Hang on, a reboot of The Office is in the works? That is the rumour that has been swirling the internet this morning – and it has come as extremely welcome news for fans of the hit TV show.
However, it might just be a bit too early to be getting excited about a spin-off version of the comedy series. Today’s news seems to have been spawned from an article published on Puck (the American media company) in which lawyer-journalists Matthew Belloni and Jonathan Handel speculated on the future of Hollywood after the writers’ strike.
“Greg Daniels is set to do a reboot of The Office, for instance,” they said in the piece. “A ton of high-profile movie scripts will come in. The industry will chug back to normal.”
It’s true that Belloni and Handel are both industry insiders, so the information should have some weight, but as of now we’re delaying our delight, as screenwriter Daniels – who adapted Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s The Office for American network NBC – hasn’t publicly confirmed their comments, and nor has NBC.
There have been rumours that a spin-off of The Office could be on the cards ever since the series ended in 2013. It was, after all, a massive success, winning awards with a following in the millions (5.7 million people tuned in for its final episode). However, partly thanks to the advent of streaming (which further boosted The Office’s popularity), over the years these whispers have started to get louder.
When NBC’s chairman of entertainment content, Susan Rovner, was asked about possible “reimaginings” of the show by The Hollywood Reporter in February, Rovner said: “Whatever Greg Daniels wants to do, I’m standing by with open arms.”
Daniels, meanwhile, has not denied the possibility of a reboot: “Obviously certain parts are just personal, like I’ve got all these other projects that I’ve been working on,” he said to Collider in 2022. “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.”
“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,” he added. “But I don’t know if that would be something people would want or not, it’s hard to tell.”
Since The Office concluded, Daniels, who is now 60, has created Parks and Recreation, the Prime Video sci-fi comedy series Upload, and Netflix comedy series Space Force, which stars Steve Carell.
New projects will only happen at the the conclusion of the Hollywood writers’ strike, which has been ongoing since May 2. But it looks like there is light at the end of the tunnel. On Sunday the union sent an email to its members: “[The] WGA has reached a tentative agreement with the AMPTP [the body representing the big Hollywood studios]. This was made possible by the enduring solidarity of WGA members and extraordinary support of our union siblings who joined us on the picket lines for over 146 days,” it said.
Further details of the agreement are yet to be revealed, which the Writers Guild said in a Tweet would come “after contract language is finalised”. The Guild also thanked the “extraordinary support” of its “union siblings”. Next up, both the Guild’s board and its members will have to vote to agree to the deal. Meanwhile, an agreement is yet to be made with the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union, which is still striking.
