NBC pulled an Office cold open after it aired exactly one time, and it's been off TV for 17 years. A former producer says it's because the network boss's wife didn't like how it ended. 8.2 million people watched it on October 29, 2009. After that it disappeared from the reruns, then the DVDs, then Netflix, then Peacock. The producer told The A.V. Club the complaint came from Caryn Zucker, whose husband Jeff was running NBC Universal at the time. The last shot of the scene landed right on a cause she'd spent years working on. She asked him to get rid of it, and he did. What made it so easy to cut is how The Office was put together. The cold opens were usually their own little short films before the credits, with nothing to do with the rest of the episode. This one happened to hold all of the episode's Halloween stuff. Take it out and "Koi Pond" just opens with Michael falling into a client's lobby fish pond, and you'd never know it was the Halloween episode. Jeff Zucker was gone from NBC Universal by early 2011, when Comcast took over. His wife's request has now outlasted his time there by 15 years. NBC hasn't even been consistent about it. The show's official YouTube channel put the full cold open into a Halloween compilation back in 2021, so you can watch it free on NBC's YouTube while the episode on NBC's own streaming service still skips it. And the episode it got cut from is literally about this. Michael gets made fun of all day for falling in that pond (a bit the writers took from writer Warren Lieberstein, who really did fall into one before a meeting), so he makes the whole office write up a list of things nobody's allowed to joke about. The writers spent 22 minutes on a list of off-limits jokes, and the network quietly added one more before the episode ever reran.