Diksha Sundriyal
Created by Greg Daniels and Michael Koman, Peacock’s ‘The Paper’ brings back the documentary crew from ‘The Office’ to cover a new story in a different city. Leaving Scranton in the rear-view mirror, they move to Toledo, Ohio, where they land on a company called Enervate, which bought Dunder Mifflin after the events of ‘The Office,’ and is also the parent company of a local newspaper called The Toledo Truth Teller. The ten-episode season takes the audience into the inner workings of a local journalism, while also focusing on the personal relationships of the people working at the Truth Teller. What makes these elements work is that they are grounded in realism.
The Fictional Enervate and The Toledo Truth Teller Shine a Light on Contemporary Journalism
The Toledo Truth Teller and its parent company, Enervate, are entirely fictional, created to serve the plot of ‘The Paper.’ The reason that Greg Daniels and Michael Koman decided to go with a local newspaper as their next subject is that they felt it would be natural for a documentary crew to gravitate towards something like that. ‘The Paper’ begins with the crew of ‘The Office’ returning to Scranton to get an update on Dunder Mifflin and its employees. This leads them to track down Enervate, which bought out Dunder Mifflin, which is where they chance upon Oscar from accounting working at The Toledo Truth Teller.
Daniels and Koman believed that it would make sense for the documentary crew to stick around and find out what happens to a dying newspaper when a new editor-in-chief enters the fray to shake things up. This journey of going back to its glory days would be considered worth exploring, and this realistic approach allowed them to delve into the world of local journalism. However, having chosen their subject, they knew that the story would be more than just about laughs, and it would have to be relevant to the state of journalism today and represent the way it has changed and evolved over the years.
To highlight this difference, a documentary about the Truth Teller from the early days is shown, when it used to have 150 highly motivated employees working on tight deadlines and breaking stories that changed the world. As opposed to it, now the Truth Teller has a handful of utterly unmotivated people who don’t believe in the newspaper anymore and are just trying to keep it alive by recycling wire stories, writing clickbait articles, and fishing for ads that would keep the money flowing. This mirrors the challenges faced by real-life newspapers, particularly the local ones, and this gives a realism to the Truth Teller that allows the audience to connect with it.
The Paper Creators Wanted The Truth Teller to be a Realistic Underdog
Once the idea of creating a story about the Toledo Truth Teller took hold, Greg Daniels and Michael Koman turned towards research to make the fictional newspaper feel more authentic. They visited an old Midwestern newspaper, where their visit to the steel presses led to a key scene in the show, and got to see the nitty-gritty of its daily workings. Being regular readers of local newspapers of their own communities and their own experience of working in school newspapers, or something adjacent to it, helped them get into the mindset of what it takes to create something like the Truth Teller.
Because of its roots in the community, they wanted Toledo’s local flavour to be prominent in the show, which connected with local people and organisations, like FilmToledo, to make sure they got everything right about the city and its people. What increased their faith in the story was that this was essentially a story about underdogs. In ‘The Office,’ they had a paper company trying to keep itself alive while the world shifted to phones and iPads; ‘The Paper’ has a team trying to revive a newspaper in a time when everything seems to be moving online and journalism doesn’t seem to be in a good place, at least for them.
There is also the logistical side of it, where they have to ensure their parent company that the newspaper is worth investing in, because if they are not profitable, they will be cut off. All of this puts incredible pressure on the team, but they are highly motivated individuals, and that forms the core of the story, giving the audience someone to root for, while also becoming more informed about the stakes of keeping the soul of journalism alive in today’s world.
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