Actor Mindy Kaling almost joined Saturday Night Live, the job of many comedian's dreams - but it would have hurt The Office. Kaling is best known for her role as Kelly Kapoor in The Office, the talkative Customer Service Representative at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. Kaling's involvement with the series goes much further than her on-screen appearances, though, with her being one of the driving forces behind The Office, meaning that joining Saturday Night Live may have killed the series.

Since The Office ended, Mindy Kaling has done a lot, creating shows like The Mindy Project, voicing characters in projects like Inside Out, and writing for series like The Sex Lives of College Girls. While she has done all kinds of great work, she will forever be remembered for her time on all nine seasons of The Office. During her time with the show, Mindy Kaling not only played Kelly, but she also wrote and directed episodes of the series, becoming a vital creative behind the show's success. However, things could have been very different.

Related: The Office: Michael Scott Was Right, He Was A Great Boss

During The Office season 2, Kaling was offered a spot on Saturday Night Live's writing team, with the prospect that she could work her way up to an acting role on the sketch comedy series. However, she was under contract with The Office, meaning that she had to have a tough conversation with showrunner Greg Daniels. Daniels agreed to let Kaling out of her contract if she was cast on SNL, however, after revealing that it was just a writing job, Daniels said "that’s not the deal we made." Here's Kaling's full story on how she almost left The Office (via IndieWire):

“I sat down with [showrunner] Greg [Daniels] and I said to him, it would be my dream to be a cast member on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ And he’s like, you have a job here, I don’t understand why you would want to leave. And I said, I know, it’s just this is my childhood dream. And he said, OK, if you go there and get cast on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ I will let you out of your contract. So I went there and I auditioned and afterwards I had heard that Lorne [Michaels] wanted to offer me a job as a writer there, but not as a performer. But there was some hint at that point that if I stayed on long enough, like Jason Sudeikis, that I could maybe graduate to be a performer. That was dangled to me, so I thought, well that’s pretty exciting. So I went back and talked to Greg about it and he said to me, no, that’s not the deal we made. The deal we made is that if you get cast as a cast member you can go. And it was really a life-changing thing. I think the course of my career would have gone really differently had I left ‘The Office’ and done that instead.”

This highlights just how close Kaling came to leaving The Office in its relative infancy.

Why Mindy Kaling Joining SNL Would've Hurt The Office

Kelly smiling and Ryan looking nervous in The Office

If Mindy Kaling had left The Office during season 2, while she probably would have done great on Saturday Night Live, The Office would have majorly suffered for it. Not only was Kelly Kapoor a fan-favorite character, but Mindy Kaling wrote and directed some of The Office's best episodes. She wrote 22 episodes of The Office, including season 2's "The Injury," with Michael Scott's George Foreman Grill incident being one of the show's funniest moments. She also directed two of the show's later episodes: season 6's "Body Language" and season 7's "Michael's Last Dundies." On top of all that, some of the show's best storylines belong to Kelly Kapoor, including her on-again-off-again relationship with Ryan.

Many of these iconic episodes, moments, and jokes wouldn't exist without Mindy Kaling's contributions to The Office. As she recognizes, her career would have been very different if she joined SNL. Mindy Kaling made the right choice turning down Saturday Night Live, as The Office simply wouldn't be the same without her, and the series launched her incredibly successful career that is still going on today.