Stephen Merchant to Direct "The Office" Episode This Season

Current co-executive producer Stephen Merchant will direct an episode of The Office, this time with the Scranton branch.

Merchant, who co-created the original version of the show with Ricky Gervais, will begin shooting his episode Monday afternoon. It will be one of the holiday-special episodes that The Office seems to do so well. Merchant's will center around the Halloween holiday.

"He was in the writers room with us rewriting over the last several days," The Office writer/producer/actor Paul Lieberstein (who plays Toby) said in a conference call Monday. "It was really exciting having him there."

Gervais and Merchant have been involved, albeit briefly, with the actual production of the American version of The Office. They cowrote an episode in the third season.

Lieberstein said that Merchant seems to be most concerned about keeping with the "integrity of the documentary" formula which has served the show so well. He reportedly doesn't want to wander too far away from the idea that there's a camera crew present in the office to chronicle the lives of those who work there.

Oh, and Lieberstein revealed that his character, Toby, will be absent from the office in the first part of the show's fifth season, but will eventually return to Scranton.

"What brings him back is a failure to escape," Lieberstein says. "There was a friend of mine . . . who about 10 years ago collected enough money to live poor in Hawaii. He was gonna just do it and surf, because he loved to surf. He made a big deal of it, had a going-away party, and he was back in two weeks. He was lonely, no one talked to him, he was robbed on the beach, and that was it. So that was our model."