Entertainment Weekly interviewed Executive Producer Greg Daniels about The Office series finale.

An excerpt:

What about the network? What were their feelings about the ending? Did they have any input?

Daniels: No, they were super supportive. They wanted it to be done the way we wanted to do it and helped us strategize about how to pull it off. That’s all. Well actually … you know, we didn’t tell them about Steve. They didn’t know about Steve and the line producer was a little nervous about it, I think he was afraid he was going to lose his job. But we shot the Steve stuff and we kept it out of the dailies and didn’t tell them about it. At the table reading, we gave the Steve Carell lines to Creed.