Daniels

[This story contains some spoilers from the first season of The Paper.]

The last episode of The Office aired in May 2013, and it seems like talk of rebooting, reviving or spinning off the series started, oh, about two weeks after that.

A check of the historical record reveals that’s not quite the case. But reports of a reboot or revival have periodically burbled up since at least 2017 (not including a couple of spinoff ideas during the run of the show that never came to be). Meanwhile, the mockumentary format that The Office popularized has flourished in a host of other series, which did not go unnoticed among the show’s producers.

“We were watching as so many others were basically doing derivative versions of our show, whether they were paying homage to us, honoring us or ripping us off,” executive producer Ben Silverman tells The Hollywood Reporter. “It prompted Greg [Daniels] and I to just really focus hard on [the idea that] we need to enter the fray as well.”

They did just that with The Paper, an indirect spinoff of The Office that premieres its full, 10-episode season Thursday on Peacock. Daniels, who developed the American Office and was its showrunner for four seasons, created the new series with Michael Koman (Nathan for You). The show is set in the offices of a historic but now gutted Toledo, Ohio, newspaper, the Truth-Teller, and centers on an optimistic new editor, Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), and his efforts to restore some of the publication’s former glory with help from its (non-journalist) employees.

“There was a lot of push to do a spinoff of The Office over the years, and I was very reluctant to do it. I said, ‘Look, I don’t want to do a reboot,’ because we couldn’t get most of the cast,” Daniels told THR. “I don’t want to do something where it’s the same characters and we recast them, because our original cast can’t be improved on, in my opinion. So I always said the only way we even consider it is if the same documentary crew made another documentary, and if you were OK with the idea that the connection is really the documentary crew. So it’s really a new show.”

The Paper’s connection to The Office comes first from behind the cameras, as the documentary crew that chronicled Michael Scott, Pam Beesly et al chooses the Truth-Teller as its next subject. (An establishing scene at the former Dunder Mifflin office in Scranton, Pennsylvania, featuring Bob Vance of Vance Refrigeration (Robert R. Shafer) lays the groundwork for how they arrive in Toledo.)

Once there, they find that Office regular Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nuñez) is working for the Truth-Teller’s parent company, Enervate — and that he wants absolutely no part of the new project. A title card, however, informs the audience that the release Oscar signed for the first documentary has no end date, so he’s out of luck.

“It felt like perhaps [Oscar] had moved to this other city looking to start fresh, and he was enjoying the fact that any old memories might be a little more distant,” says Koman. “And then to have exactly the same camera crew walk into your office …”

“Oscar is so funny,” Daniels adds. “He’s such a strong performer, and it is a character that didn’t have so much closure at the end and the [Office] finale. It’s not like he had left and gone to England, like Toby. He was kind of unchanged. So we thought we could pick up where we left off with him.”

Setting the new series in another work environment wasn’t necessarily the plan from day one, Silverman says: “We debated it — do we do something that’s set in a home life, do we do something [different] since we’ve been in the workplace? Do we focus on something more domestic? Do we focus on something in another kind of bureaucracy? But I think determining that a newspaper, which is connected to a company that was in multiple versions of the paper business, was a really strong way to do it.”

Daniels and Koman say they took pains not to have any of The Paper’s characters — the core cast also includes Sabrina Impacciatore, Chelsea Frei, Melvin Gregg, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Alex Edelman, Ramona Young and Tim Key — map precisely onto those from The Office (Oscar excepted, obviously). They didn’t shy away, however, from playing into some similar dynamics, including a couple of simmering workplace romances.

“Our attempt was for any kind of overlap to be something that is closer just to human nature,” says Koman. “There are certain things like relationships that are going to happen anywhere.”

Daniels adds, “You could take it to an extreme. You could be like, ‘In The Office, they ate food. We’re going to have these characters eat rocks.’ There are going to be love affairs that develop between co-workers. There are going to be jealousies and undermine-y things. That seems like a feature of people in a workplace. But the important thing to us is that they’re brand new characters. They all have different motivations. And because they’re in a workplace where there’s somebody who’s a little bit more inspirational than Michael Scott, it’s more like they have a sense of hope. Their pulse is quickening with the potential of what their job could be. It starts at a pretty beaten-down place, but it’s got a direction, and then maybe they’ll get more hope out of it.”

Daniels and Koman spoke to THR before the news that Peacock had renewed The Paper for a second season. Even so, they weren’t ready to give up any ideas about where the series might go — though the 10-episode season leaves several relationships and storylines open for more exploration.

”The point of these 10-episode streaming situations is there is going to be like a year between seasons, and you want the audience to wonder what’s going to happen,” Daniels says. “Then they’ll find out it might not be anything that they think, but I certainly wouldn’t want to tell them not to wonder about it in the 10 months in between.”

Koman adds, “If we’re lucky enough that people care what happens next, we want to give it as much thought as possible.”

The Paper is now streaming all episodes on Peacock.