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The Paper review: This spin-off to The Office is another 'winning' sitcom

Twenty years on quina 15 08 2019from its premiere, The US Office remains hugely popular comedy comfort food – and this follow-up series, set around an Ohio newspaper, deserves to be just as big a hit.

What kind of child wanted to be Clark Kent instead of Superman? Ned Sampson, the new editor of an Ohio newspaper pointedly called The Toledo Truth Teller. That goal, he says, was "much more noble and much more achievable". Domhnall Gleeson makes Ned earnest and engaging as the centre of this charming, smart, thoroughly winning spin-off of the US version of The Office. The creators of The Paper – including Greg Daniels, who adapted the American Office from the British original – have found the magic formula for making an offshoot work. The new show is the same only different. It has the DNA, droll humour and sharp mock-documentary style of The Office. There is a similar ensemble of characters, down-to-earth enough to seem authentic and exaggerated enough to be comic. But it is also distinctly itself, reflecting how the world has changed in the 20 years since the US version began.

The Paper is built on the reality that journalism has morphed from the old print, fact-based days Ned romanticises, giving the show a more incisive, timelier focus than its predecessors. But it handles that theme lightly. And while the key to the US Office was how it softened the acerbic David Brent (Ricky Gervais), turning him into the bumbling but well-meaning Michael Scott (Steve Carell), Ned is more intelligent and less blundering than both. He gives the series an even warmer tone, so that, timely though it is, The Paper also functions as just the kind of soothing escapism today's fraught times might call for.

It turns out that the Dunder Mifflin paper company from The Office was sold to another paper company called Enervate. In one of the show's sly jabs at how print journalism is fading away, Enervate's products include toilet tissue and a newspaper. The old documentary crew returns to chronicle The Truth Teller. Once flourishing, it now shares a floor with the Softees bathroom supplies team. "I start work at the paper," Ned says, bright-eyed on his first day. "Which paper, news or toilet?" he's asked. He is determined to make his paper an actual news source again. But this idealist is also just gullible enough to have plenty of hapless moments.

Mare Pritti is the other character who is intelligent and relatively realistic, a well-matched colleague for Ned. Chelsea Frei makes her sincere and also exasperated. A veteran and former reporter for the US Army paper Stars and Stripes, she now pulls click-bait stories from wire services, like a feature about Elizabeth Olsen's skin care routine, and drops them into The Truth Teller.

They are surrounded by a supporting cast perfectly in sync with the mock documentary style. As in previous iterations of The Office, that approach pulls us into the paper's world fluently with side-eyed glances caught by the crew and separate comments spoken directly to the camera. Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nunez), the one character returning from The Office, is the paper's head accountant, who sees the familiar camera team and says, "Not again!" Nunez expertly delivers Oscar's sceptical looks and remarks. Stand-up comedian Alex Edelman plays another accountant, so guileless he actually reacts when someone in the room yells "idiot", not even meaning him. Nicole (Ramona Young), working in circulation, has an air of knowing resignation, especially when she points out that scraping subscribers' data is much more profitable than news. She, Detrick (Melvin Gregg) in ad sales, Adelola in accounting (Gbemisola Ikumelo) and Travis (Eric Rahill), who is actually employed on the toilet paper side, all chip in as mostly-inept part-time reporters, because Ned has no budget to hire anyone experienced.

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The show also has its comic villains. Tim Key is prickly and used well as the terrible Ken, an Enervate corporate lackey who is imperious with the Truth Teller staff. He is the cringey David Brent figure. Ken is British (his path to Toledo never explained), and he has the same eye-rolls at the camera, the same hokey lines that only he thinks are funny, and the same smirk after he delivers them. "Hello, 911," he says, pretending to make an emergency call. "My budget just had a coronary." There is just enough Ken to make the character work as an acidic balance to almost everyone else.

The other, unfortunately overdone, villain is Esmeralda Grand, the managing editor who now resentfully works for Ned and is constantly scheming to undermine him. Sabrina Impacciatore (from the Sicilian season of The White Lotus) makes her character deliberately larger than life, a flamboyant, attention-grabbing would-be femme fatale in overdone makeup, who makes big gestures with her long nails. A little Esmeralda goes a long way, and the routine becomes tiresome by the end of the series. It's the one weak spot.

The show at times seems as nostalgic about old-style journalism as Ned, who watches a documentary about The Truth Teller made in 1971. We see snippets of it in black-and-white, with Tracy Letts as the publisher of the paper and a bustling newsroom. "Is it expensive?" he says to the '70s documentary camera, answering his own question with yes, but it's worth it. "We only keep democracy alive, is all."

That theme is always present in The Paper, but the focus stays on the characters. Will Ned thrive as Toledo's Clark Kent? Will Esmeralda ever get over herself? And since Ned and Mare's attraction to each other is evident from the start, how will their will-they-or-won't-they play out?

The Office, a jewel among sitcoms, ended 12 years ago but has never gone away. Wildly successful in reruns, it has become comfort food, a show to return to again and again, a cosy end to the day for many. The Paper so far has 10 episodes – but like its source, this instantly endearing spin-off deserves a very long life.

The Paper launches on Peacock in the US on September 4 and Sky and Now in the UK on September 5.

★★★★★

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