The New Yorker:

The new workplace sitcom from Greg Daniels, who co-created the U.S. version of “The Office,” borrows its predecessor’s mockumentary format—but pales in comparison to what came before.

By Inkoo Kang

The Toledo Truth-Teller, the fictional broadsheet at the center of the new comedy “The Paper,” lives in the shadow of its past. A half century ago, the publication had more than a thousand people on its payroll, including a hundred journalists dedicated solely to Buckeye politics; today, it occupies less than one floor of the multi-story Romanesque Revival building that bears its name. Its most promising employee, Mare (Chelsea Frei), spends her days filling the next day’s front page with wire stories written by other reporters about other places. Local coverage has been reduced to high-school sports scores. “I don’t even know if it’s a real paper,” Mare confesses to the incoming editor-in-chief, Ned (Domhnall Gleeson), who, on his first day, vows to keep the Truth-Teller from “collapsing like an old smoker’s lung.” Inexperienced and impractical, Ned brings to the newsroom two embarrassing artifacts: a typewriter and a sense of idealism about the future.

“The Paper,” which premières this week on Peacock, was co-created by Greg Daniels, who is best known for adapting Ricky Gervais’s “The Office” for American audiences. This show, like its predecessor, is framed as a mockumentary, and the unseen camera crew that documents Ned’s tenure is revealed to be the same one that filmed the previous series. (They also share a minor character, the bookkeeper Oscar Martinez—one of several callbacks that read as anxious pandering to fans.) The franchise, for all its prankishness, has always been suffused with a certain post-industrial malaise: “The Office” takes place at a paper-supply company, and its characters know their jobs will soon be obsolete. Later seasons emphasized the shaky financials of the firm, which, by the start of “The Paper,” has been subsumed by a larger corporation whose flagship product is toilet paper. The Truth-Teller, too, is going down the drain.
 

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