The Paper

Rated TV-14 • Peacock

It’s been more than a decade since The Office ended its nine-­season run on NBC, but the mockumentary series depicting the ups and downs of a paper company remains firmly entrenched in America’s cultural consciousness. Now The Office showrunner Greg Daniels returns with a spinoff series called The Paper: a show about the woes of a dying newspaper.

In the first episode, the documentary crew from the original series heads back to Scranton 20 years after they began chronicling the lives of Dunder Mifflin employees, and they learn the company was bought by a paper conglomerate called Enervate.

Enervate is based in Toledo, Ohio, in a historic building that once housed the city’s newspaper, the Toledo Truth Teller. That bastion of Midwestern journalism has fallen on hard times. More than a thousand newspaper employees used to fill the nine-story structure. Now the entire staff occupies half of one floor, sharing the other half with the sales force for Softees bathroom tissue.

But the Truth Teller is getting a new editor-in-chief who plans to improve the newspaper’s fortunes. Domhnall Gleeson, who’s probably best known for his appearances in the Harry Potter films and the Star Wars sequels, plays the idealistic Ned. He’s in way over his head, especially since he doesn’t have the necessary budget to improve the paper. He’s stymied at every turn by Enervate’s management and one of his own editors.

To reinvigorate local journalism, Ned recruits folks from around the office to act as volunteer reporters. Much of the show’s comedy comes from watching these painfully inept amateurs try to piece together news stories.

As in The Office, The Paper doesn’t merely focus on the staff’s professional activities. We get plenty of personal rivalries and romances as well—the kinds of emotionally fraught situations that made The Office both relatable and cringe inducing. But how does The Paper compare with The Office?

On the whole, Greg Daniels and company are playing it pretty safe with The Paper, something they didn’t do with The Office. Watching the first season of The Office can be a startling experience. I still wonder how they got away with putting some of those episodes on network television. The series didn’t pull any punches as it skewered social decorum and politically correct office culture. The Paper merely tiptoes where The Office once gleefully stomped.

Another difference is that since The Paper is on Peacock, rather than network television, episodes sometimes include PG-13 language. Overall the series has less innuendo and crass humor than The Office had. Maybe that’s part of Daniels’ playing it safe, or maybe it’s because there’s no character as outrageous as Steve Carell’s Michael Scott.

Instead of having one maniac sucking everyone else up into his whirlwind, this show takes Michael’s many eccentricities and dispenses them among the various characters in little doses. Everyone is somewhat quirky, which deprives the audience of having a self-aware Jim and Pam to identify with when the story veers into absurdity. The show does however include Oscar Nuñez reprising his role as Oscar the accountant from the original series.

The Paper has a more subdued tone than The Office, and it takes a few episodes to hit its stride. But fans of mockumentaries and cringe comedy will find a lot to like here, if they don’t expect too much.