The most important resource during the creation of The Paper was an in-case-of-emergency eject button. An escape hatch. An exit clause.
However you want to describe it, for The Office co-creator Greg Daniels, it was crucial to be able to pull the plug on this first-ever “spinoff” of the series at any time: shut down production, cancel the series order, and make it so no footage sees the light of day.
The U.S. version of The Office ran 2005 to 2013 on NBC and has since found several new lives as one of the most popular—and lucrative—series on streaming. If, as the saying goes, lightning never strikes the same place twice, then imagine the unlikelihood of that lightning finding its way into a bottle once again, recapturing the comedy magic of that series.
“To Greg’s credit, it was the first thing he informed me about,” Michael Koman, who co-created The Paper with Daniels, tells The Daily Beast’s Obsessed.
“I had to be upfront, because I was like, ‘Alright, you want to do this, but here’s the only thing: If it doesn’t turn out well, it’s going to disappear as if it never existed,” Daniels says.
Koman laughs: “It was like buying a plane ticket to New York and we might stop in Phoenix. We might stop in St. Louis. But I don’t know if we’re going to get to New York.”
The plane, it turns out, has indeed arrived in New York. Well, it has arrived in Toledo, Ohio, to be more accurate, where The Paper takes place.
Twenty years after arriving in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to film the minutiae of daily office life at a paper sales company, the same documentary crew heads to Toledo to capture a ragtag group of employees’ last-ditch attempt to turn around a struggling smalltown newspaper, The Truth Teller.
One former Dunder Mifflin employee, Oscar (played by Oscar Nuñez), has relocated to Ohio to work for Enervate, the conglomerate that owns The Truth Teller (as well as much more profitable toilet paper company), allowing The Paper another connection to the original The Office universe. “Oh God, not again!” Oscar shrieks when he spots the documentary crew. “I’m not agreeing to any of this.”
That the series is seeing the light of day—all 10 episodes launch on Peacock Sept. 4—means that Daniels never had to press that emergency button. In other words, the team behind The Paper figured out a way to make a return to the world of The Office work.
“Once we had secured this amazing cast, I was very much more confident,” Daniels says, adding that it was also key to have the opportunity to take a month after shooting the pilot to really hone its voice and vision.
The Truth Teller’s office is populated by a staff of endearing weirdos and eyerollers, much in line with the characters of The Office.
Nuñez is back in the accounting department, working alongside adorably doofy Adam (Alex Edelman) and no-nonsense Adelola (Gbemisola Ikumelo). Quiet and shy Nicole (Ramona You) is the one-woman subscriptions and circulation department, and the gregarious Detrick (Melvin Gregg) is the one-man sales team.
Chelsea Frei plays Mare, the level-headed voice of reason who serves as the paper’s compositor, responsible for dropping stories from wire services into the Truth Teller because there aren’t enough reported articles to fill the pages. One depressingly apt example: “Elizabeth Olsen Reveals Her Nighttime Skin Machine.”
Italian actress Sabrina Impacciatore, fresh from her Emmy-nominated turn on The White Lotus, is Esmeralda, a whirling dervish of fabulousness and delusion. Esmeralda is the managing editor of the Truth Teller, but more passionate about—and proud of her work on—TTT, the paper’s online presence. It’s there that she published her masterwork, “You Won’t Believe How Much Ben Affleck Tipped His Limo Driver.”
They’re all on autopilot on a crashing plane—the woes of local print media are exacerbated when a barebones staff is largely apathetic—but are perked up by the arrival of Ned (Domhnall Gleeson), an Enervate nepo baby who idolizes Clark Kent and, as such, is hellbent on return The Truth Teller to its journalistic glory days.
“Standing on its own was the biggest thing,” Daniels says, of the blessing and curse of The Office fans who expect a certain familiarity in a spinoff, but who are also wary of a Dunder Mifflin cut-and-paste comedy job.
“We didn’t want to repeat character types, and we didn’t want to repeat the same kind of jokes all the time,” he says, pointing to the character of Ned as a jumping point for how The Paper is inherently different—especially when compared to The Office’s lead, Steve Carell’s Michael Scott.
“Domhnall’s character, Ned, is a legitimately inspiring leader at times, and there’s an underdog, Bad News Bears vibe about that,” Daniels says. “The fact that they’re trying to accomplish something that’s kind of unlikely and difficult, but worthy of being accomplished…I don’t think there was any of that in the original show.”
“Certainly, your antenna is up during the writing process and the casting process, and you’re looking for areas that feel like they have not been explored,” Koman adds.
Nobly, The Paper doesn’t just romanticize the practice of local news reporting, but makes a genuine case for the need for it and what is lost by the pivot towards clickbait, advertorials, aggregation, influencers, and AI that is decimating print journalism. That’s all while being pragmatic about the huge challenge in reversing that trend and saving a paper like The Truth Teller.
Left with no other recourse, Ned resorts to recruiting the three accountants, Nicole, Detrick, and Mare to report stories for the paper during free time from their other office duties, despite the fact that only Mare has journalism experience.
“It’s just fun to watch characters face a challenge and have real hope that they can find something at the other end,” Koman says. “There’s a comic premise in taking office workers who are reporters and forcing them to be reporters in a situation where the newspaper needs them,” Daniels adds. “So that becomes a comedy engine for us.”
That comedy engine was roaring, as proven in a joint interview with Nuñez, Edelman, and Ikumelo—the latter of two who, like The Office stars Mindy Kaling, B.J. Noval, and Paul Lieberstein before, pull double duty as writers in addition to acting on The Paper.
Asked if it felt like being a veteran mentor to the Office universe newbies, Ikumelo jumps in before Nuñez can answer: “I’ve been really enjoying mentoring Oscar. I think he’s gotten better as the season went on.”
Nuñez volleys right back: “It was in my contract that they were to avert their eyes for at least a week. I cut it to two days because I liked them. I said, ‘You may look upon me.’ They bought me gifts.”
“We brought you offerings,” Edelman agrees, playing along with the bit.
While from the outside, one could imagine immense pressure on actors and writers to pull off what headlines have been blasting as the major Office spinoff, Edelman says, self-effacingly, that the expectations weren’t on his radar.
“The funny thing is, and I’m totally serious about this, you don’t think about it,” he says. “The challenges are so prodigious, but also so micro. Like, can you make sure a character’s story is working? Can you make sure what’s on page is translating to the screen? You never wonder if this is working as a whole, you wonder what if these little incremental steps are going to get together.”
Plus, there were signs that The Paper was working. “I noticed the crew finding it hard to suppress laughs,” Ikumelo says. “When the crew, especially when they’re focused on their individual tasks, can’t stop laughing, I always think that’s a good sign.”
It was a relief for the cast to feel like the show was working, especially since they didn’t even initially know what the show was at first. Throughout the casting process, The Paper was shrouded in secrecy. The actors were completely unaware of what they were auditioning for, let alone that it would be an Office spinoff.
Frei, who plays Mare, recalls “I knew close to nothing,” only that she had booked an audition for Untitled Greg Daniels/Michael Koman Project. Gregg, who plays Detrick, remembers that there was no character breakdown at his audition, and Young, who plays Nicole, says when she arrived at a lunch with Daniels and Koman, she didn’t even know the name of her character yet.
Their characters were eventually molded after conversations between the actors and the writers, ensuring that, if the right comedy balance was struck between this cast, The Paper’s creators wouldn’t simply be running around stormchasing with a bottle in their hands—but perhaps actually capture that lightning in it again.
