They’re not at Dunder Mifflin anymore.
“The Office” creator Greg Daniels, who also co-created the new spinoff show “The Paper,” wasn’t initially planning to revisit that world.
“I didn’t want to do anything that would somehow retroactively change what we had done on that show,” Daniels exclusively told The Post.
“We had a very intentional ending, and all the characters went in different directions.”
However, he changed his tune when “The Office” landed at No.1 on Netflix “for four years” and “people kept asking” him to do a spinoff. He soon realized that “if the documentary crew just picked another subject matter” it could be a new show from the same cameraman.
Premiering Sept. 4 on Peacock, “The Paper” is a mockumentary in the same style as “The Office.”
“The Office,” which ran on NBC from 2005 to 2013, followed staffers at Dunder Mifflin paper company in Scranton, PA, including Michael Scott (Steve Carell), Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) and Jim Halpert (John Krasinski).
“The Paper” follows a new cast of characters, working in the office of the “Toledo Truth Teller” newspaper in Ohio, including editor-in-chief Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), Esmerelda (Sabrina Impacciatore, “The White Lotus”), and Oscar (Oscar Nunez) the one crossover character, reprising his role from “The Office.”
“Oscar didn’t have a storyline that felt like it would be ruined by reopening. He actually managed to keep his dignity through nine years [on ‘The Office’] and didn’t really come to any kind of big conclusion. We decided to include him, so there would be a true spinoff,” Daniels explained.
“But other than that, it’s really a new mockumentary that’s connected through the notion of paper, but is not repeating any of the characters or jokes of the original.”
Daniels and his co-creator Michael Koman aren’t opposed to bringing on more “Office” stars though, noting: “You never know.”
“We really wanted to make sure this show stood on its own two feet before asking any of them, because we didn’t want to be like, ‘please help our new project,’ you know? So, we’ll see.”
The “Parks and Recreation” creator added that they’re trying to be “respectful” of the original show and “not exploitative of its fame.”
Koman told The Post, “The contact between the two shows is the sensibility of the storytelling, not the story itself.”
Even though a newspaper is different from the Dunder Mifflin paper company, there’s a creative throughline.
“In terms of trying to recapture the tone of ‘The Office,’ the fact that they were selling notebooks when everybody was moving on to iPads, but they still were plugging away….there is a little bit of feeling of nostalgia for when the newspapers were well-funded and were really booming, and an awareness that it hasn’t been that for a while,” said Daniels.
“That kind of poignant sense is good for the bones of the show, I think.”
Skeptics might say it’s a bad idea to create a spinoff of a beloved show.
Daniels said that he’s used to hearing “that kind of feedback,” when he was adapting the original British “The Office” into an American version, “and when doing ‘Parks and Recreation’ after, as another mockumentary.”
“If you listen to the kind of feedback, you do one thing and then…you never get a chance to do anything else,” he explained. “You have to take another swing, and not listen to naysayers.”
[Notigroup Newsroom in collaboration with other media outlets, with information from the following sources]
