A new office

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Friday, September 5th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: One of the shows that remade television finally gets a spinoff. Here’s arts and culture editor Collin Garbarino.

COLLIN GARBARINO: 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.

KEN: And here we are, the Toledo Truth Teller… the local newspaper.

How did we get here? 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. They learn the company was bought by a paper conglomerate.

KEN: Enervate sells products made out of paper. So that might be office supplies. That might be janitorial paper, which is toilet tissue. Toilet seat protectors. And local newspapers. And that is in order of quality.

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 salesforce for Softees bathroom tissue.

KEN: That’s absolutely insane, if I do say so myself.

But the Truth Teller is getting a new editor-in-chief who plans to improve the newspaper’s fortunes.

NED: I have a lot in common with Superman too. We each have our Kryptonite for example. For Superman, well, it’s kryptonite, obviously. For Clark Kent, it’s Lois Lane. And for me, I guess my kryptonite is my love of journalism.

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 upper management and one of his own editors.

KEN: And would all of these be paid positions?

NED: Yes. But they would make the paper worth reading again.

ESMERALDA: Can we do that?

KEN: No, no, no.

To reinvigorate local journalism, Ned must recruit folks from around the office to act as volunteer reporters.

ADAM: I wrote a paper in junior high.

NED: Not quite the same thing.

DEDRICK: I’ve tweeted.

NED: You’ve tweeted?

ADAM: I’m in a group text.

NED: OK, OK.

Much of the show’s comedy comes from watching these painfully inept amateurs try to piece together news stories.

NED: Remember the five Ws.

ADAM: Is that a gang?

NED: No. It’s “who,” “what,” when,” “where,” “why.” It’s what they teach you on the first day of journalism school.

ADAM: So, not a gang.

But, just like 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 so relatable.

NICOLE: Detrick thinks I’m sad all the time, but actually a lot of the times, I’m just tired of pretending he cheered me up the last time.

Of course, the big question is, “How does The Paper compare with The Office?”

On the whole, I would say, 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.

DETRICK: I sell ads for the paper. Which means I’m not supposed to interact with anybody in news. Ken calls it the Chinese Wall, which I thought was wrong, but I guess it’s an actual news term.

Another difference is that since The Paper is on Peacock, rather than network television, episodes sometimes include PG-13 language. But overall the series has less innuendo and crudity than The Office had. But maybe that’s to be expected since there’s no character as outrageous as Steve Carell’s Michael Scott.

Instead of having one maniac who sucks everyone else up into his whirlwind, this show takes Michael Scott’s many eccentricities and dispenses them among the various characters in little doses. Everyone is somewhat quirky. This means that the audience is deprived of having a self aware Jim and Pam to identify with when the story veers into absurdity.

The show does however have Oscar Nuñez reprising his role as Oscar the accountant from the original series.

OSCAR: Not again. I’m not agreeing to any of this. Don’t you guys have enough after nine years? Nobody wants this!

I actually think some people will want this. 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 give it a chance.

MUSIC: [The Paper theme song]

I’m Collin Garbarino.

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