This Sitcom about Journalism Made Me Sad—and Hopeful

-first published in Substack blog “The “Last Editor” on November 26, 2025

I sat down to watch the first episode of the new Peacock sitcom The Paper a couple of weeks ago. The streamer had been hyping the show for a while as the “sequel” to the NBC megahit The Office, a show which seems to be able to permanently find an audience. The premise of the new series is that the same documentary crew that filmed the people of Dunder Mifflin in Scranton starting back in 2005 returns to see what has happened to the company 20 years later. In the early minutes of the pilot episode, we learn that Dunder Mifflin was acquired by a toilet paper manufacturer based in Toledo, the setting for the new show. I’ll skip the other details connecting the two shows and jump to the main premise—the toilet paper company now operates in a once-grand building that housed the powerful Toledo Truth Teller, a newspaper that has succumb to the current times and is a shadow of its former self, now existing in the corner of a single floor in the building. That’s right, the newspaper is a vestigial subsidiary of a toilet paper company—nothing subtle about that.

We learn about the storied past of the Truth Teller in a clip from a faux documentary from 1971 in the style of Frederick Wiseman, simply titled Newspaper. We see the paper’s publisher, John Stack, showing the documentary crew around the newsroom. Behind him there is a sea of men—white men—dressed in white shirts with narrow ties, busily typing or talking on the phone while cigarettes hang from their mouths. Stack describes the scene, “The ninth floor is 100 men covering politics. We have 300 more outside the building in Washington, New York and we have foreign bureaus all over the world.”

I instinctively laughed at the notion of 400 reporters covering the world for a newspaper in Toledo.

But then it hit me—even mid-sized newspapers once had dozens of reporters covering their cities, their states, the country and the world. I realized the show was going to have some bite, and wondered if journalism would only be the butt of the jokes.

Then the Stack character goes on. “Is it expensive?…We only keep democracy alive, is all. Is it worth it? Well, ask the Cincinnati City Council. A third of them indicted on bribery charges—today. Thanks to our reporting.” It was clear journalism would not be the target of some cheap shots. The creators of the series mean to show us what we’ve lost.

And they do that quickly. We meet the paper’s compositor, who shows how she pulls clickbait articles from the Associated Press. Setting up the front page for the next day, she sees a story with the headline, “Elizabeth Olsen Reveals Her Nighttime Skin Routine,” which she pulls across and drops on the front page of the Truth Teller. Perhaps luckily for its readers, the story is too long to fit in the space allotted.

The show’s open doesn’t pull any punches either. It follows the pattern of the familiar open for The Office, with the same light and airy style music this time playing under scenes of people using the newspaper to: wrap naan bread, make a hat to wear at the pool, cover a window before painting, use as a makeshift tablecloth for a street poker game, wrap dishes before a move, wrap fish, housetrain a dog and line a bird cage floor.

The rest of the episode plays like a greatest hits of what’s wrong with journalism today.

The paper’s managing editor praises its online version, TTT Online, which actually posts the worst sort of clickbait articles rife with tangents, unrelated background, page jumps and many, many ads. Popular in the printed edition is “Seen Around Town,” merely a list of names, no stories. It starts, “If your name is on this list, our reporter saw YOU around Toledo.” We find out the paper has one reporter, Barry, who is asleep for most of the episode and apparently only covers local sports scores. And perhaps most telling of the current state of journalism, circulation manager Nicole tells us the paper sells subscriber and user data and makes more from that than from subscriptions. “We get more information from the readers than they get from us.”

This would all be pretty depressing by now if it weren’t for the moments that honor real journalism and what it can accomplish. The arc of the ten-episode first season involves a new editor-in-chief joining the paper and trying to do journalism properly to bring the Truth Teller back to a place of importance in the community. While there is way too much lowbrow sitcom garbage, each episode introduces—and champions—a real journalistic principle, often showing what local reporting can accomplish. The fledgling news team learns about separating the business side of the newspaper from the corporate side—at one point covering a scandal with its toilet paper company parent at its heart. The young reporters also learn it’s wrong to take gifts in exchange for coverage and that traditional journalism must face the challenges of new competition from young online writers. The season finale finds the team up for some state journalism awards, reminding us of the feelings all of us have had at an awards dinner waiting to hear our names.

Is The Paper a good show?

Not really. Many of the sitcom conventions found in every episode go too far, taking us out of the real-world newsroom setting into some ludicrous side plots. But the cast of mostly unknowns (you will recognize Oscar Nuñez reprising his The Office role as Oscar Martinez, versatile Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson as the new editor-in-chief, as well as perhaps The White Lotus alum Sabrina Impacciatore and veteran character actor Allan Havey) is uniformly solid and does good work with what is some pretty weak writing at times.

Is The Paper worth watching? Yes—at least for journalists. Despite my sad reaction to its initial depiction of the state of journalism, the series is a tireless cheerleader for the profession, showing not only the reasons we need solid reporting, but just how much fun it can be to do it well and see results from good reporting. Peacock has renewed it for a second season which will arrive soon—January 5 next year if IMDB can be trusted. I wonder what stories the Toledo Truth Teller and its eager reporters will be tackling next...