CHARACTER NAME: Pam Beesley-Halpert
FANDOM: Television Show The Office.
CHRONOLOGY: 7x22
CLASS: Hero aw yis.
SUPERHERO NAME: Pama-lama-ding-dong.
ALTER EGO: Pam Beesley-Halpert
BACKGROUND:
At the very beginning of the show, Pam was the receptionist at Dunder Mifflin, a mid-range paper company that has consistently struggled to make quota. She was engaged to her high school sweetheart Roy (it is heavily implied if not outright shown throughout the show that Roy was somewhat lacking as a boyfriend) and spent most of her time during the day baby-sitting her boss Michael and playing pranks with her best friend in the office, Jim. She had dreams of being an art student, but when she raises the issue with Roy, he denies her, saying they didn’t have the time or money for her to enroll in classes.
The issue comes to a head during a casino night, held to benefit the boy scouts troop in Scranton. Jim, who had harbored a crush on Pam since he started working at Dunder Mifflin, told her about it. Pam turns him down, and is seen shortly afterwards on the phone with her mother. Jim walks in and kisses her in a last-ditch effort to get her to change her mind. Again, Pam turns him down, quietly saying she can’t leave Roy. Jim accepts this, and transfers to Stamford.
And ironically, Pam breaks off her engagement with Roy. She goes out on blind dates, enrolls in art school finally, but still, it’s obvious that she’s missing Jim. When the Stamford branch closes and Jim returns, Pam’s excitement shows. She tells the camera how happy she is to see her old friend, and runs to hug him tightly when he walks in the door.
Unfortunately, Jim started dating his Stamford coworker, Karen, and turns Pam down. Pam accepts this, although it’s obvious she’s both uncomfortable and jealous of Jim’s relationship with Karen, even breaking down in tears during inventory and being comforted by usually tactless and annoying coworker Dwight.
However, life goes on as usual. Phyllis gets married, and steals all of Pam’s previous wedding ideas, to Pam’s dismay. She and Roy reunite, but only on the condition that he does boyfriend things. “If you’re going to be my boyfriend, you have to do boyfriend things,” she tells him, and in her interview that day she says she’s going to start telling people what she wants directly.
Pam has her first art show shortly. She invites the entire office, but only Michael attends. (Roy and his brother showed up long enough to say hi, then left without looking at any of her paintings.) Michael was genuinely impressed, even going as far as to buy one the painting she made of their building and hanging it on the wall outside his office. His gesture touched Pam, moving her to tears. Shortly after, she and Roy split up again, and after the initial fallout (where Roy attacks Jim for making moves on Pam), they part way amicably, with Roy apologizing for how he'd acted.
Michael is offered a job at corporate, and Jim and Karen tag along to interview, after the employees of Dunder Mifflin have a beach trip. Pam is delegated the task of taking notes on who does what during the day, instead of taking part in the activities. It’s not until the very end of the day after doing the coal walk (Pam was the only office worker to actually complete the coal walk) that she gets up in front of everyone around the campfire and blurts out everything she’s been holding back for the first three seasons, how she’s sick of being treated like she’s invisible and how hurt she was that no one came to her art show. She tells Jim that she called off her wedding because of him, and how she never really cared about all the reasons she shouldn’t have been with Roy until she met him.
The next day, Jim leaves for his interview, and Pam slips a note in with his paperwork wishing him luck. That, and her speech, tip the scales, and Jim leaves the interview. He drives back to Scranton, interrupting Pam’s interview with the cameras, and asks her to dinner. Pam accepts.
They start dating, and try to keep it a secret from the office, only to be discovered by the camera crew. The whole office soon finds out, to Michael’s joy and everyone else’s indifference. Pam begins pursuing her dreams of attending art school seriously and getting a degree in the field. However, most of her options would take her away from Scranton. Jim tells her that he plans on proposing, promising that it would “kick her ass” when it happened.
Officially, the engagement doesn’t happen for another few months, after Pam’s made the decision to enroll in art school and leave Scranton to get her degree. She’s away for three months, and Jim meets her halfway between Scranton and New York to propose to her. When she fails a graphics design course, she has the option of staying another three months, or going back to Scranton. Homesick and missing Jim, she heads back, taking up her old job of receptionist.
