Jennifer Celotta

A quick zoom finds a reaction, and the frame is not quite where a more orderly comedy would put it. Jennifer Celotta favours the sense of a documentary crew struggling to catch everything, with imperfect framing part of the comedy. We rate her feel for this kind of ensemble work. It gives the people on screen room to look awkward without making every hesitation feel like an invitation to laugh.

The Office (2005) is the centre of her work, but calling her one of its directors leaves rather a lot out. She joined as a consulting producer, wrote 11 episodes and became co-showrunner with Paul Lieberstein for the fifth series. Her three directing credits sit within that longer responsibility for the characters and their stories. That matters in a comedy whose cast becomes a reason to keep watching, even when the boss is exhausting. Celotta’s work in the writing room deserves at least as much attention as the deliberately untidy images.

We laughed at Steve Carell’s painful neediness in The Office, and found it harder than expected to dismiss such an exhausting boss. Carell supplies a reason to stay with a programme whose borrowed beginnings and occasional overplaying can test our patience. Overplaying is a particular problem for this style of direction: when a performer presses too hard, the pretence that the camera has simply happened upon something funny becomes harder to sustain. These are strengths and weaknesses of the series, and we would not hand either set to Celotta alone.

Her later directing work includes eight episodes of Cobra Kai (2018) and further workplace mockumentary in Abbott Elementary (2021). The Paper (2025), an Office spin-off, gives her another chance to balance comedy and feeling within the restrictions of documentary-style filming. Its seventh episode is an example of that discipline, though The Office remains the firmer basis for our enthusiasm. Start with The Office for the ensemble, provided an exhausting boss is something you can tolerate after work.