The Paper Season 2 Review

Mild spoilers below for The Paper Season 2. All episodes stream September 9 on Peacock.

At the Toledo Truth Teller, love is in the air. And in a ditch. And at a gun range, on a podcast, and everywhere else you turn. In Season 2 of Peacock’s The Paper, the employees of the fictional Ohio-based newspaper are tangled up in so many office romances that it’s sometimes hard to keep track. The most recent batch of episodes of the Office spin-off puts relationships at the center, often to hilarious effect. It’s a season of television that swings for the fences, daring to explore what happens when you move beyond the classic “will they, won’t they” sitcom trope and dive into the actual consequences of workplace love affairs.

In Season 2, The Paper hangs nearly its entire narrative on the budding romance between competent, if often flailing, newspaper editor-in-chief Ned (Domhnall Gleeson) and star reporter Mare (Chelsea Frei). In the wake of the Season 1 finale, in which the staff of the Truth Teller swept the Ohio journalism awards, the two characters begin a secret office romance. From romantic getaways involving Orwellian food delivery carts to sweet FaceTime dinners, Ned and Mare often echo The Office’s Jim and Pam at their best. But whereas The Office’s central romance spent multiple seasons trapped in a cycle of yearning and missed opportunities, The Paper moves at a quicker pace. By the Season 2 premiere, Ned and Mare are fully together and enduring all the tribulations that come with a new relationship.

Nearly every episode of Season 2 centers around Ned and Mare’s romance intersecting in some (often hilariously) inconvenient way. Ned gets jealous when Mare (who’s ex-military) is a better shot than him when they visit a gun range to schmooze a local cop. They co-host a debate-style podcast where they manage to flirt and vehemently disagree at the same time. They cut short a romantic weekend away when the rest of the office can’t be trusted to handle an election-related story.

It’s a refreshing approach to sitcom relationships that shows the romantic progression between two characters who share the same passions (in this case, print journalism) and uses the relationship to make the workplace shenanigans more meaningful. That makes it all the more frustrating when Mare and Ned’s romance hits a predictable speed bump late in the season. I won’t spoil the blow-up here, but in typical TV comedy fashion, it involves miscommunication and a moldy muffin.

Similarly, the sheer volume of secondary characters who are involved in their own romantic entanglements (spanning everything from subtle flirtations to getting too close for comfort in a roadside ditch while a tornado passes overhead) can be overwhelming at times.

Resident attention seeker Esmeralda (the always-hilarious Sabrina Impacciatore) and corporate hack Ken (Tim Key) engage in a series of hijinks that frequently verge on a pseudo-relationship. Oscar (Oscar Martinez) concocts a scheme to snag a cute nursing home employee. Staffers Detrick (Melvin Gregg), Adelola (Gbemisola Ikumelo), Nicole (Ramona Young), and Troy (Eric Rahill) each deal with office crushes of their own. Even parent company CEO Marv (Allan Harvey) makes a play for love near the end of the season. Each of these storylines is benign enough on their own, but in aggregate, they risk turning The Paper from a cutting mockumentary about the state of journalism into a late-aughts romantic comedy with too many intersecting storylines.

Apart from the myriad romances, Season 2's most notable trait is the big comedic swings the show takes, moving beyond the small-ish comedy of The Office (golden tickets and rabies scares aside) into moments that are big, broad, and verging on farce. Yes, smart humor is still present (there’s a runner about newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s mistress that might be the funniest scene of the entire series), but Season 2 often pushes itself out of the confines of the mockumentary format into a show that’s more universal.

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