The creator of The Office returns with new comedy The Paper, following the exploits at a struggling local newspaper
Paper was at the core of The Office, the beloved workplace mockumentary centring on the exploits at the Scranton branch of mid-level paper supplier Dunder Mifflin. Paper is similarly crucial to The Paper, a sort-of spinoff of The Office that utilizes the same well-worn format to focus on a new workplace with a different theme.
Co-created by Greg Daniels (whose credits include the U.S. version of The Office, in addition to Parks and Recreation, King of the Hill and Upload) and Michael Koman (Nathan for You), The Paper features the same unseen documentary crew that chronicled Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton office, now in search of a new subject for another project. They find it with the Toledo Truth Teller, a historic Ohio newspaper struggling through tough times for print journalism.
In hopes of reversing the Truth Teller’s failing fortunes a new editor-in-chief is brought in, Ned, played by Domhnall Gleeson, tasked with bailing out this sinking ship and setting it back on course.
Naturally, he’s got his job cut out for him, which becomes clear when he meets his team of reporters — few of whom have ever written copy for a newspaper. The most glamorous member of the team is Esmeralda (Sabrina Impacciatore, best known for her Emmy-nominated role in the second season of The White Lotus), a former reality show contestant with no journalism experience, who is particularly proud of her article titled “You Won’t Believe How Much Ben Affleck Tipped His Limo Driver.”
In addition to the documentary crew, another through line from The Office to The Paper is former Dunder Mifflin accountant Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nuñez), who left one dying company for another, and is now the Truth Teller’s accountant. Wary of his experience with the doc crew from his time at Dunder Mifflin, Oscar is reluctant to appear on camera, and devises a strategy of using profanity whenever the camera’s trained on him in the hopes that the footage will be unusable.
Other than Nuñez reprising his character, The Paper tells an entirely new story — which is precisely what Daniels wanted, given his refusal to regurgitate what he’s already done — despite the clamour for an Office reboot. “Because I feel like we ended that story beautifully. The characters had closure,” he told TheWrap. “I would never want to redo that same show with a different cast, because I think we got the luckiest cast, the best cast ever, in TV, to do that show. So the notion of a reboot is not of interest.”
Daniels honed in on the subject of a local newspaper in a mid-sized Midwestern city as a natural successor to the story told in The Office. “When you think about it, the original show, they were selling stationery in a world where people had iPads,” Daniels observed. “So, the sort of timeliness is not the point. The point is, in this show, it’s sort of like people who have been a little bit beaten down in an uninspiring particular situation, becoming inspired by somebody new — and I think journalism, as a pursuit, is so important. And the newspapers have been hollowed out by these economic forces.”
Those forces have been the tech companies that now dominate in the internet age, which Daniels noted have “stripped all of the source of money out of newspapers. And it just seemed like the mission is so great, and it’s such a thing for the characters to be inspired by somebody who comes in and says, ‘Let’s really do this and do it like it used to be done.’”
While reviving a struggling newspaper at a time when print journalism seems to be going the way of buttonhooks and buggy whips might seem to be an exercise in futility, Daniels insists that’s the point. The Paper, he explained, is the ultimate underdog story. “And I guess it’s also like when you’re kind of rooting for the Bad News Bears team,” he said. “The more difficult the thing is that they’re trying to pull off, the more you want them to win.”
The series premiere of The Paper airs on Thursday, 7 p.m. & 7:45 p.m. (repeating at 10 p.m. & 10:45 p.m.), Showcase