The Office star Rainn Wilson admitted things were “chaotic” for the show after Steve Carell’s exit ahead of the show’s final two seasons.
“When Steve left, then it was a little bit chaotic of trying to figure out the tone of the show and who’s the lead and, how are we telling these stories without the comic engine of the show, which is Michael Scott?” Wilson, who served as assistant to Carell’s regional manager, said on a new episode of the Good Guys podcast.
Carell was “such a big movie star at the time” that “we knew it was coming,” he added, but still agreed that the change was a “gut punch.”
Wilson’s comments come just weeks after his co-star Jenna Fischer, who played Pam on the long-running NBC sitcom, shot down the widely held “belief” that the show was “treading water” after Carell’s exit.
“My biggest takeaway from having rewatched it was that it’s really good the whole time,” Fischer told the hosts of the Fly on the Wall podcast. “There was this lore, especially among the cast and the creatives, that maybe we hit our peak in Season 3 or Season 4,” she explained, “And also this belief that the two seasons after Steve left, we were just treading water and maybe they weren’t as good.”
On the contrary, she said, “Some of my favorite episodes were in seasons 8 and 9 after Steve had left. There were still these amazing storylines.” During those seasons, the show cycled through a series of new “bosses” to replace Carell’s Michael Scott, including unlikely actors like James Spader and Idris Elba.
Wilson had a different perspective. Not having “one of the greatest comic actors in American history at the center of our show,” was a “struggle,” he admitted. “He was doing, God, I don’t know how many millions of dollars he was getting for these big giant movies,” Wilson continued, “so of course he’s going to leave The Office when he can. So we were prepared for it. But that was definitely a struggle to find the tone of the show without Steve.”
Wilson would be happy to get the whole gang back together, including Carell, to reboot The Office, but only under certain conditions.
“The reboot has floated up many times, but there’s, you know, Steve’s doing all these other movies and shows, and John [Krasinski] is directing and doing other stuff,” he said. “I would be open to something like it, but not for doing a show. Maybe a one-off or a special or a movie or something like that would be fun.”
This September, a tangentially related spin-off series called The Paper will premiere on Peacock. The only original cast member from The Office expected to appear on the show is Oscar Nuñez, who will reprise his role as Oscar Martinez.
But Wilson said fans should not hold their breath for a full-on reunion: “People are in different places and have different needs and stuff like that, so I think we’ll just let it stay that we made 200 amazing episodes—well, 183 amazing episodes—and a few middling episodes, which is a pretty good ratio.”
