Season two’s “Christmas Party” (not to be confused with the movie) was the first episode of The Office to be nominated for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series at the Emmys, and the first episode since the pilot to reach nearly 10 million viewers (9.7 to be precise). It’s also when the show “really took off,” according to one of its stars.
“We were almost canceled two, three, four, 10, 12 times at the beginning,” Brian Baumgartner (who played Kevin Malone) told Yahoo! Entertainment. “We were struggling week to week,” Angela Kinsey (Angela Martin) added. The ratings “declined rapidly” since the pilot, “and then came back and [that episode] really served as a significant event for us,” Baumgartner said. “Christmas Party” — in which Michael Scott turns an office secret Santa exchange into a Yankee swap — was the show’s initial Christmas episode, and one of its best, along with season three’s “Benihana Christmas.”
“After that episode aired, we were the number one streaming show on iTunes and all of a sudden we were like, ‘Hold up. We found our audience,’” Kinsey remembers. “It turned a corner from there and we were set.”
It also gave us this indelible moment in The Office history.
The charmingly old school digital camera somehow makes it even funnier.
(Via Yahoo! Entertainment)