It’s been 10 years since the final episode of The Office aired on NBC, bringing to an end one of television’s great recent sitcoms. And thanks to easy availability on streaming platforms, people have never really fallen out of love with the show. To this day, I know people who will add “That’s what she said” to any sentence that might conceivably call for it. Shameful but true.
Perhaps the show’s enduring popularity is part of the reason why we’ve been hearing recently that a reboot might be in the offing. I mean, there are new episodes of Frasier airing on Paramount+ right now. Will & Grace came back for three whole new seasons in 2017, over a decade after its original ending. Is the idea of an Office reboot really so crazy?
TheWrap got ahold of original series co-creator Greg Daniels to ask about all of this. “I don’t like to think of anything as a reboot,” Daniels said. “I feel like we ended that story beautifully. The characters had closure. I would never want to redo that same show with a different cast, because I think we got the luckiest cast, the best cast ever in TV, to do that show. So the notion of a reboot is not of interest.
"The notion of maybe something like the way The Mandalorian is a new show in the Star Wars universe, you know what I mean? Something like the notion of this documentary crew doing a documentary about a different subject. That, I think, could be intriguing and creative. But I don’t even know what you would call that. I don’t know if that’s like a sister show or something. I don’t know what the term is. But it doesn’t feel like reboot would be the appropriate term for that."
So Daniels isn’t interested in bringing back Michael Scott, Jim, Pam, and the rest, either played by the original actors or recast. I think most fans would breathe a sigh of relief over that. But he would do a show where the documentary crew behind The Office films workers at a cannery or something. Or on Mandalore.
The comparison to The Mandalorian is interesting. Disney used that show as the springboard from which to launch a sort of Star Wars Television Universe that also includes shows like The Book of Boba Fett and Ahsoka. I don’t think an Office spinoff would go quite that far. Part of me hopes we never find out.
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