The Office: New Podcast Series to Chronicle the Show’s History With Steve Carell and More Cast Members

A new podcast will provide fans with an oral history of The Office, NBC‘s long-running workplace comedy, with a little help from host Brian Baumgartner, who played the character of Kevin Malone on the show. The show will be less like Office Ladies, the hugely popular episode-by-episode rewatch podcast hosted by stars Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey, and more like journalist Andy Greene’s The Office: The Untold Story of the Greatest Sitcom of the 2000s. While the podcast — a 12-episode limited run — is not an adaptation of Greene’s book but, like that book, joins the story before the show even starts and follows it from development to the end of the show.

The series will also follow the course of development, searching for a network, and casting the show. EW, who broke the story, revealed that along the way, there will be interviews with castm members Steve Carell (Michael Scott), John Krasinski (Jim Halpert), Rainn Wilson (Dwight Schrute), Fischer (Pam Beesly), Kinsey (Angela Martin), and others — as well as Grammy-winner and The Office superfan Billie Eilish.

With studios launching proprietary streaming services that are removing some of the biggest shows of the last 25 years from bigger platforms like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, there seems to be a growing new market for podcasts and books that explore those shows in depth. Besides The Office, NBC’s other big single-camera sitcom of that era, Scrubs, has both a rewatch podcast from the cast and a recent, fairly in-depth book from best-selling writer Shea Serrano.

The Office was a “mockumentary”-style sitcom that portrayed the everyday lives of office employees at the Scranton, Pennsylvania, branch of the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company. It aired on NBC from March 24, 2005, to May 16, 2013, and was based on a series created for the BBC by British comedians Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant.

The oral history format is also a popular one for podcasts, whether it’s things like How Did This Get Made?, which is not really an oral history but is premised/structured a lot liek one, and the recent miniseries Josie and the Podcats, which tracked the lifespan of the 2001 Josie and the Pussycats movie starring Rachael Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson, Tara Reid, Seth Green, Alan Cumming, and Scrubs star Donald Faison.

An Oral History of the Office will be available starting Tuesday, July 14 on Spotify. Three episodes will drop on launch day, and then a new episode will come each Tuesday until it’s completed.