“The Paper” and the politics of the workplace mockumentary

Every episode of “The Paper” features an opening credits montage of archival footage from the pre-Internet era, before the 24-hour news cycle and handheld devices ruled the information space. Some recognize this as print journalism’s golden age, when newspapers kept the citizens connected to the world around them.

But the featured clips don’t foreground the broadsheet’s noble history. They’re a parade of moments when yesterday’s news becomes fish wrapping. Or packing material. Birdcage liner. A pee pad for incontinent dogs. After serving any of those purposes, it goes in the trash.

Every journalist who pours sweat and stress into their copy knows their efforts are disposable. Newsrooms being breeding grounds for gallows humor, most also understand that futility is a terrific comedy catalyst. Greg Daniels gets it; he adapted NBC’s version of “The Office” from Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s original British format in 2005. Daniels relocated the action from unglamorous Slough to Scranton, Pennsylvania, but kept his Dunder Mifflin drones pushing paper, just like their British counterparts.

Back then, people wondered how long we’d continue to need paper, given how quickly the world was switching over to digital platforms. Twenty years later, Daniels and his co-creator, Michael Koman, ponder a similar notion regarding one paper: The Toledo Truth Teller, an Ohio daily with a storied legacy.

“The Paper” sends the same filmmakers who recorded Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton team to the Buckeye State, where they shadow Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), the Truth Teller’s overly optimistic editor-in-chief, from the moment he steps into the job.

Sampson exudes the type of combination of optimism and naïvete endemic to a man who grew up wealthy. That’s the only kind of guy who can afford to believe in print journalism these days, even while he acknowledges that the industry has collapsed like an old smoker’s lung. Still, Ned insists, with the right resources, adequate staff, and a can-do attitude, the Toledo Truth Teller can return to greatness.

Not if its corporate parent has anything to do with it.

Like many community newsrooms around the country, the Truth Teller is a ghost paper owned by a conglomerate called Enervate. Word nerds are correct to read a special meaning into the company’s name. It hints at the trend of hedge fund managers buying local publications to drain them until they’re husks of their former selves.

That appears to be what happened to the Truth Teller. As explained by Ken Davies (Tim Key), one of Enervate’s legion of pointless middle managers, the company primarily deals in office supplies, toilet rolls and local newspapers. “And that is in order of quality,” he scoffs.

It’s easy to traffic in cheap jokes at the expense of professions most of the audience doesn’t hold in high regard or think about much, if at all. “The Paper” refuses to do that, choosing instead to depict the laughable reality of newsrooms like The Truth Teller while championing the men and women doggedly working to restore its glory.

The Truth Teller is a stand-in for hundreds of regional publications swallowed by companies like Enervate. A paper that once employed a sizable staff of workers, enough to fill the entire building Evervate uses as its headquarters, is now represented by a tiny portion of the sales department for Softees toilet tissue. People like Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), an experienced former military reporter, keep the lights on by pulling clickbait from wire services and placing it above the fold.

A few seats away, her coworker Nicole Lee (Ramona Young, “Never Have I Ever“) explains that when visitors to the Truth Teller site click “accept all cookies,” Enervate scrapes their browsing history. “You could say we get more information from the readers than they get from us,” she says.

What is the managing editor’s function? Good question. Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore, an impressive contrast to her work in “The White Lotus”) totters around on her high heels, smiling brightly and tossing her hair for the cameras. She claims to have a nose for news while ignoring a fire raging in a nearby building that’s plainly visible from her vantage point.

Year after year, multiple studies remind us that the public’s trust in media hovers at record lows – around 31%, according to Gallup. An array of factors led to this low estimation of the Fourth Estate, but the death of local journalism is close to the top of the list. Small town newspapers write about local politics and corruption that national outlets aren’t obliged to cover. Following stories that are important to local communities tends to reduce partisanship and political polarization by encouraging voters to make choices based on how a candidate’s policies might affect local conditions.

These days, almost 55 million people in the United States have limited to no access to local news, according to Northwestern’s Medill Journalism School’s State of Local News project’s 2024 data. Granted, “The Paper” doesn’t expressly lament this expansion of news deserts. I don’t recall it even dropping that term, which is fine; it’s a sunny TV sitcom, not a civics lesson.

Nevertheless, the show does the news profession a solid by depicting Ned, Mare, and Softees’ other volunteer journalists as quixotic heroes doing the best they can with paltry resources and managerial roadblocks.

