We’re not sure why Peacock decided to drop all of the episodes of The Paper at once instead of sticking to their original plan of releasing it weekly. It is certainly a throwback to the ’00s, when The Office became a hit because it built a relationship with its audience, especially during its second season. It’s certainly not because of the show’s quality, as you’ll find out below.
Opening Shot: A graphic discusses the crew that filmed a documentary at Dunder Mifflin paper company from 2005 to 2013.
The Gist: The crew goes back to the Scranton office building where Dunder Mifflin was, and discovers that Bob Vance (Bobby Ray Shafer) moved his refrigeration company into that office. It turns out that DM was bought in 2019 by a paper company named Enervate, based in Toledo, Ohio.
As Ken (Tim Key), the company’s executive in charge of strategy, hams it up as he leads the crew through the offices, he goes to the ninth floor, where the Softies toilet paper brand shares space with the Toledo Truth Teller newspaper. The TTT operates with a skeleton crew, but used to fill the building with over 900 employees, as we see in a 1971 documentary that features publisher John Stack (Tracy Letts) waxing poetic about how important local reporting is.
Things today, of course, are much different. Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei) isn’t a reporter, she’s a “compositor”; her job is to take stories off the AP wire and puts them in the page layout to see if they fit. Their AP subscription doesn’t even let them put in stories about world or national events; it’s more stories about celebrities and other soft stuff. She does this job despite having written for Stars & Stripes. The only reporter is Barry (Duane R. Shepard), who does sports and is about 100 years old. Esmerelda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore) is the managing editor, who has absolutely zero journalism experience, but loves the clickbait stories she puts on the TTT‘s website that can be surrounded by ads.
Esmerelda introduces us to Nicole Lee (Ramona Young), who is in charge of circulation, Detrick Moore (Melvin Gregg), who is in ad sales, and the accounting department: Adeola (Gbemisola Ikumelo), Adam (Alex Edelman) and Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nuñez). Yes, that Oscar Martinez, who is none too happy that this film crew has found him again.
Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) is arriving for his first day as the editor-in-chief of the TTT; that means he’ll be Esmerelda’s boss. When he wanders into the office, the team locks him in the copy room, because of a previous security breach. But Mare, who literally ran into Ben in the lobby and dropped her salad, vouches for him.
When Ben takes her for lunch, Mare gets excited when he tells her that he actually has journalism experience — he went to j-school but ended up selling paper after college — and wants to bring original reporting back to the paper. One problem, Tim and Esmerelda tell him that he has no budget to do what he wants to do.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Koman, The Paper is somewhat of a spinoff of the US version of The Office. Of course, the mockumentary format is something Daniels has used more than once; he also co-created Parks And Recreation.
Our Take: One of the things about The Paper that we were pleasantly surprised about was how accurately it nailed the feeble state of most local newspapers in 2025. They were once bastions of the community, whose reporting was able to hold local politicians and businesspeople to account. Now, as we see, whatever stories are in the thin print edition are just filler around ads, and the website gets most of the attention. Original reporting is rare or nonexistent.
What we also liked is that it’s not trying to be an Office clone, trying to make equivalents of those characters — except for Oscar being on both shows, of course. Ben is actually more in the Leslie Knope mold than the Michael Scott mold; he’s sincere and really wants to bring the TTT back to at least a semblance of what it one was, but he’s also able to quickly pivot when he’s told that there is no budget for silly things like reporters and a city desk.
Gleeson is able to toe the line between Ben’s sincerity and ability to see the whole picture, and his chemistry with Frei is already pretty easygoing in the first episode. Whether this is going to be a romance or just a friendship is still to be seen, but it is definitely going to be the two of them against the forces that are going to try to keep the paper’s status quo intact, like Esmerelda.
The rest of the people in the office get their due, especially in the second episode, when Ben looks for volunteers to go out and report on goings on in the city. And there are things going on; this is a city with a population of over 250,000, not some small town. The fact that Esmerelda is oblivious about a fire raging in the building next door is emblematic about how far the TTT has fallen. But while it seems that the paper is going to just take on small-town stories, that just speaks to the inexperience of a staff who aren’t trained to foster sources and find juicy narratives.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: Oscar awkwardly curses at the camera in order to make the footage “unusable.” Some of the bleeps are a bit misplaced.
Sleeper Star: Eric Rahill is Travis, who is the most aggressively dopey of the people who are going to be Ben’s volunteer reporters. We also appreciate that Tim Key is doing “David Brent-lite” shtick as Ken, a nod to Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s original Office.
Most Pilot-y Line: “Hello, 911? Yes, my budget is having a coronary,” says Ken when Ben asks him to budget for real reporting. Then he realizes he actually called 911 for real.
Our Call: STREAM IT. The Paper does a good job of giving us the vibe of the early years of the US Office without copying it, with funny moments and a “found family” tone that is apparent from the first episode.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.