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.
We know all of this because the documentary crew from The Office is back. They’ve tracked down one of Dunder-Mifflin’s former employees: Oscar. He’s working as an Enervate accountant in Toledo, Ohio and when the documentary crew shows up he’s not happy about it at all. Soon enough, though, he’s doing interviews (and at one point confesses that he sometimes dreams he’s giving interviews, so much of his life has been documented). He also finds himself grudgingly contributing to the paper – first puzzles, then reviews for the Arts and Lifestyle section.
With no budget for reporting, Ned – a former champion toilet paper salesman who always wanted to work in the news business – asks his boss if the current employees can use some of their work hours to do original reporting. This means that accountants and sales people who have never done a day of journalism in their lives find themselves out on the street, trying to find great stories in a town that doesn’t seem to have any. It’s a fun setup for a lot of clever gags, though it also leads to some real journalism along the way.
Mare is an instant favorite. I’m tempted to say she’s the new Pam, but she’s really nothing like Pam. She’s not a timid receptionist who has to be brought out of her shell. She’s funny, opinionated and outgoing right off the bat. Maybe she’s a Pam/Jim hybrid. I think people will fall in love with her instantly. In the same way, Ned isn’t exactly Michael Scott, even though he occasionally exhibits some of Michael’s insecurities, though only briefly. He’s more of a Michael/Jim hybrid, though that’s not quite right, either.
There’s also not really a Dwight analog. Esmeralda comes closest, but her role (at least in the early episodes) is more of an antagonistic one. She’s not at all happy that she’s been passed over for promotion, and she makes it her mission to undermine Ned at every turn.
Other characters include Detrick (Melvin Gregg), Adelola (Gbemisola Ikumelo), Adam (Alex Adelman) and Nicole (Ramona Young) and Travis (Eric Rahill) all of whom are drafted as volunteer reporters for the Truth Teller and none of whom have any qualifications for the job.
While there are echoes of the original show’s characters here, for the most part the dynamics are quite different. Michael Scott was such a massive personality, so over-the-top and socially awkward and vain, that much of the story revolved around his myriad social faux pas and unforced errors. He was the life and death of the party. The rivalry between Jim and Dwight was also central to many of the best moments in The Office. There’s nothing quite like that here.
Ned is no Michael Scott, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Trying to just copy what worked in The Office and paste it into The Paper would have been a recipe for disaster, and show creator Greg Daniels (who also created The Office) wisely avoids this. Sure, the series relies on some nostalgia (the opening credits evoke the original’s, and the mockumentary-style filmmaking remains the same) but mostly it carves its own path.
The Paper is much less awkward, for one thing. The first season of The Office was particularly unpleasant at times, with some of Michael’s most appalling behavior, and The Paper avoids this almost entirely. There are moments, of course, especially with characters like Ken (Tim Key), a middle manager with an outsized ego who routinely makes a mess of things, but tonally this is a very different show than its predecessor. I’d rather work at the Toledo Truth Teller than Dunder-Mifflin, but there are no gags here that are as funny as Jim’s various pranks on Dwight, or Michael stepping on a George Foreman grill.
Still, it works. I’m not sure if it will ever capture the lightning in a bottle that The Office did, but it’s funny and charming and the characters, while not as memorable (at least not yet) as the Dunder-Mifflin gang, are fun to spend time with. The subject matter is a little near-and-dear to my heart as a TV critic. Journalism is one of those businesses that is always on the verge of collapse, now perhaps more so than ever with AI on the rise and “fake news” a rallying cry. This is an underdog story about a local newspaper trying to defy the odds. It’s fun to root for these characters. I want them to succeed, and I want this show to succeed because I think it has a lot of potential, whether or not it ever reaches the same lofty heights as the original.
I’ve seen all ten episodes of The Paper all of which drop on Peacock this Thursday. I wish they’d released just the first few so that we could enjoy it weekly, the same way we did with The Office (my how times have changed since that show first began airing). But perhaps I am just pining for the good old days, much like Ned pines for the good old days of American journalism.
An extended release schedule was the plan originally, but Peacock changed course. I’m not sure if it’s a lack of confidence in the product or an attempt to appeal to the modern audience and its need for instant gratification. Either way, I hope you give it a shot. It’s not groundbreaking, but it’s a nice splash of optimism in these bleak times, and I think we need that more than ever.