Ricky Gervais Suggests That He Should Be ‘Paid Twice’ for ‘The Office’ Spin-Off
While there are seemingly no plans to make an Oz-like drama about Creed Bratton’s life in prison…
…we are soon getting a spin-off of The Office. Sort of. In September, Peacock will premiere The Paper, which is set in the “universe of The Office.” Or, in other words, the planet Earth.
The show won’t feature Jim, Pam or Michael Scott, but it will include former Dunder Mifflin ant Oscar Nuñez. And within the world of the show, the documentary is being produced by the same PBS team that somehow shot nine years’ worth of footage of a paper company before airing a single episode.
This time, the subject of the spin-off will involve a totally different, yet still paper-based, dying industry. According to the recently-released official logline for The Paper, “The documentary crew that immortalized Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch is in search of a new subject when they discover a historic Midwestern newspaper and the publisher trying to revive it.”
While it remains to be seen whether or not the new, tangentially-connected series will be a hit with fans, the co-creator of the original British version of The Office, Ricky Gervais, will no doubt be happy. Whether it’s good or bad, he’ll still collect a royalty check for a project that he had zero involvement with.
Well, Gervais recently posted about the show, jokingly suggesting that he should actually receive more money from the network, since it seems like The Paper’s producers are continuing to mine his U.K. productions for ideas, but this time, without permission. “It's like The Office but set in a dying local newspaper, like in After Life,” Gervais wrote. “Do I get paid twice?”
He also added a laugh-cry emoji, but it does seem like he’s genuinely kind of annoyed.
The Extras star is referring to the fact that his recent Netflix series, After Life, is about a depressed widower whose day job is writing for a small town newspaper called The Tambury Gazette. One reviewer called the show a “grief-com” with “the emotional depth of a Post-It note.” The New York Times said that it was “the TV equivalent of making lemonade by alternating swigs of straight lemon juice and corn syrup.”
Gervais is known for offering bad takes on social media, but he may have a point here. It is a little odd that the follow-up to the American remake of The Office is set in a workplace similar to one Gervais’ non-Office shows — although, to be fair, The Paper likely won’t primarily focus on grief, as After Life did. And presumably it won’t feature any storylines about babies that resemble Hitler.