We’ve been writing about the long-rumored spinoff of NBC’s The Office for months now, and the details that everyone has been waiting on have finally arrived. Well, most of the details; we still don’t know what the new show will be called, nor the degree to which the forthcoming spinoff will intersect with any of the Dunder Mifflin characters we all loved from the OG series. Today’s big news, though, is that the still-untitled spinoff has officially been picked up to series by Peacock — and we’ve got all the highlights below.
In addition to Peacock confirming on Thursday that the new Office-adjacent show from Greg Daniels and Michael Koman has been picked up to series, we also know that production will begin in July. And that Domhnall Gleeson (About Time, Ex-Machina) and Sabrina Impacciatore (The White Lotus) will lead an ensemble cast.
As for what the show is about, here’s where things depart from the original Office:
NBC’s beloved nine-season show was, of course, a mockumentary, and this time around that same fictional documentary crew is in search of a new story to tell. Leaving the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin behind, the crew discovers a dying newspaper and its publisher in the Midwest. The paper has brought in volunteer reporters to turn things around, and I suspect the documentary crew will zero in on the individual characters to tell the story of a legacy journalism business that, honestly, sounds a lot like a certain regional paper and office products supplier in Scranton.
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Having worked in journalism for a few small-town newspapers many years ago, I can confirm: The characters, the weirdness, the heart, and the camaraderie will definitely lend itself to the kind of show that fans of The Office want to see.
Suffice it to say, the people who work at small-town newspapers exist on an island of misfit toys. Town gossip, school board meetings, soccer matches, and police blotters are the mother’s milk of community newspapers — the kind of thing read mostly by geriatrics, who will call in to the newsroom at the drop of a hat to complain about everything from grammar mistakes to the fact that no one delivered their paper this morning.
You meet all kinds of people here, from the sweet receptionist to the lone ad salesman to the publisher who has an outsized assessment of the paper and acts like he’s Ben Bradlee. Reporters often double as their own photographers, and it’s a place where quirkiness is normalcy. I once had an editor — a desperately optimistic Michael Scott type — who commiserated with me over a mistake that I was beating myself up over.
He guffawed, with a honk of a laugh, and brushed it off. That’s nothing, he said, compared to the time he got chewed out for mixing up the perpetrator and the victim in a crime story he’d written. I laughed, while also marveling to myself: This is my editor.
I said all that to say, I’m more hopeful than not that Peacock’s new series could very well turn out to be the perfect spiritual successor to The Office. You can find decent and likable people anywhere you look, which was also more or less what Pam was referring to when she said at the end of the series finale: “There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things.”
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