The Office boss on revival odds: ‘My biggest concern would be disappointing the fans’

Could The Office be opening back up for business?

If it were up to NBC, the beloved comedy would no doubt return to the air, considering that the network has continually expressed such a desire. The fire was further stoked by Ed Helms, Jenna Fischer, and Ellie Kemper crashing Steve Carell’s Saturday Night Live hosting gig last year to “pressure” him into a revival, followed by much of the cast reuniting at the house of Greg Daniels, who developed the show for American audiences.

Speaking to EW recently for an oral history of the wedding of Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Fischer), Daniels said The Office is more popular than ever thanks to its availability on Netflix (for now), which raises the question of whether he’s interested in riding that wave back to Scranton.

“I think that there was a lot of misunderstanding, because NBC did just did an exact reboot of Will & Grace and then we started talking about doing something more with The Office,” Daniels says. “And at that time the cast were doing things that would make it impossible to get them all back to do more episodes of The Office — even if they wanted to.”

For those not keeping up with Will & Grace, the other long-running NBC comedy returned with the same main cast in 2017. This past summer, the network announced that the upcoming third season of the new iteration would be the last.

“It was such a perfect thing that I would hesitate to open it up,” Daniels says of his series. “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. 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.”

When floated the possibility of at least doing a Christmas special (Krasinski has suggested such an idea), like what Ricky Gervais’ U.K. original did, Daniels points out that was only episode 13 and 14 for that two-season show, while his Office produced more than 200 episodes.

“My biggest concern would be disappointing the fans,” Daniels admits. “People will watch the entire series and then roll right into watching it again, and to me that means we ended it properly.”