Two years after the British version concluded with a second brilliantly mortifying Christmas special in 2003, American viewers got their own take on The Office. Set at the Dunder Mifflin paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, it was very much in the spirit of the original, at least initially: a deadpan mockumentary centred on a megalomaniac manager (Steve Carrell’s Michael Scott), who like Ricky Gervais’s David Brent before him was “a friend first, and a boss second … and probably an entertainer third”. The Office: An American Workplace ran for nine seasons, setting aside some of the original’s cringe comedy aspects in favour of something with a little more heart. By the time it ended in 2013, it was an award-winning sitcom juggernaut in its own right – hugely popular but bearing little resemblance to its Slough-based sibling.
It is in this US Office universe that showrunner Greg Daniels’s new spinoff is set, with the camera crew that followed Dunder Mifflin for a decade now decamping to a floundering local news outlet a state away (Oscar Nunez’s judgy accountant Oscar Martinez is the only character to transfer from Pennsylvania to Ohio). The Toledo Truth Teller is a newspaper struggling to survive in the digital age: cue the arrival of plucky new editor Ned Sampson (a very un-Irish Domhnall Gleeson). Ned hasn’t actually worked for a newspaper before, but he has risen the ranks selling high-end cardboard at the Truth Teller’s parent company, Enervate, which specialises in different types of paper (hence the link with Dunder Mifflin, and cue a recurring bit about the Truth Teller being less popular than toilet roll).
In early scenes that may be triggering for journalists, we see just how terrible the Truth Teller is. In lieu of actual journalism, staff populate its pages with trivial wire copy (“Elizabeth Olsen reveals her night-time skin routine”) and its website is smothered with banner ads. Managing editor Esmerelda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore) shows off her magnum opus, titled “You Won’t Believe How Much Ben Affleck Tipped His Limo Driver”.
What follows is a perfectly serviceable, if rarely hilarious, workplace comedy about how to revive a failing business while under increasingly unbearable levels of stress. Alex Edelman’s uber-dry Adam and Gbemisola Ikumelo’s zoned-out Adelola are perfect stock sitcom characters. But – devoid of those Office-style glimmers of tragedy (Adam is a put-upon dad?) – their dialogue is often one-note. The paper company conceit also means that the show never really has to commit to being about the media per se; one plot focuses on a news story involving the company’s “man mitts”, a glove for cleaning oneself after using the bathroom that is also prone to causing sewer fatbergs. The show does do classic misdirection quite well – like when Ned thinks he has a lead on a local serial killer, only to find that the police are suspicious of him on account of a breathy phone call he made to a morgue. But such moments are few and far between. Compared to other mockumentaries du jour – Abbott Elementary, St Denis Medical – The Paper often feels like dated background TV that’s crying out for a laughter track.
Thank God, then, for Impacciatore, last seen as the White Lotus’s stressy Sicilian manager Valentina. As Ned’s nemesis Esmerelda, she gets the best lines in the whole series, among them, “in America, there is the saying about accepting the things you cannot change. In Italy we do not have that saying”. She describes tenacious reporter Mare (Chelsea Frei) as “the woman whose parents named her after horse”. Ned accuses her of sensationalising stories, to which she asks “since when is sensationalism a bad thing?!” The mix of Ab Fab-style getup, beautiful physical comedy (as a cockroach, a lobster and more), and those campy punchlines make Esmerelda an instantly iconic character. And, yes, there is some Office-esque pathos in there, too. The fledgling double act between her and Tim Key’s Brexity, David Brent-lite executive Ken is wonderful as well, and leaves me wanting a spinoff of the spinoff where the two of them climb the greasy pole of Enervate, badly.
Maybe that’s where The Paper should have concentrated its energy all along. Gleeson is so talented but the character of Ned – the editor-in-chief who gets locked in his own office by his own employees – is too milquetoast a lead for a franchise that has long put vain, oblivious bosses front and centre. The Paper has no problem characterising local journalism as mundane and mediocre but, as they say, it takes one to know one.
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