ms. Fischer said she really wanted to come to that event, but was recovering from a nasty fall at the time.
"I'm so excited. I have no idea what to expect. Everyone who came last time had a blast," Ms. Fischer said. "It's going to be very cool."
"Office" executive producer Greg Daniels attended "The Office" Convention, and since then had always looked for an opportunity to return.
"So I'm really glad we get to do it one more time," said Mr. Daniels, among several crew members set to attend the wrap party.
Speaking of returns, Mr. Daniels came back to run "The Office" this season after a couple of years spent concentrating on his other acclaimed NBC comedy, "Parks and Recreation." He said it was like "getting one more turn on this great ride."
It turned out to be a fun, yet emotionally charged, year.
"I think the women on the show have been weepy and sentimental all year. But when it got to the last week, that's when it hit all the men," Ms. Fischer said.
The show shoots its scenes out of sequence, and, as it happens, the last one filmed was of the Dunder Mifflin crew leaving the office for the day. Though not the last scene viewers will see, it proved "a very poetic choice" for the cast, Ms. Fischer said.
"And, of course, we're not supposed to be crying in the scene," she said with a laugh.
"It was weird. They all kind of looked at me in the last scene," Mr. Daniels said. "I realized I had to say, 'That's a wrap on "The Office,"' and I managed to choke that out."
Over the past few weeks, the show has been putting the final touches on the characters' story lines. The final episode will catch up with the workers a few months after the airing of the PBS documentary about Dunder Mifflin Scranton.
While she expects most of her cast members to get together for a viewing party of the finale, Ms. Fischer will be in New York City starring in the new Neil LaBute play, "Reasons To Be Happy." In fact, the play opens in previews the night of the finale, she said.
"The finale is just great. I feel like, as a fan of the show, all the things on my wish list are on it," said Ms. Fischer, who's trying to convince her "Office" castmate and best friend Angela Kinsey (Angela Martin) to fly out to New York to watch the episode with her.
"I think it wraps up a lot," Mr. Daniels said on a recent afternoon in between doing post-production work on the final episodes at the show's Los Angeles set. Workers there were busy tearing down the Dunder Mifflin office and turning it back into an empty stage.
Though "The Office" is ending, Ms. Fischer said the show's legacy will endure. She believes it'll go down as one of the great comedies in television history, right up there with the likes of "Seinfeld" and "Cheers."
"I feel like the show had a big influence on how television shows are shot now," she said. "We're supposed to be a documentary, and a lot of shows are shot like that now, but aren't meant to be a documentary. That's a thing our show really cemented. That mockumentary style had been around before us, but we popularized it in a way that was pretty significant."
Mr. Daniels has worked on a long list of great television shows, including "Saturday Night Live," "The Simpsons" and "King of the Hill." But "The Office" will always have a distinctive appeal, or "taste," all its own, he said.
"It feels like every generation has a show they care about. I feel we'll be very connected to a generation," he said. "I just love the show. Even If I hadn't worked on it, I would have been a big fan."
Contact the writer: jmcauliffe@timesshamrock.com, @jmcauliffeTT on Twitter