The Paper, Sky Max review - a spinoff of the US Office worth waiting 20 years for

Fans of the US version of The Office may wonder what happened to the assorted oddballs of Dunder Mifflin, proud creators of paper products in Scranton, Pennsylvania. They will be none the wiser after watching the pilot episode of The Paper, though they will certainly want to stick around for this very welcome spinoff. 

Its format is much the same as before (one of its writers, Greg Daniels, wrote the original US Office): a film crew is stalking workers in a sleepy office, who regularly talk to the camera, betraying their feelings and their colleagues. Here the business is a moribund local paper in Ohio. The Toledo Truth Teller was once a hard-hitting local newspaper with 1,000 staff, all shoehorned into an imposing Victorian building known as Truth Teller Tower, where they unmasked corruption and graft. Its printing presses are still in the basement. A mockumentary within this mockumentary shows a middle-aged white grandee (Tracy Letts), the paper’s publisher, bursting with pride back in 1971 about its achievements.

Fast-forward to the present day, and the TTT staff have dwindled to about eight eccentrics – it’s hard to be precise because they have to share their limited office space with the Big Softies, as their colleagues in another wing of the company are known, who work for the superior paper products division. As corporate slimeball Ken (Tim Key) explains, Enovate, the company that bought Dunder Mifflin in 2019 offers three levels of paper: office supplies, toilet tissue, and the Toledo Truth Teller, in descending order of paper quality. Into their forgotten corner comes a potential white knight, Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), a livewire who loves the smell of printing ink in the morning. He never wanted to be Superman, he exclaims, he wanted to be Clark Kent, though he took a diversion into paper sales. Now he is vowing to turn the ailing TTT around as its new editor in chief. But Ned is an old-school print fan, so from the outset he is on a collision course with the interim managing editor, Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore, pictured above with Ramona Young as Nicole), a worshipper of all things digital, who runs the paper’s online section, largely for all the free cosmetics samples it gives her.

As with its parent show, much of the fun here is sparked by the jockeying of the junior staff. There’s the statutory quiet blonde, Mare (Chelsea Frei), a former US Army journalist who more or less creates the TTT from the wire stories she likes the look of (and can afford to buy in); the statutory male oddball, Travis (Eric Rahill), who might be an incel or maybe just likes his “fishing collective” too much; Barry the older hack (Duane R. Shepard Sr), who still smokes at his desk and may or may not be suffering from dementia; a cheeky reporter with an Eddie Murphy vibe, Detrick (Melvin Gregg, pictured below), who fancies the prickly circulation director Nicole (Ramona Young); Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nuñez), the only returning character from The Office, who’s still repeatedly appearing on camera saying he doesn’t want to appear on camera; and, from accounting, stony-faced, caustic Adelola (Gbemisola Ikumelo from Black Ops) and Adam, a dopey father-of-four (stellar comedian Alex Edelman). None of them, barring Mare, has any experience as a reporter, so of course Ned sends them out on the streets looking for local stories. Esmeralda and Ken, meanwhile, spend their time cooking up ingenious ways to get Ned fired.

This is a very funny show, with nifty plots, really satisfying characterisation and sharp dialogue. Its scene-stealer is Impacciatore’s Esmeralda, a deliciously crazy creation, who, as she did in The White Lotus 2, looks like an escapee from a Fellini film, part grotesque, part glamorous, with a confusing broken accent to match. She is actually Italian but sounds like a parody Italian, her grasp of American English comically volatile – in her mouth, “self-deprecating” becomes “self-defecating”, for example. The writers use her to satirise the inanities of online journalism, such as its “features”: those scraps of copy around endless ads that you never get to the end of before losing the will to live. 

Nicole is also a cleverly deployed weapon, a faux-naive observer with a deadly accurate understanding of what’s what, who candidly tells the camera that the paper’s data-scraping software, which goes into action whenever a reader fills out an online form, means TTT readers give the paper more information than it gives them.Gleeson holds his own well against this mix of US and UK comedy talents. He is the Jimmy Stewart manqué of the pack, stirring things up with brave speeches you know will set up booby traps he will fall into. Unlike most of his staff, who usually outvote him, he is dangerously retro when it comes to what he considers news, favouring worthy but rather dull stories over meretricious clickbait. Yes, it's journalism now.

Tim Key is his usual enigmatic self here – how on earth did Ken get from St Albans to Ohio? – and seems to have inherited David Brent’s DNA, visible in his sarcastic, smirking commentary on what the film crew are seeing, and displaying that same love of conspiratorially acknowledging the camera’s presence. He’s still recognisably Tim Key, though, inspired composer of weird short poetry. Here he supplies bizarre cadenzas, like the one where he conjures up an elaborate image of the Tower as star football player Tom Brady’s fridge and the TTT the sickly mouse hiding behind It. I’m guessing he is allowed to come up with his own lines.

Under its satirical weaponry, The Paper has the same warm-heartedness as its predecessor; it’s similarly fascinated with the micro-reversals of the average workplace and how groups of misfts cope with the mundanity of their working lives. And at its heart is Impacciatore, a total delight. Where has she been all our TV-watching lives?

• The Paper is on Sky Max. All 10 episodes available from September 4
• More TV on theartsdesk