The Paper is set at the fictional Toledo Truth Teller newspaper in Ohio.John P. Fleenor/PEACOCK/Supplied
While the American version of The Office was very popular, both in its initial nine-season run and its streaming afterlife, it’s not a sitcom that changed any national conversations.
The 2005-13 TV comedy made stars of Steve Carell and John Krasinski – but it didn’t break barriers in terms of representation or subject matter like an All in the Family or Will and Grace.
Indeed, though it certainly satirized corporate life at times, its underlying depiction of a workplace as a kind of second family was far from a threat to the forces of capitalism.
By contrast, The Paper, a spinoff series premiering in Canada on StackTV and Showcase this week, is also a gentle-hearted, office-set, mockumentary-style sitcom – but it feels almost like a radical piece of political art given the times we’re in.
Its loving depiction of a newspaper, with subtly incorporated Journalism 101 lessons, certainly goes against the grain in a country where that digitally disrupted industry is under increasing political attack. Could it help revive respect for the media in Trump’s America?
The Paper is set at the Toledo Truth Teller in Ohio – a fictional media outlet that co-creator Greg Daniels calls a “ghost newspaper.”
The Paper is going against the grain in the U.S., where journalism is under increasing political attack.Aaron Epstein/PEACOCK/Supplied
This is one of those once-venerable local newspapers that has been bought by an outside company and hollowed out, he explains, with original reporting replaced by wire-service stories.
“I guess our goal would be to bring attention to how important it is for a community to have a newspaper,” says Daniels, who created the show with Michael Koman, best known for his work on HBO’s very different cringe comedy Nathan for You.
News deserts are a serious issue in the United States, where more than 120 newspapers shuttered last year, but also in this country, where the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives estimated in a recent report that 2.5 million people now live in a postal code with only one or no local news outlets.
The Paper, which will be watched, at least at first, by the huge fan base of The Office, will put a new spotlight on this issue. “It’s primarily a comedy show,” Daniels says, “but there’s a lot going on in local government that is missed by national wire services if there’s nobody keeping track of what the mayor’s doing and what the planning commission’s doing.”
The new show’s connections to The Office are pretty tenuous. The unseen documentary crew that followed the ups and downs of the Scranton, Pa., branch of paper and office supplies wholesale company Dunder Mifflin has started a new project filming the behind-the-scenes drama at the Toledo Truth Teller.
The Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson stars as Ned, an idealistic but inexperienced new editor-in-chief who wants to get the ghost paper back doing proper living journalism – but discovers his newsroom has almost no real journalists left in it.
That plot allows for a side of media education as the non-reporting staff played by ensemble members Alex Edelman, Gbemisola Ikumelo and Oscar Nuñez (yes, his accountant character from The Office has ended up working at the paper) learn how to research and write news stories about their community.
There are explanations of the 5 W’s (who, what, when, where, why) and how reporters go about verifying information – basic media-literacy lessons that have seemingly fallen by the wayside in the social-media age.
Sabrina Impacciatore as Esmeralda and Ramona Young as Nicole in The Paper.Aaron Epstein/PEACOCK/Supplied
Edelman, who is also one of The Paper’s writers, says this was intentional – but the team worked hard to build these moments into the show in an unforced manner.
“My character being a very bad reporter is played for comedy, but it’s a really good story engine and we used it a bunch, especially in early episodes in the season,” he says.
Edelman is both an avid consumer of journalism and moonlights as a writer himself – having won a sportswriting award as a teen in Boston, and contributed to The Atlantic and The New York Times as an adult. (The Jewish-American comedian’s widely acclaimed special Just For Us is also a kind of exposé, about him going undercover at a meeting of white nationalists.)
He’s just one of many working on the show who have a love of newspapers dating back to their youth – which is evidenced in how the TV show researched and respectfully depicts a newsroom.
Daniels worked at his high-school and college newspapers and seriously considered a career in journalism at one point, even trying to join the staff of a newspaper in Santa Fe, N.M., on his first drive to L.A. to work as a TV writer.
As for Koman, when he was a kid, one of his favourite books was A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago by Ben Hecht.
That legendary newspaper reporter went on to co-write the best of all newspaper comedies, The Front Page, in 1928 – a play that was adapted for the big screen twice, and also was the inspiration for His Girl Friday and Switching Channels.
The connection between newspapers in their heyday and comedy is often forgotten.
Daniels – who also co-created Parks and Recreation and King of the Hill – says he was highly influenced by Mike Royko, the humorist who worked for the Chicago Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. Koman, meanwhile, says one of his first major comedy inspirations was Dave Barry, the Miami-based humour columnist whose pieces used to be syndicated across North America.
Koman notes the value of local newspapers is about so much more than just political reporting. “On a really basic level, it’s just healthy that there is a source of information that the people in the community share,” he says.
“I think it can be about new restaurants that are opening and what happened, you know, last week at a softball game. It brings people together in a way that’s genuinely healthy.”
The Paper airs new episodes on Showcase at 10 p.m. on Thursdays and streams on StackTV.
