Steve Carell on successfully rebooting The Office: “The odds wouldn’t be in its favor”

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Steve Carell has more or less made his position on that potential Office reboot quite clear, but people keep asking him about it. On Saturday Night Live, for example, former cast mates Jenna Fischer, Ed Helms, and Ellie Kemper all made their case to Carell for why he should reprise his role of Michael Scott. This is despite the actor previously asserting that not only is not a good idea, but also that “it might be impossible to do that show today and have people accept it the way it was accepted 10 years ago. The climate’s different.”

(Read: Why We Still Laugh at The Office in the #MeToo Era)

Yet the public’s interest persists, and Carell, who could very well see himself taking home an Oscar this year for is work in Beautiful Boy or Vice, is here to crush your dreams. When asked by Collider if he had any interest in revisiting The Office, he offered a definitive response.

“I’ll tell you, no. I feel like I’m a broken record, talking about this because I get asked about it. The show is way more popular now than when it was on the air. I just can’t see it being the same thing, and I think most folks would want it to be the same thing, but it wouldn’t be. Ultimately, I think it’s maybe best to leave well enough alone and just let it exist as what it was. You’d literally have to have all of the same writers, the same producers, the same directors, and the same actors, and even with all of those components, it just wouldn’t be the same. So, no. But, I love the show. It was the most exciting time, and all of those people are my friends. We all love it. It was a special thing. It was a special thing before people thought it was a special thing. It was special to us, before other people started feeling that way. But, no.”

Basically, the above statement reflects so much of what’s fundamentally wrong about reboot culture. Unless one plans to completely rework a show, to acknowledge its cultural impact, and to suit it to our times, there is absolutely no reason to do it. You will never recapture what was once special about it. Successes like Twin Peaks: The Return and Battlestar Galactica are perfect examples.

“I just wouldn’t want to make the mistake of making a less good version of it,” he concludes. “The odds wouldn’t be in its favor, in terms of it recapturing exactly what it was, the first time.”

He’s not wrong. Who else has seen Fuller House?

Carell is about to open Welcome to Marwen and will soon appear in a new Apple series starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.

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