the office: first baby halpert news!

hey, season two jim! everything turned out okay! (also, there are WAY too few jam promo pics. it's ridiculous.) // nbc promotional photo

Mark your calendars–March 11 is about to be somebody’s birthday.

Two months from today, the second half of a two-part Baby Halpert Extravaganza will air, no doubt marking the birth of Jim and Pam’s first daughter child.  At NBC’s TCA event yesterday, much of the focus was on the failed Jay Leno experiment, but at the Office panel, creator Greg Daniels spilled a few details on Pam’s delivery:

Part of the concept is that Pam is trying to hold the baby in until after midnight so that she can get the maximum time in the hospital, so the HMO will…If she comes in at 11:50, her first day is ten minutes and then she gets 24 hours after that, so she’s trying to keep the baby in while she’s at work and trying to distract herself. That’s the plot of the first half-hour. [The rest of the staff] are all aware that she’s in labor, and she pushes it maybe too far.

I’ve read a lot of opinions on this, including a probably-accurate, “It seems out of character for Jim to let this happen,” but at the end of the day, this is probably a really good idea.

Why?

Because even more out of character for Jim and Pam would be them letting the cameras into the delivery room with them.  I had long since resigned myself to the fact that the baby episodes would be reduced to watching Michael, Dwight, and Andy being painfully ridiculous in the waiting room for an hour, followed by a 45-second scene of Jim introducing his daughter baby to his coworkers.  But this means we get to spend the whole first half-hour (the March 4 episode) with Jim and Pam in the office.  Even if it seems out of character, I’d prefer this scenario to one in which we see Pam once every act through the glass of her hospital room window.

As for the fact that Pam’s delivery has been pushed to a post-Olympics timeslot in March–effectively making her pregnancy last ten months–I wave my hand dismissively.  Remember back in the day when pregnancies would last for years?  It used to be that characters (Friends‘s Rachel, Mad About You‘s Jamie) found out they were pregnant in season finales and didn’t deliver until the following finale.  And don’t get me started on The X-Files’s Scully, who was pregnant arguably from “all things” through “Existence,” a chronological thirteen months, not including the time jump they employed at the beginning of season eight.  Anyway, I’m not going to balk at an extra month tacked onto Pam’s pregnancy–it’s really not a big deal.

Meanwhile, Kathy Bates is joining the cast for a few episodes as the CEO of the company that purchases Dunder-Mifflin.  She’s by far the biggest name guest star to actually interact with the cast (as opposed to, say, Jack Black and Jessica Alba who appeared on the show as themselves in a movie), and I get the feeling she’s not going to be all lovey-dovey with the Scranton branch.  (But maybe they could use a little tough love.)

Of course, the big disappointment at yesterday’s TCAs was that they didn’t come with an announcement that my favorite show-saver, Amy Ryan, would be returning.  Major sadness.  Well, there’s always next year.