The Office Star Says “Ship Has Sailed” on Original Cast Revival

The Office star B.J. Novak is setting fire to hopes of getting everyone back together for a return to Scranton. After 201 episodes across nine seasons, the NBC workplace mockumentary ended with most of the employees of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company moving on: bumbling boss Michael Scott (Steve Carell) found happiness and relocated to Colorado; couple Pam (Jenna Fischer) and Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) left Scranton for Austin; former assistant to the regional manager Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) ascended to manager and married Angela (Angela Kinsey); and Ryan Howard (Novak) and Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling) ran away together.

Some co-workers retired (Leslie David Baker’s Stanley Hudson), went to jail (Creed Bratton’s Creed), followed their dreams to Cornell University (Ed Helms’ Andy Bernard), or remained working in the old office (Phyllis Smith’s Phyllis Vance). 

With the cast and crew going on to other things after the 2013 series finale, Novak says “the ship has sailed” on reassembling the original Dunder Mifflin workers for The Office revival. 

“I don’t know contractually, but I know spiritually, it’s a pure Greg Daniels thing. Everyone knows he is the person who controls the rights to The Office, spiritually, creatively the American Office,” Novak told Deadline of the original showrunner and developer of the U.S. version of The Office. “Definitely you wouldn’t get everyone back together, that ship has sailed.”

Still, multiple of Novak’s former co-stars have expressed interest in one day reassembling for a reunion one-off akin to the original U.K. Office Christmas Specials. In 2019, NBCUniversal executive Bonnie Hammer said an Office reboot was a goal for Peacock, the exclusive streaming home of the hit NBC comedy since last year.

Should NBCUniversal revive or revisit The Office, Novak believes it should happen “if there’s anything to mine creatively that’s fresh.”

“I think it needs to be approached as an artistic decision, not as a financial decision,” the Vengeance writer-director continued. “I worry that there’s so much financial pressure, understandably, to mine this precious metal in the ground called The Office reboot, spinoff, or whatever.”

He added: “The Office originally was done for the opposite of money. It looked to all of us in that writers’ room as the most unlucrative stupid decision, to make a dreary, fake documentary set in an office with no shiny stars, no music, no colors practically, definitely no studio audience, that was supposed to be the mundanity of a paper company; a remake of a British show that everyone hated us for attempting.”

Daniels previously told ComicBook he was doubtful the original cast could be reassembled for a reboot “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,” Daniels said of Season 9, adding: “Sometimes, it seems like [the fans] 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 seasons of The Office and episodes of The Office: Superfan Episodes are available for streaming on Peacock.