The Office crew members blame NBC's ambivalence for Steve Carell's exit

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Boom operator/sound mixer Brian Wittle and hairstylist Kim Ferry tell Andy Greene in his new oral history book The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s that Carell could've stayed if NBC had wanted him to stick around. With the final year of his contract looming, the actor noted that Season 7 would “probably be my last year.” Wittle says of the remark: "I sat with him one time and he told me the story. He was doing a radio interview and he haphazardly mentioned, almost unconsciously, that it might be his last season. He didn’t plan on saying it out loud and he hadn’t decided anything. He was kind of thinking out loud, but he did it in an interview in public and it created news. Then what he said was the people connected to the show had no reaction to it. They didn’t call and say, ‘What? You wanna leave?’ He said he didn’t get any kind of response from them. When he realized he didn’t get any kind of response from them, he thought, ‘Oh, maybe they don’t really care if I leave. Maybe I should go do other things.’ So I think that made it easier, because when the news broke that he was considering it, the people that are in charge of keeping him there didn’t make a big effort to do so until afterward.” Ferry adds: "He didn’t want to leave the show. He had told the network that he was going to sign for another couple of years. He was willing to and his agent was willing to. But for some reason, they didn’t contact him."

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