Fans of The Office are split on the news that a documentary crew will likely be back, huddled between the cubicles in Dunder-Mifflin’s Scranton branch. But Jenna Fischer, Pam Beesly-Halpert herself, says it’s a “great idea.” In a Television Critics Association panel for her show Splitting Up Together, Fischer said she’d gladly come back, but most of the band needs to get back together if it’s going to work.
“I think it’s a great idea. I would be honored to come back in any way that I’m able to. I loved playing that character. As long as Greg Daniels is the person in charge and the visionary behind it, then I would absolutely be up for it. We just have to get Mindy [Kaling] to write some episodes, BJ Novak, Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg, Mike Schur. That show was so great because of the talent involved in the show, behind the scenes, not just on the screen.”
Kaling and Novak left near the end of the show’s (first?) run to work on The Mindy Project, and Michael Schur went on to create and guide Parks and Recreation and The Good Place. Considering Fischer is even fielding these questions because she’s on a new show, and most of the cast and crew are busy with other projects, would they even be able to lock down a schedule for the returning primaries, if they wanted to come back?
And then there’s the fan pushback and questions if The Office could recapture the magic of the series. Fischer has an interesting take. Before the American series was on the air, people questioned why they should even try to adapt the near-perfect English version. It worked. And it can work again.
“To be fair, nobody thought that the American version could ever do what it did. Maybe it’s possible to defy the odds again. There was a slight shift in tone and that was that Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant advised us while we were making the pilot. They gave us a lot of advice about how to Americanize it. Greg was very, very good at holding onto the beauty and the reality that the British version gave us but also creating something that could go on for years and years and years and many more episodes.”
At the end of the Q and A, Fischer thanked her Keds (just kidding).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKSqWR8qBb0
(Via SlashFilm)
