Written by Jennifer Celotta, and directed by Paul Feig, the episode first aired in the United States on November 22, 2005 on NBC.
The series depicts the everyday lives of office employees in the Scranton, Pennsylvania branch of the fictional Dunder Mifflin Paper Company.
Omi Vaidya revealed that, during the party scenes, the cast were allowed to drink real beer and play video games on an Xbox 360.
Vaidya later explained that, originally, "a lot of people auditioned for that role, bigger Indian American actors".
However Vaidya, who had watched the British version and was familiar with the camera style, "took a scarf, created a turban out of it and walked to the audition room with it on" because he thought that "that was what was needed for the character and the show".
Michael invites Dwight over to his house to watch the 2004 version of Battlestar Galactica, but he misidentifies the show as "Battleship Galaxy".
[9] At his improv class, Michael, in an attempt to get the instructor's attention, asks "Mr. Kot-ter", a reference to the 1975 series Welcome Back, Kotter.
Finally, Michael and Jim share a duet of the 1983 single "Islands in the Stream", originally sung by Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton.
[11] An encore presentation of the episode, on June 20, 2006, received 2.1 rating/7% share was viewed by over 5 million viewers, ranking it as the number one program in the 18–34 demographic.
Club awarded the episode a "B+", and wrote positively of the way the show was able to write-in the presence of the Documentarians into the episode's plot; he compared this to the story arc in the ninth season involving Brian the boom mic operator, noting that the documentarians presence in "Email Surveillance" was much better executed than then the aforementioned Brian plot.
He also called the episode's conclusion, featuring Michael and Jim singing a duet, "emotionally satisfying" because it relies "on what these people mean to each other outside of the office".