‘The Paper’ Season 1 review: Not exactly breaking news

Domhnall Gleeson leads The Paper, a softer, sunnier spinoff of The Office. Here’s what bleeds and here’s what leads.

Sometimes, watching The Paper feels like flipping through a freshly printed edition of your hometown paper: there’s a warm nostalgia to it, an earnestness that makes you smile, but also some awkward white space where you wish there was more substance. Billed as a spinoff to The Office—yes, the same documentary crew has returned, as if they never put their cameras down—this Peacock comedy is less Scranton branch chaos and more newsroom slapstick soap, trading cringe for cozy.

Co-creators Greg Daniels (The Office, King of the Hill) and Michael Koman (Nathan for You) clearly want to tell a new kind of workplace story, one that’s less about humiliating its characters and more about hugging them through the printer jam. If you go in expecting the second coming of Michael Scott, you might end up asking for a retraction.

The premise is charming in a “last bastion of democracy” sort of way. Domhnall Gleeson stars as Ned Sampson, a successful salesman for Enervate’s toilet paper division who’s unexpectedly handed the reins of the company’s struggling Toledo Truth-Teller newspaper. Ned hasn’t worked in journalism since college, but he’s suddenly editor-in-chief, facing a skeleton crew of oddball staffers and a newsroom that looks like it could double as a thrift store.

A new chapter in The Office universe.

The ensemble is packed: Sabrina Impacciatore as the enigmatic online editor who writes celebrity clickbait, Chelsea Frei as an army veteran who drags and drops newswire articles, Melvin Gregg as the hyper-confident slacker with more crushes than bylines, and Ramona Young as the resident introvert. Plus we have a circular cast of supporting players who chime in, including Gbemisola Ikumelo, Tim Key, Alex Edelman, and yes, Oscar Nuñez returns as Oscar, making the connective tissue to The Office both literal and meta, in the sense that not even Oscar wants to be in this show.

If The Office was about the mundanity of corporate America and Parks and Recreation about the slow-motion triumph of civic service, The Paper is (pretty much) about the survival of local journalism and the people who still believe in it enough to show up every day. Thematically, it’s a show about second chances, about reviving not just a newspaper but the sense of purpose that comes with belonging to something bigger than yourself.

Daniels and Koman lean into the documentary style but avoid the mockumentary whip-pans and pregnant pauses that made Scranton’s shenanigans so iconic. Instead, the tone here is softer, sunnier, and more understated, leaning on relationship subplots and earnest speeches about the power of the press. In other words, it’s more a replication of Pawnee than Scranton.

Good news and bad news.

That’s where The Paper both finds and loses its footing. The first few episodes set up a promising blend of character comedy and underdog newsroom hijinks, but the season never quite nails down a rhythm. The humor is sometimes there, but it often feels scattered, as if each episode is searching for the right lede. Gleeson’s deadpan timing is sharp and Impacciatore steals scenes with barely a glance, but the show is more likely to land a sweet moment of camaraderie than a gut-busting punchline. By the time the finale rolls around, you’ve grown somewhat fond of this ragtag newsroom, but you might not remember many of the jokes that got you there. And worse, is there any reason to keep reading the article on the next page?

There’s an unmistakable Parks and Rec optimism humming under the hood, but that optimism occasionally comes at the expense of sharper satire. Instead of building toward clever thematic payoffs, episodes sometimes feel like a string of loosely connected beats: a quirky staff meeting here, a romantic complication there, and a big heartfelt speech to close it out. It’s not that the show is wholly unfunny, it’s just that the comedy lacks teeth. By the finale, it’s somewhat clear that Daniels and co. had a feeling the show would fail to reach Season 2 (although Peacock recently confirmed renewal), so the ending is a bit tidier than expected, at least when it comes to the newsroom portion of the story. It’s a rushed sprint to validation that the show doesn’t actually earn, particularly in just ten episodes.

The bottom line.

None of this is to say The Paper isn’t worth anyone’s time. Just maybe folks who go in only wanting more of The Office. There’s pleasure in its performances, and Daniels’s affection for his characters is palpable. If you meet the show on its own terms—accepting it as a warm, slightly meandering hangout comedy rather than a tightly wound watercooler show—you might even find yourself charmed. But if you’re looking for the next Office, or even a fresh twist on the mockumentary format, you may leave feeling like the presses stopped just shy of printing something truly headline-worthy.

Peacock will premiere all 10 episodes of The Paper on September 4. Watch the trailer here.

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Images courtesy of Peacock.