Irish actors are good at a lot of things, but few excel at comedy as effortlessly as Domhnall Gleeson. He gave us the Peter Rabbit duology we didn’t know we needed and was hilarious in the Disney Star Wars sequels, though perhaps not on purpose. Gleeson is every bit as deadpan as he affects a decent American accent for The Paper (Sky Max and Now, Friday, 9pm), a sequel of sorts to the US version of the toe-curling sitcom The Office that doubles as a lament for the demise of local newspapers in the US and, so it is implied, the hollowing out of the American soul.
Gleeson is Ned Sampson, a can-do journalism graduate who has left a cushy job in sales to edit a once-great Ohio institution, the Toledo Truth Teller. The crucial word here is “once”. Black-and-white flashbacks hark to the publication’s glory days in the 1970s, when the printing presses roared and the newsroom was full of hard-bitten reporters. But 1970 was a long time ago: since the internet came along, the Truth Teller has become a “ghost paper”, artificially fattened with wire copy but with little local news.
The US Office was always kinder and more sentimental than the venomous British edition, and Gleeson’s Ned is nothing like Ricky Gervais’s one-person cringe carnival, David Brent. He’s closer to Steve Carell’s Michael Scott – well meaning, a bit blundering and naive, but also a functional human being. In keeping with its predecessor, and unlike the original Office, The Paper is tart but never cruel.
Still, it doesn’t dance around the harsh truth that local journalism in the US has two feet in the grave and its head in the wood-chipper. Ned is determined to restore the Truth Teller to its glory days – his childhood hero, he explains, was Clark Kent, not Superman. But the task is impossible. The paper is on life support as an appendage to a far more successful purveyor of “Softees” bathroom supplies.
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He also has an enemy in the building in the former Truth Teller “managing editor” Esmeralda Grand, played by Sabrina Impacciatore from the Sicily-set season of The White Lotus. It’s a laboured turn in a long tradition of Americans laughing at immigrants with “funny” (to American ears) accents. As you watch, you can’t help but think, “thank goodness they didn’t make her Irish.” It would be a deal-breaker (as I’m sure Esmeralda will be for Italian audiences).
She is, in any case, upstaged in the villain stakes by Tim Key, aka Sidekick Simon from Alan Partridge, who is brilliantly Brentian as Ken, an executive who oversees the Truth Teller. Ken is the closest the show comes to the sheer, despairing nastiness of the UK Office, and it is no coincidence that he is by far the funniest character.
Ned aside, the only staff member who resembles an actual person is the earnest but cynical typesetter Mare (Chelsea Frei). The Paper is clearly setting up Ned and Mare as potential romantic interests, which means that Gleeson is both the punchline of The Paper – the poor sod actually believes journalism is worth fighting for – and its underdog hero. That mix doesn’t quite work: should we pity Ned or cheer him on? Gleeson is nonetheless studiously deadpan and shares a mordant chemistry with Frei. Local news may be on its uppers, but thanks to a droll Dubliner, American cringe comedy is on the mend.
