“Mindy has long been considered the best writer on The Office, and every actor on the show thinks she writes for them best,” says Novak. “There is the extra little ‘smile’ that infuses her scripts, which is hard to quantify. My guess is that it stems from a real loving sense of the superspecific inner life of every character. Characters aren’t joke machines to her, or types to satirize. As a person, she’s incredibly sentimental, more than anyone I’ve met, but she’s also incredibly sharp. She’s unabashedly both. That allows her to express real emotions without shyness, but also without clichés.”