‘The Office’ Joke That Cost NBC $60,000
Not all jokes are created equally, some come with a hefty price tag.
‘The Office’ is notorious for consistently providing high quality christmas episodes without a miss. Among these, “A Benihana Christmas” ranks as one of the funniest.
This holiday special starts with Michael’s girlfriend Carol (the realtor) showing up to break up with him just before the holiday party starts. While Carol had many reasons to break up with the Michael Scott from Season 3, her decision to dump him was triggered by Michael removing head of Carol’s ex-husband from a christmas photo and replacing it with his own. This setback is Michael’s life was an indication of how dramatic and hilarious the episode was going to turn out to be with Michael being needy. Michael was now stuck with two tickets to Sandals, Jamaica and nobody to enjoy them with. On top of that, we was going to have to show up to his own christmas party with no date. This episode was made especially memorable by Michael’s ‘She’s yo ho no mo’ speech.
Andy decides to take Michael and other office guys to Benihana to cheer up Michael. This boozy lunch leads to them picking up two young waitresses, whom they take back to the office christmas party. The hilarity of the episode takes off here when Michael marks his girlfriend’s hand with a sharpie to remember which one is his.
It wasn’t the onion volcanoes from the hibachi dinner that cost NBC the big bucks, neither was it Benihana’s corporate trademarks. It was a completely different intellectual property that screwed up the episode’s budget. It was staff writer Jen Celotta who stopped by for an episode of the Office Ladies podcast to spill the beans on this expensive endeavor. According to Celotta, it was a 4 seconds scene during which Michael sings a couple of lines of the song “Two Tickets to Paradise” by Eddie Money that made NBC reach deep into its corporate pockets. Jen Celotta was informed of this facts well after the fact. Celotta recalled the music budge for the show being reduced not long after the episode realizing her joke had a much bigger impact than she had anticipated.
I am sure this is not an isolated case of a very small portion of a TV episode taking up majority of the episode budget due to music copyright. The process of using copyrighted music in the entertainment business is known to be a painful process. Lawyers representing the production company, NBC in this case, have to negotiate with the music label holding the publishing rights for the music, no matter how short the portion of the music being used is. In this particular case, Columbia records, publisher of Two Tickets to Paradise, made $60,000 off of four seconds of someone else’s work. There is also another episode in the office that features performance of the song “Your Body is a Wonderland”, which was acquired at a reasonable settlement as the actor B.J. Novak, who plays Ryan, is good friends with singer John Mayer.
