The Paper Season 2 Review: It’s Finding Its Own Voice — Not The Office’s

There was almost no chance The Paper was going to make everybody happy.

Come on. You make another workplace mockumentary from the people behind The Office. You send the same documentary crew that filmed Dunder Mifflin into another struggling business. You bring Oscar Martinez along just to make absolutely sure nobody forgets the connection. Then you ask millions of people who have spent the last 20 years rewatching The Office to judge this new group of weirdos entirely on their own merits.

Good luck with that.

For a lot of us, The Office has moved beyond being a television show. It is practically holy doctrine. Jim looking at the camera. Dwight setting the building on fire. Michael’s tiny plasma television. Kevin’s chili. “Dinner Party.” Prison Mike. There are entire episodes I could probably perform from memory at this point.

And then there is William M. Buttlicker.

“BUTTLICKER! OUR PRICES HAVE NEVER BEEN LOWER!”

That scene is still ridiculously funny, and I think that matters more to this conversation than we sometimes admit. We spend so much time talking about how much we loved the characters on The Office that it is easy to forget one of the more obvious reasons the show became a comedy institution.

It could be unbelievably funny.

The Paper, so far, has not been that funny.

And after watching the Season 2 premiere, I’m starting to think that may be both its biggest problem and the reason I’m not ready to give up on it.

The Paper Still Has a Character Problem

After an entire first season, there are really only three people on The Paper I feel like I know: Ned, Mare and Esmeralda.

There are other characters I like. Detrick and Nicole have something developing between them that could become interesting. Oscar is Oscar, which gives him about a decade of character development nobody else here gets to borrow. There are personalities beginning to emerge around the newsroom.

But too many people still feel like employees of the Toledo Truth Teller rather than people I’m excited to visit every week.

That distinction matters in a workplace comedy.

Stanley Hudson never needed an elaborate storyline to make a scene work. Creed could wander into a conversation, say something completely insane and disappear, and somehow you understood that whatever he had just said was exactly the sort of thing Creed would say. Angela could react from across the conference room without speaking and you already knew the entire argument happening inside her head.

That kind of comedy comes from familiarity. Eventually the characters become funny before the joke even arrives because you know them well enough to anticipate how badly they are going to handle whatever comes next.

The Paper has not earned that relationship with us yet.

But neither had The Office after its first season.

That is where the comparison starts becoming a little more useful.

The Paper Season 2 Is Getting Weirder. Good.

The Season 2 premiere made me laugh out loud.

That should not feel like a major breakthrough for a comedy, but here we are.

Esmeralda discovering she had made out with the wrong horse got me. It works because Esmeralda is already one of the few characters on this show with a completely recognizable internal logic. Something ridiculous happens, she processes it exactly the way Esmeralda would, and suddenly the absurdity belongs to the character instead of feeling like somebody in the writers’ room simply inserted a joke.

Ned is also getting stranger, which may be even more important.

Domhnall Gleeson does not need to become Steve Carell, and Ned absolutely should not become Michael Scott. In fact, one of the quickest ways The Paper could ruin itself would be trying to manufacture another Michael.

But I do think Season 1 was so careful about proving Ned was not Michael Scott that it occasionally made him too safe.

Michael was a comedy weapon. He could take something as ordinary as a sales exercise and somehow turn it into a screaming argument with a fictional customer named William M. Buttlicker while Dwight desperately tried to save an account that did not exist.

Ned does not need Michael’s personality. The Paper could, however, use more of that unpredictability.

Season 2 seems more willing to let Ned participate in the insanity rather than constantly serving as the earnest guy standing in the middle of it. He still believes in the newspaper. He still takes the Toledo Truth Teller far more seriously than almost anyone around him. But there is now a growing sense that leaving this man unsupervised may occasionally be a terrible idea.

That is a much funnier place for him to be.

So Where Is The Paper’s Buttlicker?

It is an unfair question, obviously, but it is also basically the question hanging over this show.

