Production
"The Job" was written by Paul Lieberstein and Michael Schur. It was directed by Ken Kwapis, who had, around the same time, directed The Office actor John Krasinski in the 2007 film License to Wed. Script reading for the episode took place on a beach during the filming of the season's twenty-third episode, "Beach Games". Actress Kate Flannery remarked that "we were so excited that we almost had another hot dog eating contest. Not. It's a great script. Lots of questions answered. Lots. The Office fans have been anxiously awaiting a one-hour episode, and guess what? You got it." The original cut of the episode was an hour and twelve minutes long, and had to be edited down to forty-two minutes of screentime. It was the second Office episode to fill the entire hour timeslot; the first was the third season episode "A Benihana Christmas".
Krasinski received a haircut due to production on another film, which he thought "ended up working perfectly" for the season finale. Co-creator Greg Daniels had wanted Jim to get a haircut for a while, as he thought it would "change up a little bit." Krasinski thought it was "really smart" to make it seem like Karen's idea. Kwapis was careful with Jim's reaction shots in the episode, as he did not want to "tip anything" to the audience about Jim's choice of Karen or Pam. Kwapis explained, "That to me was actually one of the big challenges of the episode is how to keep you on your toes in terms of not knowing where the story was going." Jim's flashback scene with Pam on the beach was initially intended to be the cold open of the episode before Michael Schur suggested it be moved. Kwapis shot multiple endings, and the cast was unaware how the season would end.
Jenna Fischer enjoyed doing her individual scenes with Rainn Wilson because their characters rarely interacted one-on-one. The filming of these scenes took place on the last days of production for the season, and not many people were still on set. The episode finished shooting in April 2007. Two weeks before the finale, actor Oscar Nunez gave brief allusions in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, "There will be some movement. Major things moving. Major shifts that affect the entire office. So there's some good stuff coming up. That's all I can say."
Read more about this topic: The Job (The Office)
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“The production of obscurity in Paris compares to the production of motor cars in Detroit in the great period of American industry.”
—Ernest Gellner (b. 1925)
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)