“We went home, and they were sort of like, ‘Hope we get to do some more,’ ” recalled Brian Baumgartner, who played Kevin Malone in the NBC sitcom

The Office wasn’t always a surefire hit at NBC.

Brian Baumgartner, who portrayed accountant Kevin Malone in the sitcom, shared on Jenna Ushkowitz and Kevin McHale’s Glee rewatch podcast And That’s What You REALLY Missed that the series had a slow burn start. According to the 51-year-old actor, The Office stars filmed the first six episodes of season 2, and once they wrapped, the actors had to empty their trailers.

“We went home, and they were sort of like, ‘Hope we get to do some more [episodes],’ ” Baumgartner recalled.

The show’s momentum began building — due in great part, Baumgartner said, to Steve Carell’s growing fame and Golden Globe win — and the network greenlit more episodes for the second season. “Christmas Party,” the first holiday season episode, garnered more than 10 million viewers when it aired on Dec. 6, 2005. By the following February, the crew was allowed to finish 22 episodes for season 2 with a third season ordered for the next year.

“That’s when things changed,” the actor said. “Like, oh, we’re gonna be around for awhile.”

Baumgartner called the whirlwind rise to fame “nuts,” from The Office’s Emmy win to the turnaround for shooting season 3.

Throughout the podcast episode, he also revealed tidbits of behind-the-scenes secrets to the former Glee stars. Season 1’s six episodes were filmed in a different set, which Baumgartner called a “bizarre space off of La Cienega.” He speculated that the original Dunder Mifflin office set was actually the no-frills production office of the building, Culver Studios.

Another standout memory involved singer-songwriter John Mayer. Initially, the musician denied showrunners the rights to his song, “Your Body Is a Wonderland” because he was “afraid” the show was “going to make fun of him,” Baumgartner recalled. But after pitching Mayer the idea for the song, he let them use it for free.

The hit comedy series concluded in 2013, and although it has been more than a decade, the program has had lasting popularity. In 2020, Nielsen reported that The Office racked up 57.1 billion streaming minutes on Netflix. A spin-off set in the same universe as Dunder Mifflin is in the works at NBC, starring The Revenant’s Domhnall Gleeson and The White Lotus’ Sabrina Impacciatore.

According to President of NBCUniversal Entertainment Lisa Katz, the currently untitled comedy “introduces a new cast of characters in a fresh setting ripe for comedic storytelling: a daily newspaper.”