The pilot of The Paper alludes that it’s the same documentary film crew that filmed Dunder Mifflin years prior. We see the emptied-out Scranton office, now replaced with a laser hair removal company. Bob Vance (of Vance Refrigeration) talks the camera crew through the branch’s absorption into a larger company. The focus shifts to the Toledo Truth Teller, a local print newspaper struggling to keep up in a digital-first world. Its premise also offers some similarities: an earnest but blundering boss, a downtrodden, voice-of-reason female character, and a supporting cast of kooky coworkers. It even shares a character, Oscar Martinez, who transitioned from Dunder Mifflin to the Toledo Truth Teller. For a show that doesn’t want its audience to have too much association with The Office, it draws some pretty explicit parallels.
It’s worth noting the irony that The Office started as a remake of a British series of the same name. The first episode of the series is an almost word-for-word recreation of the British show. But it grew into a beast all its own, never seeming to bow too hard to the original series. Instead of dutifully acknowledging its predecessor's success and hoping no one would compare them, the American version re-envisioned the series for a new audience across the pond, ending up as a completely separate entity from its source material.
The Paper has a level of self-awareness that The Office never did. A big part of that feeling comes from its dramatic stakes: the real-world decline of journalism. The show’s raison d’être is to mourn the loss of trustworthy, local news, and to draw some pathos from the idea of a rag-tag group of office workers coming together to save it. It’s a potent message in today’s media landscape. The Office was about connection, community, and finding joy in the mundane, but those were all side effects of a much simpler premise of following the dynamics of normal office workers. The Paper comes across as smug in its quest to save journalism, and it’s hard to generate comedy from a place of smugness. But the show’s meta-textual aims are a necessary part of launching a show in the streaming era. If there is no monoculture, then it must serve some special interest or hit on some cultural nerve, or else it has no right to exist.
The main problem with The Paper, though, is that it seems like an aim to capture a monoculture that doesn’t seem to exist anymore. With hyperspecific algorithms and short-form video content outpacing traditional TV consumption in younger generations, the potential for a show to capture the entire nation’s attention seems unlikely at best. Sure, there are eventized television moments that singularly capture the attention of at least a handful of television connoisseurs, like The White Lotus or Severance. However, the half-hour-long comedies that are consistently invited to hum in the background of our livingrooms, creating a seemingly universal cultural language, are the ones that aired a decade ago (Ahem, The Office).
This is not a new idea. The minute that streaming services took over cable, monoculture was lost. We all retreated into bubbles of our own taste, and creating a new show that wanted even a slice of The Office phenomenon was no longer possible. The creators of The Paper know this, and likely know that their show’s success will be circumscribed to a more niche audience, and there is something sad in that circumscription. It makes it harder, as an audience member, to invest in the show.
Creating a follow-up to The Office is an impossible task. It has become so enmeshed in culture that most of us know what it means to be a “Dwight.” Michael Scott quotes litter the pages of high school yearbooks across the nation. We’re all familiar with a Jim and Pam dynamic, and we’ve all seen that gif of Kevin spilling chilli more times than we ever knew was possible. It’s hard to even identify as a “fan” of the show. It’s more of a generally accepted condition of personhood than an identity itself. To take a show that is so ingrained in culture and to try to at least somewhat replicate it is necessarily going to fail. Viewers will see it as a cash grab, even if it takes pains to come across as genuine. They will compare it to the original, even if the creators don’t want them to.
The Paper may grow into a beast of its own as well. It has already been renewed for a second season, swiftly evading the early criticism that it gives off “canceled after one season vibes.” If given the room and time to grow, it might generate a dedicated following. But it will always be known as a spinoff of The Office, one that represents our baffling commitment to ideas that are doomed from the start.