It was one of the biggest shows on the planet by the time it ended, so it really shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Peacock has its eyes on fans of The Office. The US remake of the short-lived but highly-praised UK sitcom went on to become a beast of its own, and made stars out of a good few of its cast.
Now, many of the people that worked on the show are back with a new project set in the same world – a fictional reality in which The Office was a documentary series, not a sitcom, and in which the people it filmed are all real. The Paper is coming to Peacock in the US, and Sky in the UK, aiming to bring that same fly-on-the-wall style to a slightly different environment: a failing local newspaper.
There’s one obvious link there, of course – the office in The Office famously sold and supplied paper to companies and individuals, so the title of the new show is an open nod to that. It also has one other obvious area of continuity; the first trailer for the show features none other than Oscar Nuñez, who famously played Oscar Martínez in the original show, and seems to be reprising his role. Whether he’s a guest actor or a regular fixture in the new office will become clearer over time.
This time around, the office in question is that of the Toledo Truth-Teller, an Ohio paper that’s been slowly but surely circling the drain, with a staff who can’t seem to find the spark they need to turn its fortunes around. Domnhall Gleeson enters the picture as a new editor-in-chief, aiming to show them all that they’re capable of more than they realise. He doesn’t seem to be filling the kooky role of a Michael Scott, though – that might fall to the ever-excellent Tim Key as what looks like the paper’s publisher.
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The series starts on 4 September, and unlike The Office it looks like it’ll only be 10 episodes in total this time out. Still, don’t bet against this becoming a runaway hit – in which case we’ll have another mega-franchise on our hands.
