The Office fans, rejoice. Anyone who watched the 2000s mockumentary on loop while you were in college is probably looking forward to The Paper, a new spin-off set in the…universe? in which Michael Scott led a merry band of misfits on a tiresome journey to sell paper. One of those clients was a Toledo newspaper called The Truth Teller, and The Paper is their story. It’s told in a mockumentary style, and is ostensibly shot by the same camera crew that filmed the documentary in the original series. Whatever those guys are doing, I hope they’ve captured funnier footage than what we see in the first trailer.
The Paper follows the staff of the struggling Toledo publication, and the first glimpse we get is remarkably restrained in terms of actual jokes. There are a few clever nods to the state of the media industry that might register for people tuned into that space. One example is when a writer shows the crew an article she’s proud of, and it’s covered in intrusive advertisements without much actual article text. The new editor-in-chief, played by Star Wars and Harry Potter star Domhnall Gleeson, asks his group of volunteer reporters if any of them have any media experience, and one guy says that he “tweets,” which is, again, funny when you work in the field and know how many people post their way to prominence. But are those the kind of laugh-out-loud, uncomfortable, awkward comedic moments that made The Office a cultural phenomenon? Not quite. This trailer only shows us two minutes of the 10-episode season set to premiere on Peacock on September 4, but it still doesn’t make an exciting first impression. Where are the jokes?
The best part of the trailer comes when its Office ties become much more obvious. Óscar Núñez is reprising his role as Oscar, and his fleeting seconds of screentime in the trailer are its funniest. He realizes the documentary crew is back and following him around and drops a big ol’ f-bomb to make the footage unusable. That’s the kind of bite that made (most of) The Office great, and hopefully there’s more of that to come. Check out the trailer below.
All that said, the Office tie-in aspect of The Paper feels pretty superfluous as of right now. A mockumentary about a newspaper is already a solid premise. Did it need to be tied to Dunder Mifflin’s paper company? Probably not. But hey, why greenlight something brand new when you could draw in people who already liked something else?
