Paul Bevan Lieberstein (born February 22, 1967) is an American actor, screenwriter, television director and television producer. A Primetime Emmy Award winner, he is best known as writer, as executive producer, and as supporting cast member Toby Flenderson on the NBC sitcom The Office. He served as the series' showrunner from seasons five to eight. Early life Lieberstein grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut, the son of Judith and Stanley Lieberstein. He is Jewish. He attended Conard High School where he wrote his first sitcom with some friends and played the vibraphone in band. He then attended Hamilton College, where he joined Chi Psi and graduated in 1989 with a major in economics (he "wanted to be a financier of some kind"). Lieberstein wrote references to the fact that Office character Andy Bernard was a Chi Psi from Cornell into the storyline of several episodes of the show. After college, Lieberstein moved to New York City, where his first job was as an auditor at Peat Marwick International, a job that lasted six months. He followed that with part-time work at his father's law firm, "working as little as [he] could so [he] could write". Career Lieberstein and a writing partner got an agent with William Morris and moved to Los Angeles, living just off Hollywood Boulevard. He landed his first writing job on Clarissa Explains It All, but was fired after one season when he and his writing partner split up. Lieberstein then had short stints in a few other writer rooms, including Weird Science and The Naked Truth, before his brother-in-law Greg Daniels asked him to join the King of the Hill staff. Lieberstein served as a co-executive producer for 25 episodes in Season 6 of The Drew Carey Show, and also served as a supervising producer for two episodes in that season: the season opening "Drew Pops Something on Kate" (which he also wrote, along with "Drew and the Motorcycle" and "Drew and the Activist, Part I"), and "Buzzie Wuzzie Liked His Beer". Lieberstein also worked as producer on the third and final season of the television drama series The Newsroom. In November 2017, it was announced that he would replace Kevin Etten as showrunner of Ghosted. In 2018, Lieberstein wrote and directed his first feature film, Song of Back and Neck, which made it into Tribeca Film Festival. On April 3, 2020, he announced plans for