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Variety reports that the showrunners for NBC’s kept-quiet Office spinoff have made Aziz Ansari of MTV’s Human Giant their first official cast signing. Executive producers Greg Daniels and Michael Schur are still “a couple of weeks away” from whittling a few different concepts for the spinoff down to the final planned premise and setting. The show may not be a spinoff in the sense that any characters from the original series shuffle off to the second gen sitcom. Instead, cast members from the new series may appear at Dundler Mifflin for a short while before planting stakes in their new, half-hour home. Another possibility presented is that that the spinoff has little or no ties to The Office as we know it other than its style and tone. The new series will premiere this fall in the time slot after The Office.

More speculation involves Rashida Jones, who had a juicy role two seasons ago as John Krasinski’s short term love interest Karen. Jones, like Ansari, just signed a new deal with Universal, making her a seemingly good fit for a returning role in the spinoff.

The casting of Aziz is a great, if not unexpected, first hire - reason enough to turn up the expectation levels for this. Though I’m still sticking to my not so out-on-a-limb assertion that the spinoff marks the beginning of the end for The Office, giving Carrell, Krasinski, Fischer, and Wilson cover to persue feature roles full-time, while also allowing NBC to retain some semblence of their critically praised property.