The Paper

The new Peacock series The Paper, a loose spinoff of NBC’s The Office, uses the same mockumentary framing as its predecessor (and many subsequent sitcoms as well), mainly as a way to justify straight-to-camera commentary and fourth-wall-breaking jokes. But where The Office focused on the rituals, indignities, and fleeting pleasures of cubicle life, what is being documented in The Paper, in a roundabout way, is its portrait of how day-to-day life in the United States in 2025 can make people feel directionless, depressed, and lonely, and its conviction that things will improve if we pay more attention to what’s happening on our block, in city hall, and in parts of the city we rarely visit — and retrain ourselves to care about people we don’t personally know.

As the first few entries of this ten-episode season play out, we get the sense that, as Leonard Cohen once sang, the war is over and the bad guys won. It was never easy to hold a corporation, institution, or government agency accountable for decisions that harm a community, but it has become nearly impossible now that the media, the only independent watchdog with any real power, has been rendered nearly irrelevant. In The Paper, the gutting of local journalism over the last 20-plus years is depicted as a mundane sort of tragedy, typically undertaken by indifferent parent corporations or, worse, hedge funds that strip newspapers for parts. The result is the same all over: In most towns and cities, some quite large, people can no longer open a local publication each day and see a story that reflects their lived experiences. Readers of the Toledo Truth Teller, the setting for The Paper, can expect news from Washington or maybe a national or international wire story that has little relation to their lives. “Bachelor Contestant Opens Up About Chin Mole,” reads one headline. Or maybe it’s an ad — the way things are laid out, it’s sometimes hard to tell.

Because journalists love talking about journalism, a lot will be written about whether The Paper gets the details of modern journalism right. But the series is as interested in the particulars of fact-checking and deadlines as it is the concessions we make to capitalism’s indifference to humanity. The vehicle for this is a dying newspaper and its new editor-in-chief, Ned (Domhnall Gleeson), whose nepotistic connections to the Toledo Truth Teller’s parent company got him the gig but don’t damper his enthusiasm for making “the TTT,” as the paper is nicknamed, relevant again.

It won’t be easy. The same fate that has befallen so many local-news outlets has neutered the TTT as well. Anyone who has paid attention to the business after the turn of the millennium will recognize the reality Ned observes after he takes over. Aside from local sports stories written by grizzled veteran Barry (Duane Shepard), there’s very little material about Toledo in the paper. Most of the articles are wire stories about national matters. The website is almost unusable. “It’s local ads with clickbait, and like, four Associated Press stories and sports scores on the cover,” explains Mare (Chelsea Frei), a former military reporter and one of the few in the office with a journalism background.

Aside from Mare, most of the other staffers are involved in selling, shipping, and receiving toilet paper for parent company Enervate, the conglomerate that bought The Office’s Dunder Mifflin. The huge old building that once housed hundreds of newspaper employees has become a modular space where a facsimile of journalism is practiced. The skeleton staff is overseen by a daffy Italian woman named Esmeralda (Sabrina Impacciatore), whose screwball energy and mangling of English (“Don’t be so self-defecating!”) mask her treachery. She immediately becomes Ned’s main foil, along with her ally Ken (Tim Key), a Brit who works for Enervate. Ken is not interested in spending any money on local journalism, in large part because he’s still living in the apartment that was rented for him when he came to the U.S. more than a decade earlier and doesn’t want anyone taking a close look at the books. The two immediately undercut Ned and his ambition. Esmeralda sends out a staff email stating that, contrary to what everyone may have heard, Ned did not come to Toledo to escape a job wherein he was “Me Too–ed,” while Ken vetoes Ned’s plan to hire more reporters as too expensive. Ned’s ingenious solution: Anyone who’s already on staff and getting paid can volunteer to add a little journalism to their job description.

As they’re spitballing ideas, they hit on a story about a decrease in the number of public parking spaces at a dog park, and Adelola (Gbemisola Ikumelo) and Adam (Alex Edelman) rush to the scene with their reporting pads. It turns out to be nothing nefarious, merely a requisition of some spots by the parks department. Meanwhile, Travis (Eric Rahill), whose entire life is fishing, agitates to do a piece about Ohio’s Division of Wildlife lowering the daily limit on how many fish an individual can catch. It’s a solid lead from a knowledgable person that produces news readers can use — even if Travis uses the reporting opportunity to accost his ex, the fish and game warden, at work. These are satisfying enough sitcom C-plots with a subtle dose of media literacy: In depicting the time and effort it takes to report out a simple story (not to mention how many leads dead-end), The Paper offers a sense of how costly and difficult it is to do thorough local journalism. You can’t give a city the attention it requires with a handful of reporters. The first episode ends with an airborne shot pulling back from the paper’s headquarters to reveal a building on fire a few blocks away. Yes, the joke is that none of the reporters notice the fire, but there’s a secondary layer of compassion: The TTT staff couldn’t have covered it anyway because they threw themselves into reporting on a water-main break that happened earlier in the day.

Later, Ned and Mare go undercover to test a national mattress company’s promise that it’ll match any competitor’s price as long as it’s the same model of mattress. How could a company do that and stay in business? The trick is that most mattresses are made by a handful of manufacturers, then purchased by retailers who brand them with their own proprietary names, a ruse to make it seem as if a company is producing mattresses while wriggling out of price-matching promises on a technicality. One of the fascinating things about this subplot — much more than the sitcom-y sexual tension involved in Mare and Ned pretending to be a couple — is the foregrounding of everyday people stuck between a broken system and those frustrated by it. The mattress saleswoman Mare and Ned deal with doesn’t have the power to make the company honor the spirit of the law. “I actually hate this job,” she confides, gesturing at her uniform of a “stupid polo that they make you pay for yourself.”

Standing unsteadily atop a desk in the premiere, Ned makes like Henry V and gives a motivational speech, telling his new employees that the local paper used to be essential “if you have ever wanted to be the first person to know what’s going on in the place where you live, or if you want to make sure the people who are running your city are telling the truth about doing the things they said they would do, or if you just root for the underdog and want to stick it to the loudmouths.” Which is to say the paper is essential to everyone, even if they don’t realize it. The opening credits, an assemblage of archival footage from various eras, show sheets of newspaper being used to do things like wrap fish and line litter boxes. It seems as if the show is taking the piss out of a profession that remains full of itself despite how ragged it has become. But as the season progresses, we come to understand that these images are a sly and affectionate way to show that local news was once so useful, in so many ways, that people took it for granted. The institution has been broken and humbled for so long, we’ve started to forget what we’ve lost.