As the new peacock series, The Paper, begins, you will learn a few things about the fate of Dunder Mifflin, the paper business at the heart of “The Office.” Some sort of sequel to “The Office,” “The Paper” begins with a screen note.
When they revisited Scranton Business Park, those documentaries found were the Frozen Vance (the business next to Dunder Mifflin) and “The Laser I Did One,” “Reuben,” and “Kabbalah.” But apparently there is no more in that building: Dunder Mifflin.
That’s when the camera meets Bob Vance, the owner of Vance’s frozen, played by Robert R. Shaffer. “Dunder Mifflin” recalls Bob, who marries Mifflin worker Phyllis (played by Phyllis Smith) in season three of “The Office.” “Yeah, they’re gone for a while. Phil and Stanley (Leslie David Baker) are in touch. We both have Schnoodles. Other than that, one and the guy who’s finished are fine.
That’s when we learned one and that Laser took over the old Dunder Mifflin office. Vance usefully points to the Scranton Chamber of Commerce website, which holds a list of all businesses that have been closed in the past decade. According to the site, Dunder Mifflin was purchased in 2019 by a business called Enervate in Toledo, Ohio.
“Yes, I remember them asking if Phyllis wanted to move to Toledo,” says Vance. “Ha! Are you leaving Scranton for Toledo? Let me laugh.”
Enervate sells products made from paper, including office supplies, cleaning paper for toilet tissue and toilet seat parents, and local newspapers. The documentarian headed to Toledo and documented Enavart’s attempts to revive the once bustling Toledo Truth Terror newspaper, and was there on the first day of the paper’s new editor-in-chief, Ned Sampson (played by Donhall Gleason).
However, the camera catches familiar faces. Oscar Martinez (played by Oscar Nuñez) was really hooked on the offer to move to Toledo. But he didn’t expect cameras, but soon knows that the exemption he signed with Dunder Mifflin in 2005 will be filmed permanently.
So, what about Dunder Mifflin? Even if the Scranton office is closed, do paper companies still exist? Greg Daniels, creator of “The Office” and “The Paper,” admits he was a bit surprised by the amount of reporters and critics who burned him about the fate of Dunder Mifflin.
“That doesn’t mean they aren’t anymore, they’re no longer in the Scranton branch location,” Daniels notes. “Oscar still works with Dunder Mifflin on a set of ‘paper’. There is a box of Dunder Mifflin’s papers. As a company, it is part of this large company called Enervate Now. ”
So Mifflin still exists. It’s just that the Scranton branch has been closed.
“Or it moved,” says Daniels. “It’s unknown. It’s not in the same building, I don’t know. This show has to live or die in its own merit.”
In other words, “paper” lives in the “office” universe, but not a reboot. But Daniels isn’t completely shutting down the idea of returning to the original cast one day. “If someone else says, ‘What do you know, Raines Wilson and I have great ideas for something,’ then I don’t want to close the door to someone else’s project in some crucial way,” says Daniels. “But I think the finale of our ‘office’ almost closed the door to Dunder Mifflin, which everyone remembers. And people look like a finale. “Oh, no, they’re going to Texas. Everything’s going to ruin it!”
“The Paper” is currently streaming all 10 episodes of Peacock from season 1.
