By Joshua Tyler
| Published
NBC has released the first trailer for a new series they’re calling a spinoff of The Office. If you’re wondering what a comedy made by timid people too afraid of backlash to make jokes might look like, then this trailer for The Paper has the answer. It contains nothing that even tries to be funny, except a scene in which a woman mispronounces a word.
Again, this is a comedy and a spinoff of one of the funniest comedy television shows ever produced. And the show’s first trailer doesn’t try to make anyone laugh, unless you count people who enjoy reading dictionaries.
For a while, Hollywood was so afraid of offending that it stopped making comedy. Until the release of The Naked Gun this summer, a new comedy movie hadn’t been released in theaters since 2017. The Naked Gun is a success, though, and now comedy is back. It’s okay to offend people again.
The Paper feels like a product of that previous, unfunny era, something made by people who, unlike Seth MacFarlane and The Naked Gun’s producers, didn’t see the winds of change coming and assumed the best they could do was produce a show that might make people not want to frown.
The Paper is a television show about a small newspaper, after all. That’s right. It’s 2025, everyone except your grandma is using X and Reddit, yet television writers are still trying to make newspapers important and relevant. Even the new Superman had the good sense to turn The Daily Planet into a digital media brand. But here we are with NBC expecting people to get excited about a smirkedy focused on trumpeting the greatness of newspapers just because they’ve attached The Office’s name to it.
The Paper may be the most out-of-touch, out-of-date television program ever produced. It has only four episodes filmed so far, and I predict cancellation after episode 2.
