Fans of The Office Will Be Pleased by The Paper

The Paper, a sort-of sequel to The Office with the same mockumentary format, doesn't quite fill the shoes of its predecessor, but reviewers say it shows a lot of promise. Domhnall Gleeson stars as Ned, a new editor-in-chief tasked with reviving the struggling Toledo Truth Teller newspaper. With a shoestring budget, he enlists personnel from paper company Enervate, which has toilet paper as its main product, to volunteer as reporters. The series was co-created by Greg Daniels, who adapted the British series for the US. All 10 episodes will be released on Peacock on Thursday.

• "Making a worthy follow-up to The Office was always going to be a near-impossible task, and it certainly takes some time for this series to warm up," Aramide Tinubu writes at Variety. But by the season finale, he writes, "it has all the makings of being as witty and iconic as its predecessor."
• Erik Kain at Forbes found the series "funny and charming." "I think fans of the original will be pleased," he writes. "I'm not sure if it will ever capture the lightning in a bottle that The Office did, but ... the characters, while not as memorable (at least not yet) as the Dunder-Mifflin gang, are fun to spend time with."

• The series "starts fast, funny and competent, with an easy command of its mockumentary template," James Poniewozik writes at the New York Times. "But the template is also a problem; the show feels too much like a Mad Libs version of the characters and dynamics from The Office and similar shows, without a firm identity of its own."
• The Paper "doesn't really work as a direct Office replacement, since even at its strongest, it never remotely approaches the comedic levels of its parent show," Alan Sepinwall writes at Rolling Stone. "But it may at least function as a methadone-like substitute for fans who love the original but feel like they need to stop rewatching "Casino Night" and "The Lover" over and over again."
• The Truth Teller is portrayed as a paper that lives "in the shadow of its past," Inkoo Kang writes at the New Yorker. "Inexperienced and impractical, Ned brings to the newsroom two embarrassing artifacts: a typewriter and a sense of idealism about the future." The Paper, "like the publication at its heart, is intermittently charming—and inevitably outshone by what came before it," she writes.