In the Peacock comedy series The Paper, the same documentary crew that followed Michael Scott and his employees on The Office has shifted its focus to the staff of the Toledo Truth Teller, an Ohio-based newspaper that is almost in the dustbin of history but may have a chance to be saved when Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) is hired as its new editor-in-chief.
Awards Buzz spoke with creators Greg Daniels and Michael Koman about distinguishing this show from The Office, including whether they feel that TV comedy is substantially different today than it was when that show debuted twenty years ago. Daniels shared:
“When The Office first premiered, the dominant thing was multicam. And at NBC, Will & Grace was the number one show. I remember thinking when I signed on to adapt The Office that it would be for HBO or something like that. When it looked like it was going to be on NBC, I thought it was going to be a real noble experiment, that really wasn’t their bread and butter. But the tone of The Office is very much to me like Cheers, where it’s ordinary people and it’s pretty realistic. The humanity of the characters is a part of the show. We tried to keep that going with The Paper. And also the mockumentary has changed a good bit since The Office. Part of our goal here was to go back to a more strict type of mockumentary where you don’t break the rules that the camera operators are able to get shots that they can’t really get. If you’re going to do the original office format elements the way they are, you might want to include The Office as the official progenitor of the show.”
Koman, who was not involved in The Office, added:
“I think it helps that, in our minds, this is the same crew that made the original documentary. They have a memory of what they’ve already done and that they would have been looking for something new to cover, or at least a different aspect of work. I kind of like the idea that, like in real life, the characters are conscious of what they look like on television and they know what it means to be filmed because people are more familiar now with the way reality television works and what documentary means. So I think any time a camera’s on somebody now compared to, you know, 2006, there’s a difference. People are just a little more canny about that. So to me, the continuity has a reason.”
Watch the video above to hear more about their specific choices and also about the progress of their upcoming project, Chelm: The Smartest Place on Earth.
Season one of The Paper is streaming on Peacock.
