A scene in The Paper.(Courtesy of NBC)
In the pandemic year of 2020, the show that dominated TV screens was not Tiger King or The Mandalorian, but a show that had ended seven years earlier. In that year of isolation and anxiety, millions of Americans returned to The Office for comfort. It was boosted by its availability on Netflix, by then already synonymous with streaming, but also by its cache of over 200 episodes, its deep bench of much-loved characters, and its recognizable style.
The Office was built to spin off. Greg Daniels’s version for American TV was itself an adaptation of a British show by the same name, created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. As was noted by Michael Schur, a writer for The Office who later developed Parks and Recreation with Daniels, portability was part of the show’s design. Beyond the walls of the series’ fictional paper company, “you could do spinoffs that weren’t really spinoffs”; The Office’s comedic style could work in “any workplace in the world.” And it did: More than a dozen adaptations in different countries followed.
The Paper, which premiered on Peacock and also airs on NBC, is yet another realization of that promise of portability. It’s a show about a workplace, this time about a ghost newspaper and the people who work there. Also created by Daniels and employing the documentary-crew framing device, it’s a direct spin-off too. But what felt new and innovative about The Office now seems tired and worn in The Paper. While labor in The Office stood as a representative sample of corporate work anywhere in America, the work in The Paper, much like journalism in general, should be specific to its location—in this case, Toledo, Ohio. Instead, The Paper seems content to exploit the good feels of the Office rewatch rather than risk reporting something that could feel uniquely of this time and place and point of view.
The show’s title actually refers to two “papers”: a floundering, diminished local newspaper, the Toledo Truth Teller, which is the subject of the new documentary, and the slyly named paper conglomerate Enervate, which subsidizes and barely tolerates the Truth Teller’s existence.
The Truth Teller, we are told, is exclusively a venue for clickbait and republished Associated Press articles with no local reporting. It operates on a shoestring budget, and its editor and staff are as frivolous and superfluous as its content. There’s Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore), the ostentatious managing editor, who immediately takes to peacocking for the documentary crew’s cameras; Nicole (Ramona Young), who works in circulation and simply keeps her head down; Barry (Duane R. Shepard Sr.), the sole experienced reporter, who seems to have retired in every sense but the literal one; and Mare (Chelsea Frei), the compositor, the only other employee with any experience or any zest for real reporting.
It takes a new, idealistic editor in chief to shake things up: Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleason), a naïve nepo baby with an aw-shucks Midwestern quality. He’s a little Ted Lasso and a little Leslie Knope. While Ned is not very experienced or even noticeably competent, he does want to be a real newspaperman, and we get a sense of his cherished fantasy to hop on a desk and deliver the kind of rousing newsroom speech that would be applauded in an Oscar-bait film.
To inject some life into the newspaper, Ned recruits a group of Enervate employees, most of whom are technically not even employed by the paper, to serve as its volunteer cub reporters. If the original staff of the Truth Teller are an odd lot, Ned’s new recruits—including Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nunez) from The Office—are even more so. Almost all of them begin with zero reporting experience and no instincts for what makes a story, which immediately becomes comic fodder. In one episode, a class of high school students studying journalism come in to observe the newsroom, but it’s obvious that the new members of the Truth Teller team have more to learn from the students than the student journalists have to learn from them.
Spotlight, this is not. The bungling newsroom tackles such scoops as a broken water main, changes in a local fishing law, false advertising at mattress stores, and a farmers-market cult. In one episode, Mare covers a beloved drama teacher’s impending retirement and Oscar reviews the high school’s theater production.
But the goofy reporting escapades land most effectively when we see the direct effects of the issues being investigated. One episode uncovers a catfishing scam that hits close to home; in another, the whole team becomes lab rats for sketchy wellness products, to hilarious effect. And in what is easily the season’s best episode, a novel product from Enervate’s toilet-paper brand (called “Man Mitts”) turns out to not be as flushable as the packaging promises. Clogged pipes displace Mare from her home, and her efforts to report on the plumbing issue pit the paper against its parent company. The characters leap into heroic investigative roles: Mare is the intrepid reporter, and Ned the crusading editor in chief who valiantly stands by her. For a moment, you almost forget that all this muckraking is about how butt-wiping gloves are clogging up sewage pipes.
