While there are no active plans for Peacock to return to Scranton, PA, NBCUniversal executives say they've left Dunder Mifflin’s doors open to The Office producer Greg Daniels.
NBCU Television and Streaming Chairman of Entertainment Content Susan Rovner told Deadline that "whenever Greg Daniels wants to do [a reboot], we’re standing by." This statement reportedly followed the executive pleading the fifth when asked about a possible The Office reboot series at Edinburgh International TV Festival.
Rovner is far from the only NBCU executive interested in continuing The Office, which has been a monolithic hit for NBC and its streaming service Peacock. NBCU invested $500 million to reacquire the exclusive streaming rights to the series from Netflix last year. NBCU CEO Jeff Shell claims this substantial investment was well worth it, as the workplace mockumentary has been more actively streamed on Peacock than it was on Netflix.
Understanding the value of The Office, Peacock even utilized the series' popularity as a part of its rollout strategy, breaking down its subscription tiers to new users by outlining how much of The Office they would have access to per tier.
Bonnie Hammer joins Rovner and Shell as yet another NBCU executive banking on a future reboot of The Office. Hammer commented that a reboot of The Office at Peacock is major hope and goal of both herself and NBCU, as the series remains one of the most popular streamed properties.
As for Daniels, though he has not responded directly to NBCU’s most recent statement, he hasn't entirely ruled out revisiting Dunder Mifflin. Daniels has currently been preoccupied with projects such as Amazon Prime Video’s Upload and Netflix’s Space Force, but he has always toyed with the idea that he might revisit The Office one day.
A reboot of The Office would complement Peacock’s current strategy of revisiting NBCU’s existing IP for streaming series. Though original series such as Rutherford Falls are available to Peacock subscribers, many of the platform's in-development series are reboots such as Field of Dreams, Seth McFarlane’s Ted, MacGruber, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Battlestar Galactica. Nostalgic reboots have been hit-or-miss at the streamer thus far, with Punky Brewster receiving a recent cancellation and a Clueless series no longer moving forward, whereas Saved by the Bell was quickly renewed for a second season due to its success.
NBC’s The Office starred Steve Carrell, John Krasinski, Rainn Wilson and Jenna Fischer and is itself a reboot of the British sitcom of the same name developed by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.
Source: Deadline