Their lot is similar to that of abused healthcare workers and public school teachers, other subjects served well by the mockumentary architecture that “The Office” refined into a workplace comedy standard.

(Aaron Epstein/Peacock) Ramona Young as Nicole in “The Paper”

“The Paper” is an extension of “The Office” universe, signaled by the presence of former Dunder Mifflin accountant Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nuñez) showing up as Enervate’s head accountant and, reluctantly, one of the Truth Teller’s earliest contributors. But the show has indirect inheritors, including Daniels’ other workplace comedy, “Parks and Recreation,” with NBC’s “St. Denis Medical” and ABC’s “Abbott Elementary” being contemporaries to his and Koman’s latest.

“St. Denis” takes us inside a fictional Oregon trauma center led by Joyce (Wendi McLendon-Covey), an executive director with misplaced priorities. The place is insufficiently resourced, the doctors are cynical, and nurses like Allison Tolman’s Alex do their best to hold the place together.

Scrub a little of the humor from the script, and it’s basically a West Coast version of “The Pitt,” using familiar sitcom props and set-ups to portray the many facets of systemic failure. In its 2024 premiere, one of its nurses sums up the problem when a patient loses her temper at her and she tells the woman that she understands, then writes down a number the client can call to register her complaint.

“That’s the White House. Ask for Joe,” says the nurse. “Tell him there’s a nursing shortage and we need him to fix the health care system.”

In another field, “Abbott Elementary” portrays the impacts of underfunding on public education as a constant battle for dedicated, good-natured teachers like Quinta Brunson’s eternally smiling Janine Teagues.

Like St. Denis Medical and the Truth Teller, Abbott also groans under the questionable management of an inept administrator who does right by her employees and those placed in their care — only when she absolutely has to. The fact that these goofs hold managerial positions is proof that the structures designed to aid the vulnerable aren’t working as they should, and on purpose.

The mockumentary, though overused on TV, is also the worker’s friend. Our favorite shows’ downtrodden employees communicate that they share our plight through close-ups on wordless expressions, fourth wall-breaking eyerolls and reality TV-style confessionals. These assist in humanizing figures other TV formats tend to flatten. Like, say, journalists. (A biased perspective, I’ll admit.)

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Opening episodes of “The Office” presented Michael Scott as a screechy menace. But its mockumentary crew aided the audience in getting to know this love-desperate man better than he knew himself, gifting him the romantic happy ending he deserved.

Its spinoff wants us to pull for underdogs like Ned, a man with an admitted weakness for romanticizing things (“Print is permanent, OK? It’s like true love,” he says at one point) and Mare, a dedicated reporter itching to put her skills to use.

A successful afterlife on Netflix established “The Office” as a core show in the millennial pop culture catalog. Gen Z, including (and notably) Billie Eilish, got hooked on its easy, quotable dialogue and pratfalls – and, I suspect, its lessons about what adulting was like, sort of, for older generations.

It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether a few of those same viewers may come to better appreciate what we lose when the world’s Truth Tellers vanish. While explaining that the paper used to occupy the whole building, employing over 1000 people, our frenemy Ken remarks, “That’s absolutely insane, if I do say so myself,” saucing each word with condescension.

But Ned’s journalism dream is influenced by a 1971 (also faux) documentary featuring the paper’s long-gone publisher, John Stack (Tracy Letts). He watches a clip where Stack touts that The Truth Teller has 100 men covering Ohio politics, 300 more in Washington, New York, and foreign bureaus all over the world.

“Is it expensive? You can bet what you’re sitting on it is,” Stack booms to his filmmaking crew. “We only keep democracy alive, is all. Is it worth it? Well, ask the Cincinnati city council — a third of ‘em, indicted on bribery charges today thanks to our reporting.”

Ned may be driven by an outdated sense of devotion to yesterday’s journalism, when reporters attended local government meetings and exposed malfeasance about which his neighbors would otherwise be ignorant. But that’s not necessarily a flaw. On the contrary, it makes him the perfect mockumentary subject: a guy with a worthy dream dismissed by those who want him to fail. Ned’s mission is to persuade enough people around him to join him in paying attention. By the end of “The Paper,” many more of us might care about that, too.

All 10 episodes of “The Paper” are now streaming on Peacock.