Around this time last year, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey were completing their rewatch of Season 8 of “The Office” — its penultimate season — for their podcast, “Office Ladies.” Having played Pam Beesly (Fischer) and Angela Martin (Kinsey) since the Emmy-winning NBC comedy premiered in 2005, the two actors affectionately break down each episode, minute by minute, in their ritualized “Office Ladies” format. When they started the podcast in October 2019, recapping all 201 episodes of the show seemed like an insurmountable mountain to climb. During an interview at their recording studio in Hollywood, Kinsey says, “I knew we would start it and see it through.” Fischer counters: “I didn’t think we’d finish.”
“Office Ladies” — one of the first rewatch podcasts, a now ubiquitous format — was popular from the start. In Edison Research’s most recent report on the Top 50 podcasts in the United States, “Office Ladies” appears at No. 34. Kinsey and Fischer — self-identified BFFs since the early days of the series — knew they wanted to keep going beyond their initial rewatch, but needed to figure out what the next iteration of the show would be. With their contract with SiriusXM coming to an end in the next year, they decided to explore their options.
But it was also about a year ago that Fischer got an inconclusive mammogram, and then, after an ultrasound and a biopsy, was diagnosed with breast cancer in December. Fischer revealed this news last month on Instagram, to commemorate Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and to tell the world what only a small circle of people had known.
When faced with Fischer’s diagnosis and treatment plan — surgery, chemotherapy, radiation — the Office Ladies had a choice. Should they put the show on pause until her treatment was complete? Kinsey deferred to Fischer, trusting her implicitly. “From the very beginning of our friendship, she’s the type of person that makes you want to be your best self,” Kinsey says. Fischer had already made up her mind. With the support of her husband, Lee Kirk, and their two children — and backstopped by friends — she knew she wanted to keep working on “Office Ladies.” It’s a podcast made with love, after all.
“All the things that I needed in order to endure this time, they were just already waiting for me to see them,” Fischer says, choking up for the only time during our conversation. “One of those people was Angela, and another one was the podcast. I already had the job that was going to see me through this hardest time of my life.”
Courtesy of “Office Ladies”
Over the course of “Office Ladies,” Kinsey and Fischer have interviewed most of the cast of “The Office,” along with many of its writers, directors and crew. Their recaps are hyper-specific, going through every frame — yet they do meander, covering such varied subjects as the history of blood transfusions and deer penis wine. (The latter was prompted by something Rainn Wilson’s Dwight says in a Season 6 episode: “Fish sticks are not an aphrodisiac. You’re thinking of deer penis.”) In their optimistic, cheerful tone, they’ve navigated episodes that aged poorly, and delivered a feminist treatise on how unfair it was that Fischer had to return to work only five weeks after having a C-section because actors don’t receive paid maternity leave. They kept listeners company during the stay-at-home-days of the pandemic, just as “The Office” itself was seeing a huge surge in popularity, as people turned to the show for comfort: According to Nielsen, viewers streamed 57 billion minutes of “The Office” on Netflix in 2020, making it the service’s most popular series that terrible year.
They created “Office Ladies” in part as parents who wanted to be present for their school-age children. Kinsey was getting work only out of town, taking her from her family — “If it was in L.A., I was not getting it,” she says — and was in Orlando when Fischer called her about the idea of doing a podcast. Fischer did have the rare job in Los Angeles, but was working “70 hours a week” and putting her “kids to bed over FaceTime.” What started as an experiment to see whether they could be, in Fischer’s words, “the architects of their own time” is now an enormously successful podcast. “Office Ladies” has amassed more than 400 million downloads, with more than a million listeners following the show on Spotify — and Fischer and Kinsey published a book in 2022, “The Office BFFs: Tales From ‘The Office’ From Two Best Friends Who Were There.”
They pay attention to the numbers, of course — at launch it was, Fischer says, “like, 10 times more popular than they had projected” — but more than anything, they feel a duty to please the fans. “I want to do right by the legacy of the show,” Kinsey says. “It means so much to so many people.” She realized the podcast had caught on when people began yelling, “Lady!” at her on the street, using one of her and Fischer’s favorite words, instead of “Save Bandit!” (from a Season 5 episode in which Dwight starts a fire in the office, and Angela throws her cat into a hole in the ceiling to try to rescue him).