A more predictable strand of office politics also runs through The Paper. When Esmeralda finds that her authority has been displaced by Ned, she throws herself into a frenzy of scheming to recover her lost stature: She cancels the paper’s wire service, manipulates Ned’s naïveté with misinformation, and delays his attendance to a budget meeting. Meanwhile, a frustrated Enervate executive named Ken (Tim Key) is constantly trying to get the Truth Teller shut down or at least returned to its previous lowly status.
There is also, of course, that other staple of the workplace: office romance. Season-long storylines hang not on the question of whether the Truth Tellers will publish a story but on “Will they or won’t they?” love plots. The sales rep, Detrick (Melvin Gregg), has a crush on Nicole, but she wants to keep things casual. In an inversion of the typical relationship drama, Nicole demands that Detrick date around.
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Then there’s Ned and Mare, who feel a mutual spark upon their very first meeting yet find themselves performing a kind of practiced aloofness demanded by the standards of workplace professionalism. But if you’re worried about a multi-season storyline in which the two characters orbit each other in an ever-closing proximity, don’t be—things move fast at the Truth Teller.
Lurking in the background of The Paper’s zany reporting antics and star-crossed lovers is a stark reality about contemporary news outlets in smaller postindustrial cities like Toledo. While thousands of weeklies and dailies around the country have simply disappeared, many more have become ghost papers, retaining their names and basic shapes but completely gutted of staff and budget and local news presence. Outside of major markets, it’s common for these outlets to publish only material that is not local—or even original. Research in the past decade has found that up to 20 percent of communities have local news outlets that don’t publish any local news at all. And on this, The Paper, despite its quirky sitcom tone, is almost admirable. After all, its central premise hinges on Ned’s defiant and perhaps even absurd belief in the power of journalism.
But this conceit, in the end, is too much of an empty gesture. While a show about an office-supplies company can be insular without feeling that way to viewers, a story about a newspaper has to deliver something about the world in which it is set. Instead, Toledo is presented as a cutesy, generic Midwestern town where nothing much happens and there’s no sense of history or local politics. In The Office, the particulars of the show’s Scranton setting can be relegated to a few Easter eggs for local residents, but in The Paper, the references to the Toledo Mud Hens (a minor-league baseball team) and local stores are not enough for the setting to feel like it really defines what happens on the series or at the Truth Teller.
It’s not that the show mocks Toledo, but rather that its flyover view undermines the whole purpose and ideal of local news. Perusing local Toledo newspapers online, one finds that plenty is happening in the city that affects its residents, from county politicians fighting against SNAP cutbacks to conflict over a major project to stabilize a street that is sloping due to erosion. There are murders and trials, habitat-restoration projects, the effects of a new congressional map, and debates about the criminalization of loitering. The Paper’s scope doesn’t have to match All the President’s Men; that’s not its goal. But despite its earnest attempts to show how dire the situation has become for local journalists, the series has little interest in what they might report or the community they serve.
The show’s commitment to the mockumentary format and familiar gags of The Office makes its lack of specificity even more noticeable. Conversations are shot through blinds; characters acknowledge the camera, and even react to or resist being filmed at points; and talking heads create a conduit between the characters and the audience. But compared with other shows that use this documentary aesthetic for effect—such as American Vandal’s ingenious commentary on true crime, or Rap World (the funniest film of 2024, which also featured the Paper writer and actor Eric Rahill)—The Paper only uses mockumentary for narrative and convenience, not to do something new or funny. As a result, The Paper is stuck not only in the shadow of The Office but in that of the other shows it spawned. Abbott Elementary and What We Do in the Shadows, to name two, make this latest iteration feel all the more redundant. In this way, if the Truth Teller starts out as a ghost paper, then The Paper, by the end of its first season, starts to feel like a ghost TV show, rehashing old tropes and jokes, without any of the texture or detail of good reporting.
Jorge CotteJorge Cotte is a writer and filmmaker based in Chicago. His essays and reviews have also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and The New Inquiry.