The Office is about to get a new cast member!
On Thursday night's special hour-long episode on NBC, Jim and Pam (played by John Krasinski and Jenna Fischer) will welcome their baby, and the show's writers admit it was "hard to find a fresh take" on the tale. (Watch a sneak peek of the episode above.)
"It's definitely exciting and cool to be a part of this,” writer Daniel Chun tells Fancast. "But the second we started thinking about it, we realized that baby episodes of sitcoms are hard to do."
Writer Charles Grandy adds, "A lot of the 'moves' you think of have been done before."
One of the hardest parts, he admits, was choosing whether they'd have a boy or girl. Although the cast and crew are remaining tight-lipped — "after table reads, scripts were collected … They went to pretty great lengths to keep it hush-hush," says Grandy — about the baby's gender, he admits they were all set going one way, "and then it switched" completely.
"There is a slight story point that's nice and that has to do with the gender," he tells Fancast. "But ultimately it wasn't something that we spent too much time on because neither choice is really the wrong one."