That doesn’t last long. When Michael breaks off to start the Michael Scott Paper Company, Pam, along with Ryan the temp, accompany him on the stipulation that she starts as a saleswoman and not a receptionist. This lasts for a few weeks, before Dunder Mifflin hires Michael, Pam and Ryan back. She is allowed to keep her position as sales woman, and the new receptionist, Erin, is allowed to stay.
The company picnic happens shortly after, where Pam injures her ankle in an intense game of volleyball, and Jim takes her to the hospital. In the course of being treated for the sprain, the doctor tells Pam that she’s pregnant. Immediately, she and Jim start planning their wedding and scraping together money for a house.
Shortly afterwards, they get married at Niagara Falls. The entire office attends. Andy injures his scrotum on the dance floor, Dwight hooks up with one of Pam’s bridesmaids, and Michael meets Pam’s mother, whom he begins dating shortly after, much to Pam’s horror. Regardless, the wedding was beautiful, and Jim and Pam head off for a honeymoon. When they return, Pam gives birth to a baby girl. They name her Cee-Cee, and Pam takes some time out of work to stay at home with her.
When she returns to work, it’s just in time for the news that Dunder Mifflin has gone bankrupt, and been bought by a printer-manufacturing company called Sabre. Pam and Andy are tied for worst salesman, and go off on cold calls. Predictably, this does not end well as far as acquiring new clients. But it does lay the groundwork for Pam and Andy’s friendship, hurray.
When Sabre’s printers start spontaneously catching on fire, Pam is among one of the people who spreads the word. (Albeit, it’s just to the people at Cee-Cee’s daycare center, but still.) As the show moves into season seven, more of the usual hijinks occur, such as Pam getting trapped in an elevator with Dwight and holding a costume contest in the office, and more important ones, like Cee-Cee’s christening, and Pam finagling herself the position of office administrator, where her pay is salary-based instead of commission-based.
The last super significant event (because guys do you know how long this would be if I went into every last thing alkjflkdsja) is Michael’s departure, which Pam very nearly misses when she leaves the office to price shredders (and also see the King’s Speech, but that’s neither here nor there) an outing which takes up most of the afternoon. The last few shots of the episode show Pam and Michael speaking and Pam hugs him tightly before he boards his flight. She watches his flight take off from the window, and that’s the exact spot I’ll be taking her from.
PERSONALITY:
At the root of everything, Pam is a really, honestly sweet person. She's very kind, and instinctively tries to take care of the people around her, even when it's obvious that said people annoy her half to death on a daily basis. She's genuinely cares about people, and does little nice things for them, although most of the time people don’t notice or appreciate what she’s doing.
An infinite amount of patience is practically necessary for a job at Dunder Mifflin, and Pam most certainly has that. While her coworkers are exasperating and annoying, Pam never loses her temper with them (maybe in the privacy of a talking head interview, but never with them) and responds to them politely and calmly. She’s gotten so used to the utter crazy that is Dunder Mifflin, so it’s no problem for her to just take it in stride.
It's not immediately clear in earlier episodes, but as the show drags on, it's more than apparent that Pam is much more courageous and daring than people give her credit for. She musters up the courage to tell people exactly what she thinks, even when the consequences might not be so pleasant. She had the courage to get up and walk out with Michael, to try something new that might possibly be better than the same old job she'd had ever since she'd started working with Dunder Mifflin. She sticks to her guns, and she doesn't back down, even if she there are times when she goes about getting her way in sneakier, less confrontational ways than most. She's an incredibly strong person, even if surface-wise that wouldn't be guessed.
She has a very quick wit and a dry sense of humor, and often deadpans sarcastic comments in response to the situation she finds herself in or the crazy things that happen in the office. Her sense of humor is really great, and she’ll laugh at the more ridiculous things around her, and even mastermind (aided and abetted by Jim, most of the time) pranks on the people who annoy her.
Confidence is a thing with her. When the show started, she was the quietest, least outspoken person in the entire office, but slowly, as the seasons passed, she gained a lot of confidence in herself. She decided that she was going to get what she wanted, to speak up and say exactly what she meant, and while it started off slow, by this season, she’s a pro at it. She voices her opinions with complete confidence and self-assurance.
The voice of reason? Yeah, that’s usually Pam. She’s very level-headed, and when everyone around her goes flying off the handle, Pam’s the one who quietly says, “Hey, let’s not do that, guys.” The sheer amount of crazy stunts she’s diverted is unparalleled. She’s quick on her feet, often proposing alternate, safer plans in response to Michael’s over-the-top ideas.
