Whatever Happened To Meredith From The Office?

For 201 episodes over nine seasons, fans of The Office got to see Kate Flannery play Meredith Palmer, the boozy, promiscuous supplier relations representative at Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, Inc. One of the show's great many pleasures came from the way it gradual revealed bits of Meredith's past — her failed marriages, lactose intolerance, and prior occupations, among which were "boxer" and "adult film star."

Flannery came to The Office with a nearly 20-year résumé in improvisational comedy and theater, having cut her proverbial teeth in one of the most prestigious improv companies in the country, and toured with a terrifically popular theatrical comedy. She exited The Office at its conclusion with years of hilarious scenes and verbal exchanges, having created and embodied one of the funniest secondary characters on television. What has she done since? Not one to sit still for long, Flannery has been quite busy. Let's see what she's been up to.

One of the Annoyance Theater's biggest hits was a show called The Real Live Brady Bunch, an irony-filled replaying of actual Brady Bunch episodes, with Annoyance players in roles made famous by the likes of Robert Reed and Florence Henderson. "It was like a rock 'n' roll show," Flannery told the Improv Nerd podcast. "People were literally lined up for blocks in freezing cold weather [to see the show]. It was a weird time; it was what I call 'pre-YouTube theater,' because no one could share things like we do with the internet [today]. You can't show somebody clips, so we were doing it — that was the way that we shared it."

Flannery joined the touring cast of the show, performing in theaters across the country. On one such tour, the troupe presented the "Getting Davy Jones" episode, with the former Monkee himself reprising his role in the show. Flannery and Jones had a short-lived affair while the company was on the road, which she described in an essay on the Fresh Yarn blog. "A person doesn't have dinner with Davy Jones without realizing he does not belong to anyone," she told the pop culture site Hobo Trashcan. "He belongs to the world. He could have had dinner with any woman in the world, but he chose to eat with me ... sometimes. It was just a couple of weeks. It was a very quick learning experience, let me say."

Flannery gets to flex her musical muscles in the comedy lounge act the Lampshades, which she describes as "a male/ female duo fresh from the cruise ship circuit, spinning pop and rock into comedy gold as they work out the kinks in their amusingly tortured relationship." Of the act's origins, Flannery (who studied musical theater and voice) recalls, "I originally developed the Lampshades when I was in Chicago with a guy named Scot Robinson and Dave Adler was our piano player. I guess we did it for almost two years there, but we were doing other shows at the same time, so it wasn't our main focus or anything. And then, we didn't live in the same city together for a long time, then found ourselves both living in L.A. about six years ago and we decided to do it again."

The duo plays regularly, mostly in southern California comedy clubs, and for a number of years had a standing gig at the Improv Olympic Theater in Hollywood. "It's been musically interesting," she says. "We will gig out and host stand-up nights and we've done a lot of charity events and some private parties. It's a very portable show, so it's been really, really great for us. We've gotten around a lot doing it and we've met a lot of people because of it."

A film Variety called a "thoroughly ingratiating, touchingly heartfelt comedy," 4th Man Out tells the story of Adam, a small-town car mechanic who, after a night of drinking, comes out to his three lifelong friends, who are surprised to learn he is gay. The bulk of the film deals with maintaining the equilibrium in their friendship and helping Adam find a relationship. Flannery plays Adam's mother, Karen, and says the film is a product of an increasingly tolerant audience and society.

"The world has changed so much," she told Hollywood Chicago in an interview with the film's cast, "and younger kids have so much less judgement about everything — about coming out, about the transgender community, about racial issues — they don't care to draw lines between people. I think that is fantastic, and this movie is the evolution of coming out in America. This is an amazing story that represents that change." Parker Young, who plays one of Adam's friends in the film, concurs. "It's one of those things that in the end, is the right thing to do," he told Hollywood Chicago, "and as time progresses, the right thing always emerges as what we need to do. Our generation is more aware of what we think about it as individuals, and we're not listening to negative backlash when we don't agree with it."

Flannery maintains a robust presence on Twitter and Instagram, tweeting and posting photos of her exploits offstage, with friends and other celebrities, and of current and upcoming projects. She is also fond of retweeting fans' posts and a seemingly endless stream of memes, both of The Office in general, and of her character Meredith specifically.

She doesn't always feel comfortable in the virtual realm, though. In an interview with Google, Flannery noted that engaging with fans online "is kind of horrifying. I have to be more self-conscious than I normally would be. And I have to figure out who needs to know what, and also who gives a flying s***?" One specific online project illustrates her discomfort. "I remember doing a celebrity blog [about] The Office, for TVGuide.com," she recalls, "and I remember someone did it before me who was like, 'We all had raisins today!' They were saying the dumbest things. I felt like I needed to have a point of view. For me I feel like sometimes there's such an egocentric thing that happens with this sense of celebrity, even at the smallest level. But we're all sort of negotiating your ability to stick around. It's a really slippery slope."

Flannery — a major film buff, as many actors are — hosted a screening of Billy Wilder's Oscar-winning 1945 film The Lost Weekend at the 2018 TCM Classic Film Festival. The movie was, according to TCM, the first time a Hollywood production had seriously dealt with alcoholism. Based on a novel by Charles R. Jackson, The Lost Weekend is the tale of a writer (played by Ray Milland) who is debilitated by alcohol and willing to sacrifice everything — even the love of his girlfriend (Jane Wyman) and the help of his brother (Phillip Terry) — to keep drinking.

Flannery's father owned a bar (though he had stopped drinking by the time she was born), so ostensibly she had seen patrons who couldn't quite put the bottle down. Her connections to the film ran even deeper; in an interview outside the festival, she said she accepted the gig presenting the film "because I played an alcoholic on television and I used to wait on Billy Wilder for about seven years in a restaurant in Beverly Hills." This bit of access to the great filmmaker stuck with her. "He was lovely," she recalled. "I'm sure he couldn't pick me out of a lineup, but I was always inspired and moved by just seeing him and his amazing body of work. He was lovely. He was terrific.  He had a martini, calves brains and eggs and a slice of apple pie, every time. He was very consistent, which is kind of fantastic. We should all be so consistent."