The Paper Premiere Opens With A Nod To Dunder Mifflin's Scranton Branch — Plus, Grade It!
The Paper unveiled its debut issue on Thursday — but it had to check in with an old friend first.
As you might have heard, Peacock's new series is a spinoff of The Office, and Thursday's premiere wastes no time in letting us know how the two shows are connected. It opens by telling us that in 2005, a documentary crew began following employees at a Scranton office... and 20 years later, they returned. We get a shot of that familiar business park, and good old Bob Vance ("Vance Refrigeration") is still there. Dunder Mifflin, though, left the building a while ago, he says. His wife Phyllis still keeps in touch with Stanley ("We both have Schnoodles"), but the old Dunder Mifflin office is now occupied by a laser eye surgery and tattoo removal clinic.
Dunder Mifflin was purchased by a company called Enervate in 2019, Bob explains, and they asked employees like Phyllis to move to Toledo. (Bob scoffed at the very idea.) But the cameras pick up and move to Toledo, where Enervate sells Softees toilet paper... oh, and a local newspaper, the Toledo Truth Teller, that has seen better days. 50 years ago, the newspaper was bustling, with a staff of hundreds holding local officials accountable. But now it's a shell of its former self, relying on recycled wire stories and clickbait headlines like "You won't believe how much Ben Affleck tipped his limo driver." (It was $300, for the record.)
We meet the staff, including oblivious editor Esmerelda (Sabrina Impacciatore), disenchanted reporter Mare (Chelsea Frei), circulation staffer Nicole (Ramona Young), ad sales guy Detrick (Melvin Gregg)... and accountant Oscar (Oscar Nuñez), who can't believe the cameras followed him all the way from Scranton. (He tries to tell them, "I'm not agreeing to any of this," but the release he signed back in 2005 still holds.) But there's a new addition, too: Ned Sampson (Domnhall Gleeson), who's just been hired as the paper's new editor-in-chief. He loves old-fashioned journalism and dreams of restoring the Truth Teller to its former glory, but he gets off to a rough start. First, he bumps into Mare in the lobby, knocking over her lunch salad, and then the other staffers lock him inside a conference room when he arrives, convinced he's an intruder.
Ned tries to explain he works at the paper, and it's not a great sign that they have to ask: "News or toilet?" They like him even less when Mare comes in and refers to Ned as "the guy who hit me." She clears everything up, though, and the two of them end up having lunch, with Ned revealing that he studied journalism in college, but then all the jobs dried up, so he went to work at his dad's cardboard company. When he discovered his dad was cheating on his mom, though, he quit and went to work for Enervate selling toilet paper. He became their top salesman, and when they asked him what he wanted to do next, "I picked here." (And are we catching a vibe between these two already?)
When he asks Mare about what it's like to work at the Truth Teller, she'll only say it's "fine," and he admits he's read the paper — and "it sucks." He pledges to make it better, though, and he tells Esmerelda and corporate lackey Ken he wants a full staff of dedicated local reporters. Ken nearly chokes on the budget implications, but Ned explains they can save money by dropping wire services they've been using for news. Esmerelda doesn't like the sound of this, so she decides to throw a wrench into the works, sending an email to the whole staff clarifying that Ned was "not #MeToo-ed." He's understandably upset ("You don't have to 'not' a thing that isn't"), and he's forced to address the whole staff, standing on a desk and pitching them on the idea of a newly revitalized Truth Teller.
He asks the staff to volunteer a few hours a week to try some real boots-on-the-ground journalism, and he wins the support of the publisher Marv. (Oh, and about the #MeToo thing, Ned insists: "Me didn't. Me wouldn't.") That night, Mare finds Ned watching old footage of the Truth Teller in its heyday, with the editor running the printing press himself. She takes him down to the basement, where they finds the Truth Teller's sturdy old printing press. Ned pushes a big red button at the end of the press to see what happens, and nothing does — but then his phone starts blowing up with staffers volunteering to pitch in on his new local reporting initiative. So maybe that red button does work after all.
Now it's time for you to weigh in: Give The Paper a grade in our poll — all 10 Season 1 episodes are now streaming — and hit the comments to let us know what you thought of the premiere.