Fairly or not, Michael Scott’s (Steve Carell) departure from “The Office” in Season 7 marks the dividing line between what many fans deem “Good Office” and “Bad Office.” But there was another big departure after that: Ryan (B. J. Novak) left the series at the very beginning of Season 9, along with his on-and-off girlfriend Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling).
Unlike Michael, however, Ryan and Kelly leaving was not treated with a lot of fanfare. One minute they were a part of the show and the next minute they weren’t, and all their coworkers simply went about life as usual. When interviewed on the “Armchair Expert” podcast in 2021, Novak explained his reasons for leaving the show as both an actor and a staff writer. The basic gist was that after eight seasons, he was sort of exhausted:
“I was burnt out, Mindy [Kaling] had left. Carell had left. And they wanted a new showrunner and they asked if I would want to do that and I couldn’t imagine it. And I also couldn’t imagine just hanging around without it. And I just couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t have the love.”
As for why Kaling left the series? That departure was more straightforward: the actor-writer was creating her own sitcom, “The Mindy Project,” and she no longer had the time to regularly work for “The Office” because of it. When she left, she also brought some “Office” veterans with her, including Novak himself as an executive producer for the “Mindy Project” pilot.
It’s easy to forget, but Ryan used to be a major character on The Office
So, how did “The Office” write Ryan and Kelly out? Well, Kelly left with her fiancé Ravi (Sendhil Ramamurthy), who’s starting a new job at Miami University in Ohio. (Kelly’s under the mistaken impression that Miami University is located in Miami, Florida.) Ryan, who hates Kelly but also loves her, decides to follow her to Ohio to win her back, although he’s in denial about this being the real reason he’s following her. Basically, Ryan’s departure is designed to emphasize his most selfish, self-destructive, and delusional qualities, so it’s easy not to miss him when he’s gone. He does return again in the series finale, in which he reunites with Kelly and abandons his newborn baby to run away with her. It’s an epilogue that reminds viewers once again that Ryan and Kelly are deeply unserious people.
The casual treatment of Kelly’s departure is understandable: she’d never been that major a presence in the series. Still, in hindsight, it’s a little weird that Ryan’s departure was written so flippantly. After all, the pilot episode for “The Office” establishes Ryan as a major character. Likewise, he Pam (Jenna Fischer), and Jim (John Krasinski) act as the three main “normal” characters in a cast full of weirdos throughout the first season.
As The Office went on, Ryan became a much darker character
Although Ryan was originally treated sympathetically, the series gradually peeled back his darker layers. After spending Season 1 as the trodden-upon victim of Michael’s clown antics, the early Season 2 episode “The Fire” quietly reveals that Ryan has his own arrogant, selfish qualities when he expresses an interest in starting his own business. This dark side gets even more pronounced through his toxic relationship with Kelly, which starts in the second half of Season 2. At first Ryan is portrayed as the straight man reacting to Kelly’s clingy behavior, but pretty soon we start to see that he’s a terrible boyfriend who’s stringing her along.
By Season 3, Ryan’s been downgraded in importance, with Andy (Ed Helms in a role that became aspirational for the actor) replacing him as the show’s fifth most important character after Michael, Pam, Jim, and Dwight (Rainn Wilson). Still, the show constantly checks in on Ryan to see how he’s doing, and every time we see him he gets a little bit worse. By the end of Season 3 it’s clear that Ryan’s a shallow, self-serving jerk, but he’s mean in a quiet, realistic way. It’s only in Season 4 when he becomes the Vice President of Northeast Sales — making him the superior of everyone at the Dunder Mifflin Scranton branch — that he feels free to let his true colors show. Indeed, Season 4 Ryan is straight-up evil; when he gets arrested, fired and humiliated in the season’s finale, no viewer is expected to feel bad for him at all.
Did Ryan deserve his fate on The Office?
In a lot of ways, Ryan reminds me of Jan Levinson (Melora Hardin) — another character who started off normal and sympathetic before comedically spiraling into bizarreness over the course of several seasons of “The Office.” (Ironically, Jan’s downward spiral also led directly to the best episode of “The Office,” aka “Dinner Party.”) Like Ryan, I think Jan’s arc was smartly written for the first four seasons before diving into disappointing cartoon territory. The difference is that the cartoon version of Jan we got in the later seasons only showed up once a year, whereas Ryan post-villain arc regularly hung out at Dunder Mifflin for four more seasons.
What’s frustrating about Ryan in the later seasons is that everything about him feels mean-spirited; we’re watching a guy whose life fell apart in a devastating (if totally self-inflicted) fashion, but the show doesn’t bother to offer him any kind of redemption arc. Instead, it keeps kicking him when he’s down, all the while characterizing him in a way that makes it clear he deserves it. “The Office” was a show that got kinder and more optimistic as the series went on, but whereas the rest of the show’s characters were given more humanity, Ryan was given less.
From Season 5 through to Season 8, Ryan was treated as an afterthought at best and the show’s punching bag at worst, to the point where by the time he left for good, a lot of the audience was happy to see him go. It’s a shame because I think allowing Ryan to seriously grapple with how his life’s fallen apart could’ve been interesting. Rather than the aimless, depressing direction the series’ writers took in Ryan’s final few seasons, I wish they could’ve given him a shot at meaningful character growth. Ryan could’ve still left at the start of Season 9, but he didn’t have to leave as a total joke.