Good deeds are the name of the game with her. Pam really makes it her business to help out everyone around her, whether it’s giving Oscar some help with Gay Warehouse Guy or trying to keep Michael from making a fool out of himself on a conference call. She’s very much a caretaker, and very invested in the people around her. She likes seeing them happy, even if she knows that sometime within the next two seconds these very same people are going to be driving her up a wall.
POWER:
What Do I Have In My Pocket; Pam will be able to pull chainsaws out of any purse, pocket or drawer that she reaches into.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (FIRST PERSON) SAMPLE:
[ Pam's sitting with her comm propped in front of her, looking straight into it as if doing an interview. She has her hands folded in her lap, twisting her fingers nervously as she speaks. ]
So um. I'm not sure if this is part of the show or not. I mean, Phyllis said the producers were talking about a new direction but I thought that meant maybe better lighting or more cameras or maybe giving us a raise or something like that.
But uh. [ She pauses, swallows hard. ] Can I just say that the timing really sucks? I'm not trying to be rude or anything, because I know that I signed a release or whatever, and I guess if that means I have to go pretend a hero or whatever god, Michael’s going to love this, that's fine. It's fine. But Jim just asked me out and I really, really want to go to dinner with him and why can't this just wait until next Monday?
[ She pauses, looking down briefly. Then she sighs and brushes a lock of hair out of her face. ]
Yeah...
LOGS POST (THIRD PERSON) SAMPLE:
The big secret is that Pam actually doesn’t hate her job.
And alright, it sounds unbelievable (who do you think you’re fooling, Beesley, Jim would say, and Pam doesn’t think about how his voice would sound because Jim doesn’t talk to her like that anymore-it’s like he came back from Stanford a different person) but it’s the truth. Most of the time, it’s actually a pretty okay place to work.
Working at Dunder Mifflin is like trying to get into a freezing cold shower. Once you adjust to the temperature, it’s actually not so bad.
That’s probably not the best analogy, but Pam can’t think of a better one.
But as far as reception jobs go, it really could be worse. There are a lot of days when Michael goes on a sugar high and crashes at ten-past noon and then, if they’re really quiet, he’ll sleep until five and she can just sit at her desk and answer the phone (Hello, Dunder Mifflin, Pam speaking-) and sketch in the margins of her calendar and not have to worry about Michael running out of his office and knocking over her in-out box.
(He does that a lot. Pam’s thinking about moving it somewhere safer, even if that means everyone will complain.)
Andy’s sitting at his desk humming something that sounds like ABBA but Pam can’t tell just yet. She gives it fifteen more seconds until he starts singing the words under his breath, and privately bets herself ten dollars that it’ll be ABBA.
Pam knows that Andy will get to maybe the first chorus before Dwight starts telling him to shut up. She also knows that Stanley won’t notice, and that Phyllis will be tapping her foot in time with Andy’s harmonies.
See, that’s really why this place wasn’t so bad, because Pam knows it like the back of her hand by now. (When she realized that she wanted to scream. How okay she is with that fact depends on the day. Today’s a good day.) She knows that you can’t stare at Kelly for too long or she’ll start crying and accuse you of thinking she’s fat. And that every Tuesday at ten o’clock Dwight checks the air vents for terrorists or bats (the bats weren’t always on the list, not until they found that one bat in their and now Dwight’s convinced it was planted by the warehouse guys. Or Jim.) and that Kevin will dump the entire contents of her candy cup into his mouth if she doesn’t keep an eye on him when he comes up to use the copy machine.
And she could get another job. Pam knows this, and she thinks about that a lot, mostly on the days when Michael tries to play touch football in the office or rigs up the karaoke machine and sings Janet Jackson (Pamela, call you Miss Beesley ‘cause you nasty-) but the thing is, she’d have to get used to a whole other office full of crazy people, and it seems like a lot of work. Especially when she’s mostly got this office figured out, and hey, it’s just like stepping into a super cold shower, right? Just stay under the spray long enough and you get used to it.
Right?
She really needs to think of a better metaphor for this.
FINAL NOTES ABOUT YOUR CHARACTER:
I wrote the samples reacting to events from season three, but then I made the decision to take her from season seven. I can redo that if you guys like, but I figured since I already had it done I would use that anyway I HOPE THIS IS OKAY.