A Worthy Successor To ‘The Office’ That’s Surprisingly Funny And Charming

I have a confession: After watching the first trailer for Peacock’s new spinoff of The Office, The Paper, I was not amused. I didn’t love the premise and the jokes didn’t land. Besides, how could you possibly follow in the footsteps of a giant like The Office?

Domhnall Gleeson not only had Steve Carell’s massive shoes to fill, the entire new cast had to fill the shoes of John Krasinski’s Jim, Jenna Fischer’s Pam, Rainn Wilson’s Dwight and so many other beloved characters in one of the most popular sitcoms ever made. The only shoes I wasn’t worried about were Oscar’s, because Oscar Nuñez returns as Oscar Martinez from the original show, the only cast member to make the leap.

I’m very please to report that I was wrong. While The Paper is not as good as The Office (yet anyways) it’s a fun, funny, endearing show that’s absolutely a worthy successor and an entertaining comedy. I think fans of the original will be pleased. It’s still a series about paper and the people working with paper, only this time it’s a newspaper owned by a company with the ironic name Enervate, which owns various paper-related businesses but is mostly a toilet paper company. It’s a pretty true-to-life scenario (The Washington Post is owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, after all).

My initial concern over the premise was ill-founded. I was worried that the show was about a newspaper with an all volunteer staff, but that’s not quite right.

Gleeson plays the brand-new editor-in-chief of the Toledo Truth Teller, a once-great newspaper that has fallen on hard times like so much of the news business, chewed up and spit out by the internet and the tech companies that have run amok with so many industries over the past few decades (someone should make a series about a struggling taxi cab company trying to survive the age of Uber). I have a lot more to say about the role of Google and Facebook and all the rest when it comes to the death of local news but I’ll save that for later.

In any case, the Truth Teller is still circulated in print and online, but that mostly amounts to stories scraped from the AP Wire with some ridiculous lifestyle pieces written by the interim managing editor, Esmeralda Grand, played with hilarious gusto by Sabrina Impacciatore (who we last saw in The White Lotus season 2).

Ned shows up all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, determined to turn things around and restore proper journalism for the good citizens of Toledo. The only problem? There’s no budget for actual reporting and the one real reporter on staff, Barry (Duane R. Shepard Sr) is a relic, easily confused and mostly living in the past. The only other employee with any journalism experience is Mare (Chelsea Frei) who spends her days copy/pasting Wire articles. Things are grim, but Ned isn’t one to give up easily.

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2025/09/03/the-paper-review-a-worthy-successor-to-the-office-thats-surprisingly-funny-and-charming/