In August, “Office Ladies” moved from SiriusXM to Audacy. Though they’re loath to criticize their former corporate overseer, they’d made their displeasure clear in February when SiriusXM laid off their longtime sound engineer Sam Kieffer without consulting them. Regarding the switch, Kinsey mentions their early days at the podcasting company Earwolf, which felt like “a small little group within the big entertainment industry — and I think we were looking for something that felt like that again.” During their search, Fischer and Kinsey met with Jenna Weiss-Berman, Audacy’s podcast chief, loved her — and trusted their guts. (Once at Audacy, they promptly rehired Kieffer.)
Weiss-Berman was able to offer “Office Ladies” a healthy minimum guarantee on ad sales (she wouldn’t say how much), and gave Fischer and Kinsey the “white-glove-y” guidance they sought. Once Weiss-Berman saw their numbers, she was impressed: Though many podcasts have lost half their audience in the past year because of a change in Apple’s iOS, “Office Ladies” has only grown, with its audience “really listening to every single episode, and listening pretty quickly,” Weiss-Berman says. She points to the podcast’s 1.1 million Instagram followers. “The engagement is crazy,” she says. “And they get just these, like, beautiful love letters every single day.” (The podcast’s Facebook group, with more than 72,000 members, is the only pure, kind corner on the internet. As a surprise for Fischer and Kinsey for the finale episodes, a group of 300 members — arranged by Suresh Singaratnam, a musician from Toronto — put together their own version of the song “All the Faces,” which “Office” co-star Creed Bratton sang during the final moments of the series.)
“They could talk about anything, and they would keep the audience that they have,” Weiss-Berman continues. “People are there to hear them just talk, because they’re funny and fantastic, and they are true best friends who have just a really fun rapport and dynamic.”
The future of “Office Ladies,” which was announced on an episode in early October, will go well beyond that, though. In what they’re calling “Office Ladies 6.0,” Fischer and Kinsey will continue their deep dives into “The Office.” In their first “6.0” episode, which dropped last week, they interviewed Allison Jones, the casting director who assembled the show’s ensemble. They’re planning a set visit to “Office” creator Greg Daniels’ new iteration of the series, unofficially titled “The Paper” and expected to premiere on Peacock next year. They will have themed episodes, as well as character studies, beginning with a comprehensive examination of Michael, who was played by Steve Carell. “I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of Michael Scott’s origin story,” Fischer says. “And I’m pretty sure writers from ‘The Office’ are sick of hearing from me. But I will not give up.”
They’ll also be rerunning “Office Ladies” from the beginning, topping each episode with new material. This encore run is called “Second Drink,” a reference to the Season 2 premiere, when a wasted Pam sucks melted ice from a frozen drink through a straw and enthusiastically pronounces it “second drink!” They had considered starting the rewatch over again, Fischer says, but then “I started relistening to the podcast, and I was like, ‘Lady, we didn’t miss that much.’”
Fischer appeared in the “Mean Girls” movie musical earlier this year, but considers herself on hiatus from acting. “I think it will make me a better actress in the future to have taken a break,” she says. Now cancer free, she says that when her kids have left the house, she and her husband want to move to New York so she can do theater. As for Kinsey, she’s open to acting opportunities that don’t take her away from her husband and their kids for long, and she filmed a Hallmark Christmas movie over the summer: “My mom is over the moon!”
They’ve come a long way as podcasters since 2019, when Oliver Hudson, Fischer’s co-star on the short-lived ABC sitcom “Splitting Up Together,” suggested she might want to do one, because, he said, “you love sweatpants, and you love being at home.”
They’re gratified by what they’ve built. “We move slowly, because we’re also parents, and we have other things that we do,” Fischer says. “But I am just so incredibly, deeply proud of what we have made together.”
And they’ve come even further than when they bonded 20 years ago during production on the first season of “The Office.” After a late night of filming, while heading back to their trailers, Kinsey and Fischer wordlessly locked arms to perform the opening credits of “Laverne & Shirley.” They sensed someone behind them, and looked back to see Carell, the show’s star. “He just looked at us,” Kinsey says, “and smiled, and he said, ‘No matter what happens with the show, this is what you guys will take from it.’”