‘THE OFFICE’ FOLLOW-UP SERIES: EVERYTHING WE KNOW SO FAR

The Office-verse could be about to get even bigger. Earlier this year, Deadline reported that Greg Daniels, the producer responsible for Americanizing Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s beloved original British series The Office, had opened up a development room for a potential follow-up series.

It won’t be the reunion that die-hards have long been hoping for, though. Instead, it will take place in the same universe as Dunder Mifflin and is being pitched as a follow-up series. There aren’t many details yet, but the series is already beginning coming together. Here’s what we know so far.

Greg Daniels and Michael Koman are ready to make it happen.

Per Variety, Daniels, who also co-created King of the Hill and Parks and Recreation (itself very The Office-esque), has teamed up with Michael Korman, who will help him lead the project. Korman’s credits include writing for Late Night with Conan O’Brien and co-creating Nathan for You along with Nathan Fielder. Koman is also married to The Office alum Ellie Kemper, who played endearingly innocent receptionist Erin Hannon beginning in season 5.

Domhnall Gleeson and Sabrina Impacciatore are attached to star.

On April 19, The Hollywood Reporter claimed the follow-up series has named two cast members: The White Lotus’s Sabrina Impacciatore and Star Wars villain Domhnall Gleeson. It’s unclear who they’ll be playing, but given that they’re Italian and Irish, respectively, it suggests the show might not take place anywhere near Scranton, Pennsylvania. (Though that’s just a guess.) Daniels and Korman are reportedly casting a ”wide net” for the show’s stars and hope to lock down a full cast by the second half of this year.

Impacciatore appeared on the Sicily-set second season of The White Lotus, playing Valentina, the resort’s tightly wound manager, who has an unrequited crush on one of her staffers. Her work garnered her an Emmy nomination, which she lost to her costar Jennifer Coolidge. A graduate of New York’s legendary Actors Studio, Impacciatore also appeared in the 2001 Italian film The Last Kiss (which Tony Goldwyn remade into a Zach Braff movie of the same name in 2006) and The Passion of the Christ.

Gleeson, the son of beloved character actor Brendan Gleeson (Gangs of New York, The Banshees of Inisherin), has appeared alongside his father in the Harry Potter series, playing Bill Weasley in the last two films. After nabbing the lead in Richard Curtis’s About Time, he scored plum roles in Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken, Ex Machina, Brooklyn, and The Revenant. Gleeson is perhaps best known as hissable, oft-humiliated General Hux in the most recent Star Wars trilogy. He recently received an Emmy nomination for the FX series The Patient.

It has yet to settle on a network or streamer.

While the American iteration of The Office lives on Peacock (and plays pretty much constantly on cable), its follow-up has yet to find a home. Per THR, both Daniels and Universal Television “want to make sure the take is right before setting it up at a network/streamer.”

It’s unlikely you’ll see any of the NBC show’s characters.

The U.S. Office gang has frequently reunited off-screen, and Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey have been co-hosting the Office Ladies podcast since 2019. Alas, an onscreen reunion seems to be unlikely, in part because Michael Scott himself, Steve Carell, doesn’t seem into the idea—or at least that’s how he felt in 2018. Carell, though, did recently work with John Krasinski, the erstwhile Jim Halpert, for the forthcoming film IF.

The Office castmates have reunited on other projects.

That said, six members of the Dunder Mifflin team—Rainn Wilson, Craig Robinson, Jenna Fischer, Creed Bratton, Kate Flannery, and Brian Baumgartner—got back together for a lengthy new AT&T Business ad. The spot is for Wilson’s new line of luxury pillows, called “Dream with Rainn,” which feature an embedded speaker that allows the actor to lull one to sleep with his gentle patter. You can watch the ad above.

This article was originally published on mentalfloss.com as ‘The Office’ Follow-Up Series: Everything We Know So Far.

2024-04-22T21:03:18Z dg43tfdfdgfd