The ‘Office’ Showrunner on Rebooting ‘Space Force’ and Revisiting Michael Scott

Greg Daniels never intended to make a dating show. Then the pandemic hit, and he and his 26-year-old daughter, Haley, found themselves shooting one.

Admittedly, Haley Daniels — an employee at Illumination by day — was a far bigger fan of the genre than her father, but they’d both watched Love Island and, as he recalls, “started kidding around about what would it be like if people my age were doing it instead of these incredibly attractive people her age.” Before long, they came up with a twist — single parents, nominated by their children, would be put together in a house to find love, while their kids watch and pull strings from a second house — and sold Your Mom, My Dad to HBO Max, where it debuted earlier this year.

For Daniels, a Harvard grad who got his start on shows like Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons before running The Office, Parks and Recreation and King of the Hill, it was an entertaining exercise in trying to bring his brand of “laugh-with” comedy to a space better known for “laugh-at” fare. Still, he is considerably more at ease doing so in the scripted realm, where he has Space Force (Netflix) and Upload (Amazon) returning for second seasons.

Over the course of an hour in late January, the father of four opened up about forgoing a megadeal, preferring Zoom pitches, and the professional perks of having outgoing YouTube executive Susanne Daniels as his wife.

You’re back to running two shows, as you did at one point with The Office and Parks and Recreation. How is it easier and harder today?

Back then, I think Parks had 22 episodes and The Office had 28, so I had 50 episodes, and I’m never going to be in that position again. But the staffs were bigger then too, and they were year-round. One of the reasons it’s a lot of work now is because when the [episode] orders get smaller, the writing staff leaves. So, the writing staff’s there for 20 weeks and I’m there for two years. Back in the day, when you were doing 22 a year and the average writer contract was three years, [you could take] the first 20, 22 episodes just to train them so that they’re writing in the voice of the show. Then, they pay off in the second two years. One of the difficulties nowadays is you don’t get that period of training.

So, what do you do about that?

Mostly, people get on a deal and then they identify their lieutenants on some show. Then those guys are also put on a deal where the understanding is they’re going to continue to work for the one who hired them. I’m not in that position, because I’m not on a deal. I’m spending more time on the showrunning than the running of the empire. But I had been doing that with the deal I had at NBC 10 years ago, and I didn’t love it at the time.

Why not?

There’s more value in one great thing than there is in three so-so things, and you get more pleasure out of it, anyway. The thing about volume is that it’s harder to keep the quality up.

We’re in an era of nine-figure showrunner deals, which have to be at least a little alluring?

Oh yeah, because it gives you a home and a bunch of execs who are trying to bring projects to you. So, there’s less development, there’s less studio feel, so you have to sort of function as a studio.

And yet …

And yet I’m not doing that. (Laughs.) I’m leaving so much money on the table. What’s wrong with me?

That’s effectively my question.

When I left the deal at NBC, I really thought, like, “How do I take advantage of this new streaming universe to be more independent?” Since then, I think the business has actually gotten less entrepreneurial for writer-producers because there isn’t that other window to sell something. You’re basically paid up front and then Netflix owns it forever, or whatever it is. Most of my experience has been being somewhat underestimated at first and then turning it around in the long haul. [Both The Office and Parks and Recreation struggled in their first seasons.] So, for me, it actually works out better to do some sort of profit-sharing arrangement where they’re more willing to be like, “Yeah, whatever, give him some points, this thing’s not going anywhere.”

In today’s market, it seems it’s better to be overestimated than underestimated, no?

Yeah. And my personality is to try and say stuff and then see if people find it funny rather than announce up front that I’ve got the biggest and best idea in the world. Anyway, what I like about [not being in a deal] is everything I work on, I really like. But yeah, we’re aware of the negatives. (Laughs.) I’m not going to rule it out, but I think it would be better if people were able to be free agents.

When it came to Space Force, you’ve made a lot of changes ahead of season two, as you once did on The Office and Parks …

To shift and change is really important for comedy. It seemed really important to Steve Carell and me in the beginning that Space Force not resemble The Office too much, so we attempted to be Stanley Kubrick-y in our cinematography. The downside when there’s so much attention on cinematography is that the cast is extraordinary and they didn’t get as much chance to improvise with each other.

There’s been lots of talk of an Office reboot. If you were to pitch one today, what would have to change in order for it to sell?

When people hear “reboot,” they think it’s the exact same show. I don’t think that would work. I also think that the content was very much pitched for that period of time, when people weren’t as sensitive to what is giving offense to people so that you could have a boss who kept putting his foot in it. You could feel that the content was sort of helping people see things as being offensive that they might not have seen as offensive before, because they were just used to it. Now, everybody’s much more aware of how offensive certain things are. We’re in a different place in the cycle of consciousness-raising.

Could you pitch a Michael Scott today?

I don’t think you would. The part I would take is the documentary format and the idea that it is an examination from a documentarian’s perspective. I wouldn’t try to redo it.

You and Mike Judge recently announced an animation studio, which presumably was prompted by or at least speaks to the current appetite for animated fare.

During my time at NBC, the only people putting on cartoons were at Fox. I was like, “I wrote Fox shows. Now I’m writing NBC shows. It’s the same kind of writing and the same kind of audience.” I had this whole thing in my deal to start an animated night on NBC. I had one show [in development] with Alan Yang and another with Mindy [Kaling]. NBC didn’t ever go for it. They would buy, like, two animated shows off of six animated pitches or something like that.

You’ve been married to a programming executive for much of your career. How does her path influence what and how you pitch?

When she talks about how hard it is to get the marketing department to be excited about something or how she’s trying to give a note to this person who’s making the same mistake that she has seen 12 times — and they think she’s just trying to screw them out of their point of view — it’s helpful for when I hear notes from the execs who I work with.

Speaking of pitches, they’ve been virtual for two years now …

And I don’t ever want to go back.

Is this the way forward?

I feel like it’s better that it’s all on Zoom because the personal charisma of salespeople is diminished, so [buyers] have to look a little bit more at the idea than the jolly performer who’s making everybody happy on the couch. By the way, the season that The Office came out, the thing that NBC was banking everything on was this cartoon called Father of the Pride. It was a sitcom about the lions and tigers that belonged to Siegfried and Roy. I remember hearing that Jeffrey Katzenberg had flown all the NBC executives to Las Vegas to meet with Siegfried and Roy and see the tigers. That was the pitch. If he’d had to do it on Zoom, they might have seen that there were some holes in the idea. (Laughs.)

Interview edited for length and clarity.

This story first appeared in the Feb. 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.