Straight outta Scranton and straight into your nightmares: Mindy Kaling knows the characters she wrote for far too well, and knows exactly what they’d be doing in 2019. On Monday night, Mindy Kaling helped make TV history as the first guest on Lilly Singh’s new talk show, A Little Late With Lilly Singh. The Canadian YouTuber is one of the only women in history to host a late-night talk show on broadcast television, alongside Samantha Bee, Cynthia Garrett, and Joan Rivers. Kaling also rewrote TV history, when Singh asked Kaling, “If you were writing on The Office today, what current pop-culture moments†would she have the characters address. Kaling’s answer was both perfectly on point from a true-to-character angle and totally off the mark from what is current. (Cut her some slack, she’s a working mom!) Kaling answered:
The thing that I always think about is things that Michael Scott — who just loved trends and was far too old to do any of them — what would he be into? And to me, seeing Michael Scott dab would be one of my favorites, ‘cause I feel like he would do it all the time. Can’t you picture him doing that?
Unfortunately, we can. We can imagine it all too well. We can imagine 100 million GIFs of it. We can’t tell if this is funny because this pop-culture trend is a move that jumped the shark when James Corden hit a dab on an episode of Carpool Karaoke four years ago, or genius because that is exactly the sort of thing Michael Scott would only be picking up on now. Singh and Kaling also discussed Kaling’s film Late Night, and imagined Michael Scott’s 2019 Instagram thirst. While this reboot was only a hypothetical, they’re definitely giving NBC some good ideas, especially now that the network announced its new streaming home for The Office. Singh also had Rainn Wilson on because she knows what’s hip with the kids.