66THE OFFICE (U.S.) - TIE

Aired: NBC, 2005-Present

Adapting the British comedy by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, Greg Daniels gathered around him writer-performers B.J. Novak, Mindy Kaling, and Paul Lieberstein. "I love the idea of hiring writer-performers, whether I use them or not, because so much that's wonderful in comedy, like Monty Python or early Saturday Night Live, is that people wrote and performed," Daniels said during the show's second season. Unlike Gervais' lovably horrible boss David Brent, Steven Carrell's horrible boss Michael Scott was not strictly horrible. "I know mentally I was so concerned about not betraying the English show in the adaptation, that the first season of our show was maybe a little colder, because I felt that was the tone," Daniels said. "And now I'm writing more tonally, like King of the Hill, where it's very human people, and all the different characters sometimes have moments of doing the right thing."

Greg Daniels on scripting Steve Carell's final episode on The Office