Amazon’s ‘Paper Girls’ Is Another Strange Adaptation Failure, Like ‘Y: The Last Man’

I’m not sure what it is, but there appears to be something about Brian K. Vaughn stories that work extremely well in comic form, but just cannot make the leap to big screen adaptations coherently. We saw this most recently with Y: The Last Man on FX, which seemed like it should have been a slam dunk of an adaptation, given how beloved the original comic is, and yet it was extremely bad and bland and was cancelled quickly.

Now, the same thing is true for Paper Girls, another Brian K. Vaughn book that has been brilliantly received since its release, but the onscreen adaptation, now on Amazon, is just…not very good.

Unlike Saga and Y, I have not read the original Paper Girls, so I don’t even have the original to compare this show with unfavorably, potentially. I just didn’t like the show all on its own. I was ready to give up after two of the eight episodes, but I pressed on because I knew I couldn’t make a final judgement until I’d see them all. But once I reached the end, I still didn’t like it, and I wonder if this show will get picked up for a second season, or if it will be left hanging and force viewers to pick up the comics for resolution. Honestly, that may be the better idea.

Something about Paper Girls is just…off. I cannot chalk this up to being a “this just isn’t for you, old man” situation, as I can name a number of shows starring teen girls I’d consider excellent, from Disney’s Ms. Marvel to Netflix’s Never Have I Ever to HBO’s The Sex Lives of College Girls. I even liked cancelled Amazon teen series The Wilds and Panic more than this.

The writing, the pacing, the worldbuilding here just doesn’t work. The show is plodding and boring, with a lot of sitting around waiting for time rifts to open, mixing “coming of age” stories (a first period, a girl realizing she’s gay) with giant mecha robots and pterodactyls. Again, though I’m sure all of this is in the source material, clearly it must work there better than it does here, as this feels like four different shows mashed together in ways that just don’t fit.

There are some interesting questions posed in here, like how do you react to a future where you find out you died of cancer years earlier, but ultimately, it becomes too hard to invest in these characters as there don’t seem to be any real stakes involved, and the “rules” of what we’re seeing here are never made clear. Time travel stories only work when you set up rules as to how this form of time travel works, but the show doesn’t even bother attempting to address basic questions like “why does my future self not remember meeting themselves” raising questions about split timelines or parallel universes the show doesn’t try to answer in any meaningful capacity.

This does not work as an interesting exploration of time travel, as there’s too much competition on that front, and Paper Girls does not do anything all that unique here. And it doesn’t really work as a coming-of-age story either because it has to share too much time with the time war nonsense. It doesn’t fit together, and seems unable to reproduce whatever magic happened to make these characters and this storyline work on the page, similar to how Y: The Last Man simply did not translate to a series for reasons that still remain something of a mystery to this day.

I cannot recommend this show. There are far better time travel shows. There are far better teen shows. And the two combined here are probably best experienced on the page, not the screen, it seems. Even if it does get a second season, I can’t say I’d be interested to watch it.

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