Talk about big shoes to fill. The Paper, Peacock’s spinoff of the wildly popular mockumentary sitcom, The Office, has just dropped its first trailer just weeks before it debuts on the streaming service.
I am not amused. Or, rather, the trailer does not amuse me. I was hoping for some laughs, maybe a tease of some crazy hijinx, but mostly this trailer plays it straight. The Paper looks much more earnest and much less funny than its predecessor.
The show was created by Greg Daniels (creator of the American version of The Office) and Michael Koman. It tells the story of a struggling newspaper, The Toledo Truth Teller, whose publisher is attempting to revive it by way of volunteer reporters.
Before I go any further, here’s the trailer:
Okay, so let’s start with what works and then talk about why I’m so concerned.
The Good
Obviously, the best part about this trailer was Oscar (Oscar Nuñez) showing up. The poor guy leaves Scranton, PA and moves to Toledo, OH and then the documentary crew shows up at his new job. So much for moving on. At least he’s grown a spine.
I like Domhnall Gleeson. He was fantastic in films like Ex Machina. He’s been in all kinds of stuff, from Harry Potter to Star Wars but I haven’t really seen him in too many comedic roles. The Peter Rabbit movies, I suppose. In any case, he looks like more of a Jim character than a Michael character.
Sabrina Impacciatore is probably the most colorful new character in this trailer. She was great in the second season of HBO’s The White Lotus, and here she stands out as perhaps the only new character that seems oddball enough to be in a series worthy of The Office. Her bits are the only ones played for laughs outside of Oscar . . . which brings us to . . .
The Bad
This is a weird trailer because the vibe is very similar to The Office in terms of the actual work space and the cinematography, but that’s where the similarities end. The cast doesn’t seem half as quirky or lovable as The Office’s cast, for one thing. It’s possible that we’ll get more great characters as the story progresses, but as of now this cast just seems too young and good-looking and dull. Here’s a picture of The Office’s first season cast:
The Office
Credit: Peacock
Obviously, fans of The Office will be biased. We see this second image and we see a bunch of characters we spent years getting to know and love. But it also just feels more . . . real? I’m not sure. The bottom image feels like an actual picture of an office where normal people work. Some are good-looking, some are fat, some are bald or balding, some look like grandmas, some are young. Everyone is in some version of grey or beige or unoffensive blue. The top image is much less depressing, but it also feels like they’re trying too hard. The bottom image looks like something unique in the world of sitcoms; the top image looks like as cookie-cutter sitcom as you can get.
I’m also a little nervous about the premise. In The Office, Dwight Schrute was a volunteer firefighter but he still had his sales job at Dunder Mifflin. The volunteer stuff was a running gag. In The Paper, other than Gleeson’s character who is the new editor-in-chief, and the British guy who owns the newspaper, it appears all the reporters are volunteers. This is not only kind of appalling to me (why would you volunteer at a newspaper – don’t you need to earn money to pay the bills?) it also changes the boss/employee dynamic in weird ways. If you’re just volunteering, nothing is really keeping you in an office.
The only way this can work is if the boss is a nice guy and everyone gets along really well. Otherwise, nobody is sticking around to volunteer at a struggling Midwestern newspaper. The Office illustrated, often hilariously, how difficult a 9 to 5 job can be, and how people stick it out day after day. What will this new series be about? The importance of journalism? Or . . . the need for free labor to save journalism? It feels weirdly quaint and cynical at the same time.
Mostly, the trailer just isn’t very funny. If this is the best stuff they could pull from the first season, I think that’s deeply worrisome. Of course I’ll still give it a try. I loved The Office back in the day and I’d be beyond thrilled if we could explore more of the same universe. I don’t think this needs to be the same, either. It doesn’t have to have its own Michael Scott, but it’s hard to see how it can fill such big shoes without one.
If anything, this feels more like Parks & Rec than The Office, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. That show had a lot of great characters (the cast has gone on to do so many amazing things) and it didn’t have a Michael Scott, either. But it had Ron Swanson and Leslie Knope.
Anyways, you know what they say. Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. The Paper lands on Peacock in September. The first four episodes come out on Thursday, September 4th with two more dropping each week for a total of 10 episodes in Season 1. Hopefully it defies all expectations.