The first season of “The Paper” had to spend most of its time proving it deserved to exist. The Season 2 trailer, which Peacock dropped Wednesday, has clearly stopped worrying about that. It runs two minutes and eleven seconds, it opens on the Toledo Truth Teller being introduced as an award-winning newsroom, and within twenty seconds it has committed to the one storyline every “Office” fan was going to measure it against anyway. Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson) is dating Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), and he is telling a documentary crew about it.
His phrasing is the giveaway that this show knows exactly what it is doing. “I have started a relationship with someone who works beneath me,” Ned says, and then has to sit in the silence that follows. It is a Greg Daniels line down to the bone, and it lands the way those lines always land, which is somewhere between confession and self-sabotage. All ten episodes arrive September 9. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “The Paper” Season 2 trailer, the Ned and Mare relationship and the storm-chasing storyline it sets up.
Ned Sampson is dating Mare Pritti, and he is telling a documentary crew about it.”
The cold open is a victory lap and a joke at the same time. A voice presents “the award-winning staff of the Toledo Truth Teller” while the camera walks the lobby, and a monitor holds on the paper’s own front page: TTT Wins Big At Ohio J. Then the trailer immediately undercuts it by pointing the camera through a set of venetian blinds at something nobody should be filming, while a voice on the other side says “you old sadistic pig” and asks for a Brazilian. Somebody calls for one moment. A beat later a different voice says “and we’re back” and the show carries on as though none of that happened. Ninety seconds of prestige-journalism framing, demolished in eight.
The romance gets handled with the same instinct. Ned tells Mare “don’t tell the staff,” which is the single most doomed sentence available in a mockumentary, and the trailer cuts straight to somebody reacting with an appalled “oh my god.” Then HR arrives, and HR here means a colleague leaning in to say “HR’s got your back” before immediately asking to be told “if and when you guys have sex and how it is and what is the positions or whatever.” The joke is not that the office found out. The joke is how fast, and how enthusiastically, the office decided this was now everyone’s business.
What surprised us is how much of the trailer is about the newspaper rather than the couple. Ned stands at a whiteboard with BIG STORIES written across it in marker, running a pitch meeting like a man who has read one book about editors. “How do we push ourselves?” he asks, and somebody offers that they are “down for discussing something a little edgier.” That turns out to mean a house fire, reported with the flat detail of a police scanner, and a morgue visit where a voice says “show us the bodies here, let’s see them” while a sheet gets lifted and the camera does not quite look away.
The problem underneath all of it is a good one, and it is the most Toledo problem imaginable. “Toledo isn’t big enough for great news to happen every single day,” somebody admits, right before the demand lands: “we need more award-winning stories.” The proposed solution is pure local-paper desperation. “We pick an issue and we just hammer away at it.” That is a sitcom engine you could run for five seasons, and it is a sharper idea than anything Season 1 built its episodes around.
Which is presumably how the back half of this trailer ends up in a car in a field. Someone announces “we are on an official tornado watch,” a man in a purple polo assembles what looks like a drone out of a car boot, and Ned asks the question that tells you the entire budget line for this subplot: “is my car capable of storm chasing?” It is not. The footage goes to a hatchback on a dirt road with debris in the air, then to a burst of overlapping panic that the trailer refuses to sort out for you. “They’re okay.” “We’re not okay.” “We’re fine, no, not really.” And finally, flatly, “get out of the car.”
Then there is Oscar. Oscar Nuñez is back as Oscar Martinez, and Season 2 gives him more to do than stand in a corner being the show’s proof of purchase. He gets an archive-room talking head early with a mug in his hand, and later a long stretch of newsroom chaos where he is squared up against a man twice his size in a sleeveless top while the rest of the staff decides whether to intervene. There is a barbershop quartet in striped vests standing in the middle of the office at one point. Nobody explains it. That is the correct amount of explanation.
The guest list is where Peacock is quietly spending money. Jon Lovitz turns up laughing in a jacket, Andy Richter is in the mix, and Lisa Gilroy, Matt Braunger, Toks Olagundoye and Phil Hendrie fill out a season that clearly wants more voices in the room than Season 1 had. The trailer keeps stamping fragments of a sentence across old newsprint between scenes, one word at a time, and closes on the title card: the paper, new season, sept 9. Greg Daniels and Michael Koman are still co-showrunning.
The quieter beats are the ones that suggest this season has an actual heart under the bits. “There is a certain satisfaction that you can get when you work with someone,” Ned says over footage of the newsroom at its least dramatic. Later, someone offers “maybe we could be a family,” which in this universe is either sincere or a setup and usually manages to be both at once. And then the trailer ruins the mood on purpose, because a colleague slurs “I took my sleepy blend” and an older reporter asks, with total sincerity, “what is a tool bar?” while somebody mutters “we’re losing him.” The BR team has seen enough of these to know the shape. This is a show that has stopped auditioning.
What Do You Think? Is running Ned and Mare as a secret office romance a confident nod to Jim and Pam, or the exact comparison this show should have avoided for one more season? Does the “pick an issue and hammer away at it” premise give the Truth Teller a better engine than Season 1 ever had? And is the tornado subplot the moment the mockumentary format cracks, or the best use of it yet?
Catch up properly: every Office Universe series in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s Office timeline.
See you on the next binge!
