20 years after cameras first rolled at Dunder Mifflin, The Office has spun off into The Paper, tailing accountant Oscar Martinez to his new gig at a different paper company, one with an actual newspaper. Creator Greg Daniels has built another show in the mold he helped perfect with both The Office and Parks and Recreation, and while The Paper is playing the hits, and playing them extremely well, the tempo might be a little too fast.
The Paper premieres on Peacock, with all 10 episodes dropping September 4th.
So the basics of the story should sound familiar. There’s an idealistic, even anachronistic, person with a romantic zeal for the old-fashioned inserted into a mix of misfits who are equal parts self-important and oblivious, and this person brings about a change for the better in the group dynamic. If you smooshed together descriptions of The Office and Parks and Recreation it’d be more or less the same as what we get in The Paper, even if the ingredients are a little bit different.
The show is earnest and sweet and has empathy for even what passes as villainous in a warm-hearted sitcom. We get to root for love to spark between two people, we get to watch strong, impenetrable personalities become vulnerable, all while an absurd brand of comedy rapid-fires jokes based around caricatures of people who inspire some part of your brain to say “I know a guy just like that.” Everything I loved about The Office and Parks and Rec is here in The Paper.
This flavor of Greg Daniels-led mockumentary series focuses on a failing newspaper, although failing might not be the right word. The Toledo Truth Teller is a relic of a publication being left behind to tread water in an already-changed media landscape. It’s owned by a parent company that sells toilet paper and envelopes and a variety of other paper goods, occupying only part of a floor in a building it used to own entirely back in the heyday of journalistic integrity.
And that’s ultimately the focus of the show: the current state of a once valued institution. It’s a more substantive swing at a timelier topic than The Office or Parks and Rec ever really took as a series, and The Paper wastes no ink in letting us know about it. The title sequence is both the most on-the-nose and funniest bit of imagery to that end, made from a flurry of shots of newspapers being used for everything from a folded paper hat, to wrapping fish sold at a farmers market, to house-breaking a dog and lining the bottom of a birdcage – literally every disposable function of a newspaper that’s not its intended purpose of, you know, "actually reading it.”
There's an obvious criticism of modern journalism at play throughout the season, covering everything from click bait and celebrity info-tainment to the ethics of writing about your parent company and the attention economy at play in legacy media’s ability to compete with a one-man blog.
What’s interesting about The Paper, though, and for me the foremost knock against it, is the decision to drop all 10 episodes at once. It’s not usually a fair criticism to say “this show would be better if there were more of it,” but I legitimately believe that’s the case here. There’s an irony that a show about an old institution trying to exist in a modern landscape is itself a 2005-style sitcom living in 2025’s release model. Like The Toledo Truth Teller, The Paper is perhaps shortchanged by the environment in which it was made.
Binging the entire season is not a difficult feat given that it's 10 half-hours (and some of us will spend that long trying to decide what movie to watch again) but it does lead me back to my one real problem with the first season of The Paper: it just moves too fast. Like I said, there’s a will-they-won’t-they love connection, an old guy that just wants to nap, an overbearing boss who is believably just-beyond-realistic, a would-be villain set in their ways. The playbook is right there in its entirety but what The Office or Parks and Rec slow-played across multiple, 24-episode seasons, The Paper does at warp speed across just 10 episodes. To be fair, there are pros and cons to that.
The pro: The Office formula is so thoroughly familiar and well-made at this point, The Paper can afford to do it this way. Domhnall Gleeson as Ned Sampson, a rich kid with romanticized ideas of being a newsman, hits all the right notes. He’s childish and silly and scared of spiders, but within the same episode he’s an inspiring leader, with infectious ideology and passion, equal parts Michael Scott and Leslie Knope. Chelsea Frei’s Mare Pritti is a perfect foil for him, with a history in the military, a long-stifled desire to do something of substance and a back seat full of granola bar wrappers. English indie comedy stand out Tim Key is also hilarious as Ken, an inept and self-aggrandizing yes-man. While they’re all well-drawn characters in a vacuum, they’re also people we’ve already met thanks to The Office, Parks and Rec, and even shows like Modern Family and What We Do in the Shadows, who skip even having a fourth wall to break.
Oscar Nunez returning as Oscar Martinez, a character we quite literally have already met, is just as fun here, and the way the writers develop Martinez is one of the smartest in the show. But he is the only actual narrative connection to The Office. The real connection between the two is, of course, the style, structure and archetypes. In that respect, the choice to zoom past any sort of character building is the right one.
The con: starting fast with all the shorthand available to Greg Daniels and co is good up to a point. Take Esmeralda, for example. Sabrina Impacciatore, who we last saw at the front desk of The White Lotus, plays a proud purveyor of celebrity info-tainment, an ambitious and almost brutal office politicker. She and Ken are cast as the antagonists early on, assuming Ned’s designs to bring the paper back to its old prominence will spell the end of their comfortable status quo. It’s a common archetype that almost always follows the same steps. Step 1 is the active resistance to the main character's goals, step 2 is a humbling dose of very visible vulnerability and step 3 is the rest of the team adopting a more sympathetic view of the heel in light of step 2’s revelations. All of that happens in The Paper, but steps 1 and 2 happen so quickly that step 3 is a little difficult to buy.
The last few episodes in particular are trying to cash checks the first half of the season wrote and more than one of them doesn’t clear the bank. Everything from the ups and downs of romantic relationships to the credibility of The Toledo Truth Teller itself come to conclusions by the end of the 10-episode season that, in the days of The Office and Parks and Rec, wouldn’t have been earned until multiple seasons of groundwork had been properly laid.
It begs the question, at what point did Universal or Peacock or Greg Daniels or whoever decide to drop all the episodes at once? Did they know it was a binge model when they wrote it, and with that in mind, took full advantage of The Office’s reputation to spend less screen time on character development, or did they write a show that, on seeing the 10 episodes sitting in a neat little row, realized they’d be better off watched in one sitting.
Ultimately, that question doesn’t really matter though, because either of those options may very well be the case. The truth is, The Paper as it is constructed is better as a bingeable show. The only disappointment is in the fact that there’s enough loveable, good-natured earnestness in there to justify a much longer run. As entertaining as these 10 episodes are, the binge drop of the first season may make the show in the image of its own title sequence, a disposable bit of yesterday's headlines. The other option, the one that resonated more with me, is that The Paper, too fast and only able to run because of the shows that crawled before it though it may be, is more like The Toledo Truth Teller’s new editor-in-chief, a bit of a romantic who maybe exists in the wrong decade, but still very much worth believing in.
