Why Kevin from “The Office” took nearly a decade to do full rewatch before Super Bowl commercial

Key Points

• The Office‘s Brian Baumgartner tells EW why he waited years to rewatch the sitcom that made him a star.

• “A lot of times I won’t even watch something I’ve done once. I don’t know, because it’s done, and there’s nothing I can do about it now,” Baumgartner says.

• Baumgartner finally returned to the series by necessity, after being tapped to host the Spotify original podcast An Oral History of The Office.

Brian Baumgartner may be a part of TV history, but that doesn’t mean he wants to relive it.

The actor — currently starring in a dizzying Super Bowl 2026 commercial — contributed to some of the greatest moments on the NBC workplace comedy series The Office across his series-long run as the lovable doof Kevin Malone. WhileThe Office is among the most beloved and rewatched modern sitcoms and Baumgartner certainly still loves the series, until very recently, he refused to rewatch it.

“A lot of times I won’t even watch something I’ve done once. I don’t know, because it’s done, and there’s nothing I can do about it now,” Baumgartner tells EW during a conversation about his wild new partnership with the financial technology company Ramp. That collab has so far resulted in a bizarre act of public “performance art,” a pre-game ad which sees him cloned dozens of times over, and a massive tailgate for Baumgartner look-alikes that took place before the big game.

Before his Super Bowl engagement, something finally broke down the floodgates, returning him back Dunder Mifflin HQ.

“I went back fairly recently and watched it start to finish again,” he shares. “We,” meaning Baumgartner, wife Celeste Ackelson, and their children, “don’t typically rewatch The Office. I’ve said many times that I’m a fan of the show, that of course I still love the show.” But something’s held him back.

“A lifetime ago when I used to work in the theater, I would’ve loved to have watched every performance if it was filmed. And I would’ve watched them because the next day I could find something and maybe try something different, or do something different, see how something landed, how something was said, or what the interaction, the timing,” he explains. “But the great shows that I have been on, there’s just nothing for me to do. It’s already done.”

Baumgartner shares that it was the call to host the Spotify original podcast An Oral History of The Office that finally opened his heart to a rewatch.

“I wanted to be able to reintroduce a lot of the moments and scenes and storylines again, and see them in person, which made me think of other things that happened at the time. It was really great,” he reflects.

An Oral History of The Office and its follow-up, The Office Deep Dive, saw Baumgartner guide guests through focused discussions on different aspects of the series’ climb from polite approval to international smash success. From costars like Rainn Wilson and Melora Hardin, to creators like Greg Daniels and Ricky Gervais, to celebrity superfans like Billie Eilish, Baumgartner fully got The Office in and out of his system again.

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But now the next generation of Office fans is rising — beginning in Baumgartner’s own home.

“My kids are starting to watch it now, so it’s occasionally on in the house now,” he shares. “I’ll sit down and watch some with them.”

Baumgartner says that he still has a hard time thinking about “the 50 shots you hit great” over “the one that you missed.” But the upside is that his kids “love Kevin. Kevin certainly appeals to them, and so does Dwight (Wilson). It’s been a lot of stuff that they’ve heard about over the years, so different moments and interactions make them laugh, because they have some familiarity.”

And Baumgartner is keeping the rewatch going, appearing as recently as January 2025 on his costars Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey’s popular rewatch podcast Office Ladies.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly