For better or for worse, it seems like it's inevitable that The Office will one day get rebooted. The American adaptation of the series is still binge-watched religiously by fans to this day, thanks to its availability for streaming on Peacock. Given that we're living in the age of reboots and revivals, NBCUniversal has been hopeful for Greg Daniels, who adapted The Office for NBC, to revisit the franchise with a new series.
As of now, Daniels has no immediate plans to work on anything new involving The Office, as he's been keeping busy with other projects, such as Space Force on Netflix and Upload on Prime Video. That doesn't mean he hasn't given some thought to what he'd do if he decides to team back up with NBC to revive The Office for the network or for their streaming service Peacock. Speaking with Collider, Daniels notes how NBC would be up for more Office, but his biggest concern is that it wouldn't be well-received by fans.
"Well, [NBC] certainly would be very excited to do it. Obviously certain parts are just personal, like I've got all these other projects that I've been working on. And [The Office] was such a wonderful and rare experience that obviously you don't want to just go back to it and kind of possibly disappoint people when right now, they couldn't be happier about it."
Fair enough, but if Daniels were to revisit The Office, what would that look like? Daniels feels it would need to be a soft reboot with an entirely new cast of characters, but that it would ideally still be set in the same universe, keeping the door open for special appearances and other references to the original show.
"I can't tell whether fans would want more of it, and when I say more of it, I don't think it would be the same characters. I think it would just be sort of like an extension of the universe, you know what I mean, like the way [The] Mandalorian is like an extension of Star Wars. But I don't know if that would be something people would want or not, it's hard to tell."
Greg Daniels Says Michael Scott Wouldn't Be Acceptable on Television in 2022
Recently, Greg Daniels also addressed his thoughts on how The Office would work in 2022. He says that a character like Michael Scott would be too problematic if he were introduced in a new series, given the way comedy has changed in the years since The Office went off the air. That may be another reason why Daniels would prefer to simply reimagine an entirely new cast instead of trying to recreate similar characters.
"I don’t think that would work. I also think that the content was very much pitched for that period of time, when people weren’t as sensitive to what is giving offense to people so that you could have a boss who kept putting his foot in it," Daniels told THR. "You could feel that the content was sort of helping people see things as being offensive that they might not have seen as offensive before, because they were just used to it. Now, everybody’s much more aware of how offensive certain things are. We’re in a different place in the cycle of consciousness-raising."
Classic episodes of The Office can be streamed on Peacock along with Superfan episodes that include additional, never-before-seen footage.