Jim Halpert almost made out with Pam Beesly’s replacement character Cathy (Lindsey Broad) during Season 8 of “The Office,” during which Pam (Jenna Fischer) went on maternity leave.
Krasinski stood up for Jim and Pam’s love to director Greg Daniels when he caught wind of the potential scene.
“That’s the only time I remember putting my foot down,” Krasinksi told former “Office” co-star Brian Baumgartner in an interview for his newly released book about the show, excerpts of which Baumgartner posted to Instagram. “I remember saying things that I never thought I’d say before, like, ‘I’m not going to shoot it.’”
“There is a threshold with which you can push our audience. They are so dedicated,” Krasinski added. “We have shown such great respect to them. But there’s a moment where if you push them too far, they’ll never come back. And I think that if you show Jim cheating, they’ll never come back.”
While that portion of the scene was scrapped, Jim and Pam did still hit some road bumps. Brian the boom guy (Chris Diamantopoulos), who showed up to comfort Pam when things got rough between her and Jim in the final, ninth season, gave fans a scare.
“I said, ‘I think we should get borderline separated, and I think we can do it and then come back,’” Krasinski said. “He was so on board with that.”
“I feel like that kind of worry was good in terms of the fans’ engagement. I think they knew what was coming,” Daniels reveals in the book. “They were very comfortable with the show they were getting, and I needed to worry them that maybe I was going to give them a bad ending so they were happy when they got a good ending.”
“Welcome to Dunder Mifflin: The Ultimate Oral History of The Office,” came out Tuesday. The book includes hundreds of hours of interviews (some from Baumgartner’s An Oral History of The Office podcast) with those who made the show what it s today.