Where is your Michael? Where is your Dwight? Where are your Jim and Pam? Where is your “Dinner Party”? Where is the scene people are going to quote 20 years from now?

Where is your Buttlicker?

The problem is that we are asking a young show to compete with our memory of an entire television institution.

We are not comparing Ned Sampson with the Michael Scott who showed up during the first handful of episodes of The Office. We are comparing him with years of Michael after “The Injury,” “The Deposition,” “Dinner Party,” “Scott’s Tots” and everything else that transformed the character into Michael Scott.

We are not comparing the employees of the Toledo Truth Teller with the barely developed people sitting around Dunder Mifflin when the American Office began.

We are comparing them with old friends.

That is an impossible standard.

The Office had to become The Office. It started colder and stranger, still carrying a lot of the British version’s DNA, before the American series gradually discovered what it wanted to be. The supporting characters became actual people. Relationships deepened. The world expanded beyond Michael, Jim, Pam and Dwight.

Eventually Dunder Mifflin stopped being the reason we watched.

The people were.

Maybe The Paper gets to figure that out too.

I do not need another Office. I do not want another Michael, Dwight, Jim or Pam. I want to know these particular idiots well enough that someday Esmeralda walking into a room is funny before she opens her mouth.

For the first time, The Paper Season 2 has me wondering if we might actually get there.

Then The Paper Started Feeling Uncomfortably Familiar

Somewhere in the middle of watching these people in Toledo desperately trying to convince everyone that their little publication matters, I realized I may be taking this show slightly personally.

Because I’m doing something very similar.

Welcome to KazooWatch.

If Google or Facebook dropped you here and you have never heard of us before, that makes sense. We are new. We do not have decades of history behind us, thousands of articles in the archive or a massive audience waiting to argue in the comments every time we publish something.

What we do have is something we believe is worth building.

KazooWatch started with a very simple frustration: it should not be this difficult to find something good to watch tonight. Streaming gave us more television and movies than anyone in history has ever had access to, then somehow made choosing one of them feel like work.

So we started building around that problem.

There are discovery tools here. Ratings. Profiles. Streaming information. Ways to keep track of what you are watching and find something else when you are finished. Then somewhere along the way we built a newsroom too, which is how I eventually found myself sitting here writing about a television series where a bunch of people are trying to convince the world that a small publication in Toledo deserves to exist.

Yeah.

I get Ned now.

Why should anybody care about the Toledo Truth Teller?

For that matter, why should anybody care about KazooWatch?

Because eventually you have to give them a reason.

You cannot demand an audience. You earn one by making something worth coming back to. Ned has to prove that little newspaper matters to Toledo. The Paper has to prove that these characters are worth another season of our time. And KazooWatch has to prove that when somebody lands here looking for something to watch, something to read or somebody willing to say what they actually think about television, there is a reason to remember the name.

That part feels very familiar.

Maybe that is also why I have become more patient with The Paper.

I can see the thing it is trying to become.

The Paper Does Not Need to Become The Office

Season 2 still has work to do. I want to know more of these characters. I want the supporting cast to become indispensable. Most importantly, I want the show to make me laugh more often without feeling like it is desperately trying to remind me of the comedy that came before it.

But I am beginning to think asking whether The Paper can “live up to The Office” misses the point.

It probably cannot.

Almost nothing can.

The more interesting question is whether The Paper can become something good enough, funny enough and specific enough that eventually we stop asking.

That is what I am rooting for now.

Give me these people. Make them stranger. Let them fail. Let Ned make terrible decisions. Let Esmeralda become even more Esmeralda. Give the supporting characters enough life that eventually I know exactly who is about to ruin the staff meeting before they do it.

And someday, maybe, give me the Toledo Truth Teller’s own William M. Buttlicker.

Not another version of him.

Their version.

If The Paper Season 2 keeps moving in the direction of its premiere, I think these people might finally be starting to find it.

And if you happened to find KazooWatch while they were figuring it out, stick around.

We’re working on ours too.