spinoff

The Paper, the new spin-off of The Office that’s streaming now on Peacock, will probably be pretty funny to the average viewer. To a journalist who has lived through everything the profession has suffered over the past 20 years or so, the workplace mockumentary is a cathartic encapsulation of so much of the nonsense I’ve never been able to explain to my friends and family who don’t work in the field. The Paper’s 10-episode season portrays the trials and tribulations that come with working in journalism in 2025, whether that be on a local level like the volunteer reporters of the fictional Toledo Truth Teller or on a larger scale, and the show does it with a surprising level of care, sympathy, and advocacy for the important work people are trying to do in impossible circumstances that threaten to undermine them at every turn.

Admittedly, I was pretty skeptical coming into The Paper, not because I didn’t love The Office or because I had my doubts about how it would handle its too-close-to-home subject matter, but because all the early promo trailers did nothing for me. They didn’t really have jokes and seemed to be largely banking on nostalgia for the original series to draw people in. If nothing else, that’s made the fact that The Paper is pretty great a pleasant surprise. 

The Paper picks up a few years after The Office. Dunder Mifflin, the paper supply company that the original series documented, has shut down, and the documentary filmmakers who followed its workplace antics are looking for a new subject. They end up in the office of the Toledo Truth Teller, a local newspaper that has been so underfunded that its output is primarily news pulled from AP, mind-numbing listicles, and clickbait non-stories. New editor-in-chief Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) has left his cozy life in sales behind to try to revive the legacy paper, only to find that he’s dealing with every roadblock the modern journalist faces when trying to do the work.

© Peacock

The Truth Teller has lost almost all of its institutional knowledge, has no real funding to build itself back up, and is under the ownership of a larger corporation that has nothing to do with journalism. In fact, its owners only stand to see their position jeopardized if the publication digs a little deeper into the company’s own business practices. Nevertheless, Sampson is determined to make it work and relies on a small team of incredibly green, volunteer reporters to get things moving. Gee, that sure sounds like every media company, big and small, right now, huh?

I have worked in journalism both on a local level at my small-town Georgia newspaper and at sites read by millions like Kotaku, and watching The Paper was like reliving 10 lives over the course of 10 episodes. The show succinctly sums up all the hurdles getting in the way of good journalism in 2025 in a way that would be kind of horrifying if it weren’t delivered in the hilarious deadpan so synonymous with The Office. Ned and his team face underfunding, corporate sabotage, and a need to also grind out stomach-turning churnalism to help keep the lights on. Trying to do reporting that is both helpful to the public and clears a baseline ethical threshold is a never-ending struggle when the odds are stacked against you. Nearly every episode of The Paper touches on some very real challenges journalists are dealing with as they just try to do their jobs in the modern media landscape, and I was truly pleased with how true-to-life it felt, even when taking things to their most absurdist extreme.

The Office was always at its best when it exaggerated mundane office drama into its most comical, awkward, and uncomfortable end stages, but focusing on a sales team, especially one selling something as unremarkable as paper, gave it a universal appeal. The show is less about the specifics of the work than it is the ubiquitous experience of clocking in and trying to make the most of something dreadfully boring with a group of people you probably otherwise wouldn’t hang out with. The Paper, meanwhile, is so specific and real, I feel like it might double as a surprisingly educational tool for a general audience about the state of journalism right now, who come in with preconceived notions of how it all works.

For example, there’s an episode in which Esmeralda, the previous interim EIC of the paper, tries to get the team to go down the road of doing advertorials to cover some lifestyle products she wants, and Ned intervenes and says the team will review these items instead of uncritically promoting them for the paper. Eventually, it becomes clear that these products all have some serious adverse effects, leading to the staff getting sick or injured, and Ned, in a head-on collision of journalistic principles and the fear of incoming deadlines, tries to test all of them himself at once, and that goes about as well as you’d expect. Rather than trying to completely recapture The Office’s magic by making Ned a carbon copy of Steve Carell’s Michael Scott, The Paper finds its own way to the same hysterical conclusions, all in a way that feels very specific to the workplace it follows. The Paper is actually pretty restrained in its ties to its predecessor when it could have cynically leaned into that connection in order to bait the college kids who marathon the older series between classes into watching it.

© Peacock

The strongest tie The Paper has to The Office is in Oscar (Oscar Nunez), the sole returning character in the main cast, who certainly has his own stuff going on, but also sometimes just feels like he’s there to bring attention to the fact that this show is a spin-off of something else. Nunez has several scenes that feel tailor-made to remind people that Michael Scott is somewhere out there off-screen. Some of the callbacks are good, like the metanarrative of him not wanting to be filmed by the documentary crew following him around again, but then he directly quotes bits from Office episodes, and it loses me. We are all the products of the jobs and coworkers we once had, but I had multiple instances of being like, “Oh, right, this show might one day be some kind of bid for a shared universe of mockumentaries for Peacock to churn out, not unlike the gross churnalism Ned and his team try to avoid.” Perhaps I’m being cynical, but The Paper stands so well on its own that I don’t feel like it needed the Office tie-in to prop it up.

All that being said, I get why Peacock would want to go back to The Office. Its workplace documentary format is still really clever, and when I watched the original show back in the day, I was always fascinated by how it would present scenes that, as far as the characters involved were concerned, were clearly not supposed to be on camera. Some of the most iconic scenes from the original series were shot at a distance, with un-mic’d actors pantomiming a scene the viewer ostensibly wasn’t supposed to see, or they’re shot through the crack of a barely opened door like the crew is being nosey as shit for the plot. When The Office blew the lid off this and had a member of the documentary crew interfere with the action onscreen nine seasons in, it was met with a lot of blowback from longtime fans. The Paper is already more overtly playing with the fourth wall, so maybe that will set viewer expectations appropriately, but even after 12 years, the format still works, and The Paper is using it well without resorting to the same playbook.

I’m glad I gave The Paper a chance after my first impression of it left me cold. A workplace comedy about a fumbling newspaper could have made a lot of uninformed or irresponsible jokes about a profession that is historically misunderstood, both willfully and because misinformation spreads on the internet like wildfire. Instead, it has a surprising level of empathy for the plight of the modern reporter. You have corporate owners who know nothing about the job meddling in your affairs, commenters nipping at your heels, and you’re more often than not barely compensated or rewarded for your efforts. I haven’t set foot in a local paper’s newsroom in six years, but I still marveled at how clearly The Paper sees that a lot of corporate media’s biggest obstacles are the same ones small-town reporters are fighting against in towns you’ve never heard of but that are full of people who still read the print version of their local news. All of its raunchy humor, clever cinematography, and painstakingly awkward comedic set pieces of the kind you know and love from its predecessor funnel into a mockumentary that, at the end of the day, humanizes the people behind the bylines, and knows they’re at their best when they’re free to do the work they came here to do, without constant interference from the powers that be. 

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