Which The Paper Character Are You?
Which The Paper Character Are You?
Learn More About The Paper
When Greg Daniels announced he was building a series inside The Office universe, the reasonable expectation was a nostalgia play. The Paper, which premiered on Peacock in September 2025, turned out to be something more interesting: the same documentary crew that spent nine years in Scranton has moved on to the Toledo Truth Teller, a once-serious Ohio newspaper that has been hollowed out into a content farm by its parent company, Enervate. The joke is not that the workplace is absurd. The joke is that the workplace used to matter and everyone there knows it.
Domhnall Gleeson plays Ned Sampson, the new editor-in-chief, and he is the engine that makes the premise work. Ned is a true believer — he genuinely thinks local journalism is worth saving, he genuinely thinks this paper can be saved, and he has walked into a newsroom with essentially no reporters and a staff that stopped believing years ago. Where Michael Scott-s optimism was self-serving and oblivious, Ned-s is sincere and mostly informed, which changes the comedy-s whole chemistry.
Sabrina Impacciatore-s Esmeralda Grand is the managing editor and the show-s most reliable source of chaos. Ambitious, theatrical, and operating according to internal logic nobody else has access to, she is a genuinely great comic creation — the kind of character who can derail an entire episode by taking one small thing extremely personally. Impacciatore, coming off The White Lotus, plays her with an intensity that never quite tips into caricature.
The connective tissue is Oscar Martinez, and bringing Oscar Nunez back was the show-s smartest structural decision. Oscar spent nine years at Dunder Mifflin being the only person in the room who understood how anything worked, and putting him in a new office lets the series comment on the original without leaning on it. He is older, wearier, and visibly aware that a documentary crew showing up again is not a good sign for his life.
The newsroom fills out from there. Mare Pritti, played by Chelsea Frei, is a former service member turned reporter who supplies the show with actual competence. Melvin Gregg-s Detrick Moore works in ad sales and volunteers to report, embodying the series-s central gag — that a modern local paper is staffed by whoever raises their hand. Gbemisola Ikumelo, Ramona Young, Alex Edelman, and Tim Key round out an ensemble that gelled unusually fast for a first season.
What makes the show land is that it takes the collapse of local news seriously enough to be funny about it. Enervate-s content-farm logic, the aggregation, the pressure to chase clicks over the school board meeting — none of that is invented, and the writers clearly know it. The show renewed for a second season before the first had finished airing, and it returns in September 2026 with a considerably larger audience than it started with.
If workplace comedy is your genre, the Community quiz and the Parks and Recreation quiz are the obvious next stops, and the Brooklyn Nine-Nine quiz and the Abbott Elementary quiz cover the mockumentary and ensemble-workplace lanes respectively.
So who are you at the Toledo Truth Teller? The one who still believes, the one running on pure conviction, the one who has seen this movie before, the one who actually does the work, or the one who volunteered without reading the job description? Find out below.
