“The Paper,” the kinda-sorta sequel to “The Office,” is set at a local newspaper. Journalism should not take this as a vote of confidence. “The Office,” after all, was a comedy of decline, about the fictional paper company Dunder Mifflin, whose onetime slogan — “Limitless paper in a paperless world” — could have doubled as a cause of death. Where paper went, print follows.
But “The Paper” is also, metatextually, about another media institution whose glory days are past: The smart, popular NBC must-see sitcom. Adapted from the British original, “The Office” followed in the tradition of “Cheers” and “Friends,” prime-time anchors that commanded high ad rates and drove watercooler buzz.
“The Paper,” on the other hand, is on NBCUniversal’s streaming platform, Peacock, which has made some excellent niche comedies but remains the Dunder Mifflin of TV. Rather than launching in a plum time slot, its 10 episodes will thud onto subscribers’ stoops on Sept. 4 like the overnight edition. Like newspapers, it is one drop in an ocean of content, and it will have to fight for attention.
Is it worth yours? Well, there’s good news and bad news. “The Paper,” from the creators Greg Daniels (“The Office”) and Michael Koman (“Nathan for You”) starts fast, funny and competent, with an easy command of its mockumentary template. But the template is also a problem; the show feels too much like a Mad Libs version of the characters and dynamics from “The Office” and similar shows, without a firm identity of its own.
The “Office” connection comes quick. The documentary crew that spent nine years filming Michael Scott and his co-workers comes to the Toledo, Ohio, offices of Enervate, the company that acquired Dunder Mifflin and that produces paper products, from local newspapers to (much more profitably) toilet tissue. (The accountant Oscar, played by Oscar Nuñez, made the move to Toledo, providing viewers a recurrent nudge that they are in the universe of a show they used to love.)
Tucked into a modest cluster of desks at Enervate is the staff of The Toledo Truth Teller, a newspaper that once filled the entire building with 1,000 staffers. (Snippets from a 1970s documentary-within-a-mockumentary capture it at its Woodward-and-Bernstein-era peak.) Its new editor in chief, Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), a college journalism major turned salesman, is arriving for his first day at work, having been hired to keep the paper alive while spending as little money as possible.
He hits on the idea of deploying the existing, untrained office staff as volunteer reporters, which introduces a broad ensemble of quirky desk jockeys. The shake-ups he introduces also create adversaries, including Ken (Tim Key), an Enervate suit with a touch of David Brent from the original British “Office,” and Esmeralda (Sabrina Impacciatore), the flamboyant editor of the paper’s click-baity online edition. (Think Ava from “Abbott Elementary,” with an Italian accent and her eccentricities dialed up to 11.)
The anchor of the show may be Mare (Chelsea Frei), an Army veteran who wrote for Stars & Stripes and now kills time dragging and dropping wire stories like “Elizabeth Olsen Reveals Her Nighttime Skin Routine” onto a layout. She is somehow, in “Office” terms, both the Pam and the Jim of the show: the talented dreamer wasting away in a dead-end job, as well as the audience surrogate feeding the cameras deadpan snark. Frei makes her likable with a touch of melancholy, as if she walked off a more dramedic, less zany show.
But Ned is a problem. The show hasn’t figured him out yet, in ways that suggest that the show is still figuring itself out. At times, he seems meant to be ridiculous, a poseur hired through his wealthy father’s connections with no professional journalism experience. Other times he’s a resourceful if overeager idealist with an instinct for improvising a newsroom from nothing.
Gleeson is nimble at playing whatever version of Ned a particular scene requires, but who is this guy? Is he bumbling or brilliant? Hero or comic antihero? Michael or Jim? Above all, how does Mare — who, despite some friendly ribbing, takes to Ned quickly as a colleague — not resent a scantly credentialed rich boy waltzing into a job for which she at least has something approaching qualifications? (That last bit also makes it harder to buy the will-they-won’t-they that the show inevitably sets up between them, in a further echo of “The Office.”)
“The Paper” can be a lot of fun; an episode in which the staff pitches in to review a slew of dubious consumer products really hits its slapstick stride. At times the show feels less like an heir to “The Office” than the municipal-government comedy “Parks and Recreation” — a story of well-meaning kooks trying their best in an institution suffering crises of funding and trust.
Which brings us to the journalism of it all. Any TV series about reporting (“The Newsroom,” Season 5 of “The Wire”) is susceptible to death by a thousand fact-checks from journalists. I will not join in that here (nor, having grown up a half-hour’s drive from Toledo, am I going to blue-pencil its rendering of the Glass City). TV has been finessing the details of medicine, law enforcement and countless other professions for decades; the media have no constitutional immunity from dramatic license.
The series doesn’t romanticize the news business exactly; its title sequence, over a jaunty “Office”-like theme song, is a montage of people using newsprint to wrap food and train puppies. But it has affection for the workers willing to go down with the leaky paper boat. Ned describes editing a paper as “like having homework every day forever, until the paper fails and I lose my job.” He smiles as he says it.
And “The Paper” does seem to have done at least some homework on the issues facing print journalism today. One of its insights is the extent to which newspapers, to thrive, must in part be entertainment companies. (Full disclosure: I am writing this for the home of Wordle.) Oscar learns this while moonlighting as the creator of a Sudoku-like puzzle that is one of the Truth Teller’s first successes.
This, in a way, reflects the challenge that “The Paper” has if it is to measure up to “The Office” and “Parks,” both of which spent their first seasons figuring out their voices and getting a handle on their protagonists. You can get an audience in the door with fun and games. But the next trick is knowing what story you want to tell.
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
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