The Office showrunner Greg Daniels isn’t opposed to the idea of putting Dunder Mifflin back in business.
“Well, I think that it’s very speculative,” Daniels, 60, said of a potential revival during a Tuesday, October 17, interview with Collider. “The fact that it kind of blew up based on one line in a Puck piece was kind of cool, I guess, in the sense that the fans still care a lot.”
Earlier this month, a report by Puck News claimed that a reboot of the hit NBC comedy, which ran from 2005 to 2013, was in the works. According to the outlet, there were plans to formally announce the series after the Writers Guild of America ended its three-month-long strike but nothing has been confirmed since the guild ratified a new deal with the AMPTP (Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers) earlier this month.
While Daniels couldn’t confirm that a new iteration of the beloved sitcom is happening, he also didn’t fully shut down the idea, hinting that something may happen in the future. “When there’s something to announce, I will definitely announce it,” he promised fans.
The Office was critically acclaimed during its nine-season run, earning five Emmy wins and countless nominations. The show was inspired by the U.K. series of the same name and followed Steve Carell as Michael Scott, the manager of a small — and failing — paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania. John Krasinski, Jenna Fischer, Angela Kinsey, Rainn Wilson, Mindy Kaling and B.J. Novak rounded out the main cast, portraying his various disgruntled employees who often vented about their absurd working conditions in mockumentary-style confessionals.
When it comes to how a show like The Office could work today, Daniels told Collider that it would be an “interesting” storytelling challenge, especially with all the advancements in technology over the past decade.
“When you watch old movies it’s like a game to identify what wouldn’t work when everybody had a cell phone,” he explained. “Like, all the story moves of people like, ‘Oh, they just missed you. Oh, dang.’ Now maybe I’ll get on that boat and go to, you know, it’s just like, ‘Oh, how frustrating if you only had a cell phone.’ I mean, it’s an interesting question for sure.”
Reboots and revivals have only gained momentum in the past few years, but Daniels hasn’t always been as open to the idea of revisiting the show, telling Entertainment Weekly in 2019 that he would “hesitate” to “open” such a “perfect” thing back up.
“We got the chance to end it the way we wanted to end it. It wasn’t like we were interrupted in the middle of a run or something,” he shared. “So in a sense, it’s completely an artistic whole. But, that said, I don’t know, the cast every now and then talks about getting back together in some form, but I don’t see it being a reboot like the way Will & Grace was rebooted.”
Kaling, meanwhile— who portrayed Kelly Kapoor and served as a writer on the series — isn’t sure The Office would work today in any capacity. The show has garnered criticism over the years for some of its more controversial story lines and insensitive jokes about race, sex, religion and more.
“Most of the characters on that show would be canceled by now. That show is so inappropriate now,” Kaling told Good Morning America in December 2022. “The writers who I’m still in touch with now, we always talk about how so much of that show we probably couldn’t make now.”
The actress — who has gone on to helm shows like The Mindy Project, Never Have I Ever and The Sex Live of College Girls —explained that “what offends people has changed so much” over time. She claimed that part of the reason The Office is still so popular is because it’s “kind of fearless” or “taboo” in what it “talks about on the show.”
When asked when she planned on showing the series to her kids, Kaling — who is mom to daughter Katherine Swati, 5, and son Spencer Avu, 3 — replied, “I kind of think maybe never.”
