The Office: NBC Currently Has No Plans to Develop Reboot

In a reversal of previous comments from NBC executives, NBCUniversal has no current plans to reboot The Office for Peacock after it launches later this month. Last year, former Peacock head Bonnie Hammer said bringing the show back in some capacity was a priority for her. Now that Hammer has shifted responsibilities within the company — she now oversees production for NBCUniversal — it appears that’s not with the current overseers of the service. NBCUniversal original content head Bill McGoldrick tells Deadline that no reboot conversations have taken place for a show on Peacock.

“Because it does not launch until January, we have not talked specifically about The Office reboots for Peacock; we’ve talked about things we can do to support The Office once it gets to our service but a reboot has not come up specifically for Peacock,” McGoldrick said.

That’s not stopping them from doing a reunion series or a special one-shot, the executive says. He adds, “Lots of those ideas have been bandied about with people internally and with Greg Daniels and people associated with the show. As you can imagine, there are lots of creative ideas, we haven’t landed at any one right now.”

Just last September, Hammer said the outfit was having conversations on what to do with the fan-favorite series. “It is my hope and goal that we do an Office reboot,” she said at the time. “The Office comes back to us in January 2021. It is my hope that we can figure what that great reboot would be. We are having conversations.”

When we spoke with Greg Daniels earlier this year, the writer admitted he wasn’t sure whether fans really wanted a reboot — or if they were simply feeling nostalgic over the property.

“I haven’t spoken to anybody at Peacock, no,” Daniels told 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.”

“We knew we were going to end the show for that last season, and then we wrote towards particular endings,” he added. “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.”

All nine seasons of The Office are now streaming on Netflix.