Just weeks after news broke of a graphic novel based on Threat Level Midnight, the fictional film directed by Michael Scott (Steve Carell) on The Office, last week, via a YouTube announcement from actor Jay Jackson, who played Pawnee’s local news anchor Perd Hapley on Parks and Recreation, that Mouse Rat will release a full-length album, The Awesome Album, later this year. On the tenth anniversary of Lil Sebastian’s memorial, Jackson made the announcement in character as Hapley. At the ceremony, which happened in the season three episode “Li’l Sebastian,” Mouse Rat (fronted by Chris Pratt‘s Andy Dwyer) played the song “5,000 Candles In the Wind,” which will be included on The Awesome Album.
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On Spotify, you can subscribe to Mouse Rat to get notifications when songs appear, and to listen to “5,000 Candles In the Wind.” It is not immediately clear whether the original members of the band will return, or whether it will be mostly new content by other artists performing in-character. Some of the songs listed on the album’s tracklist are already familiar to fans of the show, including Leslie Knope’s campaign song, “Catch Your Dream,” and appearances by Duke Silver, the name Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) used in-universe when he played saxophone.
You can see the announcement below.
We recently had Parks and Recreation producer (and The Office U.S. creator) Greg Daniels on the line and had to ask him about his thoughts of bringing the series back. According to the screenwriter, he has yet to begin conversations with Peacock, so he’s unsure of the streamer’s current plans.
“I haven’t spoken to anybody at Peacock, no,” Daniels tells us. “I mean, I think that the talk really came up when they did Will and Grace. They rebooted that show. But I don’t think that we would either be able to get all the cast together, because a lot of them are doing different things, or whether we’d really need to do that, because I feel like we had our finale.”
As Daniels tells us, the show ended exactly how the writer’s room wanted it to and that’s a major hurdle everyone would have to overcome if — and that’s a big if — they decided to do a revival again.
“We knew we were going to end the show for that last season, and then we wrote towards particular endings,” he adds, making sure to point out nostalgia can almost be too big of a factor in decision-making. “I mean, I don’t know. Sometimes, it seems like people want something, but I don’t know if they really do want it, or just means that they really liked the original. It’s hard to say.”
Reboot or not, Peacock will be home to every season of The Office for the foreseeable future. You can check it out there.
