If you’re looking for a new workplace comedy to binge or simply miss the awkward chaos of The Office, The Paper is worth adding to your Peacock watchlist.
Now in its second season, Peacock’s newsroom comedy follows the staff of the Toledo Truth Teller, a struggling local newspaper trying to stay relevant while its employees navigate deadlines, office politics, personal relationships and plenty of workplace dysfunction.
While The Paper shares the mockumentary DNA of The Office, Season 2 makes it increasingly clear that the series wants to become its own thing. The characters are evolving, their relationships are getting more complicated, and the newsroom gives the show a different kind of workplace pressure to play with.
‘The Paper’ Has Its Own Identity
The newsroom team at the Toledo Truth Teller is back, and the stakes are a little higher this season.
Viewers catch up with the team after they sweep the Ohio Journalism Awards, igniting a fire under editor-in-chief Ned, played by Domhnall Gleeson. Ned is determined to secure more financial support for the newsroom, but things quickly become complicated following the untimely death of a member of Softees, the toilet paper company that funds the paper.
The result is the kind of workplace chaos The Paper does best.
Stepping out of the shadow of a cultural touchstone like The Office isn’t easy. But co-creators Greg Daniels and Michael Koman believe the cast gives the series plenty of room to stand on its own.
“If the cast are undeniably funny, talented people, then your job becomes giving them material that is good enough for them and writing up to their talent,” Koman told The Black Wall Street Times in a recent interview.
He continued. “This group of people, individually, they just all make me laugh. I find them moving. They’re just performers I enjoy watching.”
Daniels echoed his fellow creator, saying, “When you get the kind of cast that we have, where each one is so interesting that it makes you curious about their lives, you start to not remember that it’s connected to anything else,” he said. “You just start to be like, oh gosh, what’s going to happen next for these people?”
That curiosity is becoming one of the show’s biggest strengths.
Every Cast Member Has A Story
One reason to watch The Paper Season 2 is that the characters aren’t simply repeating the same jokes and storylines from Season 1.
The creators brought the cast into the writers’ room to help shape their characters and explore where they could go next.
Daniels recalled one conversation with Melvin Gregg, who plays Detrick.
“Melvin came in and was like, ‘I loved being in this relationship story with Ramona, but I also want to be more professional as a journalist. I want to grow as a journalist,'” Daniels recalled. “We were like, okay, that sounds cool, we like that too. And we would incorporate that into the overall arc.”
That input helped shape one of Season 2’s most noticeable character developments.
By the end of Season 1, Melvin Gregg’s Detrick had gone from ad salesman to a budding journalist. This season gives him more responsibility and a chance to figure out who he wants to be professionally.
“We had a lot of input with the characters from the beginning, and then afterward we were able to go sit in with the writers’ room,” he confirmed. “I sat with Greg one-on-one and gave them ideas of where I wanted it to go, and it was very receptive. A lot of it we see on screen.”
He continued. “I think we didn’t get a chance to really see a big scope of who he was last season because he was just infatuated with Nicole and chasing her. But now that he has more time to focus on himself, he’s given a responsibility to be a reporter, and I think he takes it very seriously and once he finds some success in it, it builds his confidence, and in turn he becomes an even better reporter.”
Detrick’s storyline is also a good example of what separates The Paper from simply being another The Office follow-up.
The characters are allowed to change.
They can fail, develop new ambitions and discover parts of themselves that weren’t necessarily visible when viewers first met them.
Eric Rahill’s Travis also gets more room to develop in Season 2.
The character was initially known for his strange workplace behavior and memorable one-liners. But the new episodes reveal more about what might be driving that behavior.
“You see kind of what drives Travis, which is maybe like, he’s a pretty lonely guy,” Rahill said. “He maybe joined this team to have some friends.”
Rahill pointed to Travis’ relationships with Gregg’s Detrick and Bemi Olatunji’s Adilola as some of his favorite material to shoot.
“It was so fun to be able to explore his softer side and what he actually likes — people and friends,” he said.
That added dimension gives the comedy more weight without taking away from what makes Travis funny.
How The Paper Is Different From The Office
The comparisons between The Paper and The Office are inevitable.
Greg Daniels co-created The Office, and both shows use the mockumentary format to capture the absurdity of everyday workplace life. But The Paper has a different environment, different characters and its own rhythm.
“I think it shares a lot of the same DNA,” Gregg said, “But it’s also a very different show with different characters that aren’t prototypes or archetypes of those characters. We’re all new… There wasn’t a Detrick in The Office.”
That distinction is important.
Rather than recreate Dunder Mifflin, The Paper uses a struggling local newspaper as its workplace playground.
And for those who need remnants of The Office, the cast includes Oscar Martinez, the character famously portrayed by Oscar Nuñez.
In the first season, Oscar was hired at the Toledo Truth Teller as the paper’s head accountant. He returns as a contributor to the paper’s Arts & Leisure beat and has finally accepted that the same documentary team that followed him at Dunder Mifflin will be stalking him at the Truth Teller.
Why The Mockumentary Format Still Works
The workplace mockumentary has remained popular because the format lets viewers see what employees would never say out loud. The Paper leans into awkward interactions with coworkers, revealing confessionals and those small moments when someone’s face says much more than their words.
Daniels described the show’s creative touches as “small, real, relatable, and observational.”
A newsroom is particularly well suited for that approach. It is a pressure-filled environment where people have to work closely, manage deadlines, navigate egos and often suppress what they are actually feeling.
“Working in an office is very relatable to people because that’s a lot of people,” Daniels said. “The idea that they get a chance to talk directly to the camera and tell their point of view, and then sometimes they’re contradicted by what the cameraman has noticed, exposes liars very nicely.”
Koman said the comedy often comes from watching how people behave rather than simply waiting for a punchline.
“We love jokes that come from behavior of the characters more so than setup-punchline verbal jokes,” he said. “Some of the best laughs can be the way somebody reacts or looks to someone else,” Koman added, saying offices create natural tension between inner thoughts and outward behavior.
“When you work with people in an office, you have to suppress a lot of emotion and not say so many things,” he said. “There’s a format where you can kind of have a microscope underneath that.”
Where To Watch The Paper Season 2
The Paper doesn’t need to become The Office. And that may be the biggest reason to keep watching.
If you’re looking for a workplace comedy with familiar awkwardness, but a completely new group of characters, The Paper makes a strong case for adding the series to your Peacock queue.
