Peacock’s Highest-Rated Sitcom Is Officially Dominating the Competition on Streaming
Amanda M. Castro is a Network TV writer at Collider and a New York–based journalist whose work has appeared in Newsweek, where she is an Associate Editor, and The U.S. Sun, where she previously served as a Senior Consumer Reporter.
She specializes in network television coverage, delivering sharp, thoughtful analysis of long-running procedural hits and ambitious new dramas across broadcast TV. At Collider, Amanda explores character arcs, storytelling trends, and the cultural impact of network series that keep audiences tuning in week after week.
Born and raised in Puerto Rico, Amanda is bilingual and holds a degree in Communication, Film, and Media Studies from the University of New Haven.
A ceiling was always going to hang over The Paper. Any comedy that follows The Office will be compared to it, especially with Greg Daniels back at the helm and Oscar Nuñez reprising his role, but after two seasons, Peacock’s newspaper sitcom has made a convincing case that it doesn’t need to live in Dunder Mifflin’s shadow. In fact, The Paper has become one of the streamer’s strongest comedies, combining the awkward workplace dynamics of its predecessor with a sharper interest in journalism, failing institutions, and the increasingly ridiculous ways people try to keep their jobs.
The first season had some growing pains, much like The Office itself and Parks and Recreation before it. Critics were generally positive, with Season 1 earning an 85% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but the early episodes could feel uneven. By the middle of the season, however, the show’s characters had started to click. Season 2 has continued that upward trajectory, earning an even stronger 73 on Metacritic and an 80% on Rotten Tomatoes.
'The Paper' Finally Finds Its Own Voice
The documentary crew that once followed Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton employees has moved on to Toledo, Ohio, where it finds the struggling Toledo Truth Teller. The historic newspaper has been reduced to a skeleton staff, wire copy, and clickbait, all while sharing its office with Enervate’s much more successful Softies toilet paper operation.
Enter Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), a former Softies salesman who takes over as editor-in-chief with grand ambitions of restoring the paper. His newsroom is hardly equipped for a journalistic renaissance. Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei) is one of the few people with serious reporting experience, Nicole Lee (Ramona Young) is stuck in circulation, Barry (Duane Shepard Sr.) is essentially a newspaper artifact who somehow still has a byline, and managing editor Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore) would rather keep the clickbait machine running.
Ned genuinely believes journalism can still matter, while everyone around him has varying degrees of evidence that the industry is already on life support. The joke lies in that these people are stubborn enough to keep trying to beat a dead horse, and that’s where the show has developed something its predecessor didn’t need to worry about quite as much: an actual point of view. The Office was fundamentally about people trapped in mundane jobs, while The Paper is about people trying to make a meaningful product in an industry hollowed out by declining readership, shrinking budgets, and corporate interests.
Sabrina Impacciatore Is One of the Show’s Secret Weapons
If Ned provides the show’s earnest center, Esmeralda is its engine of chaos. Impacciatore has turned what could have been a fairly standard workplace antagonist into one of The Paper’s most consistently entertaining characters.
Esmeralda is loud, theatrical, wildly insecure, and occasionally completely unhinged. She can spend one scene fighting Ned over the future of the newspaper and another getting herself into a situation that feels like it had wandered in from a completely different sitcom. It shouldn’t always work. Somehow, it usually does.
That broader comedic style becomes even more pronounced in Season 2. The Paper is clearly willing to let its characters spiral into outright farce. Ned faking a rat bite to impress Mare, an impromptu newsroom crime investigation involving condiments, and Esmeralda’s increasingly bizarre schemes show a series ready to get much weirder than its predecessor.
Peacock Has a Comedy Worth Keeping Around
The biggest compliment The Paper has earned after two seasons is that it would be disappointing if Peacock canceled it. The series has moved from a promising Office follow-up into a genuinely enjoyable workplace comedy with something to say. It understands why local journalism matters without turning every episode into a lecture, and it understands that workplace sitcoms work best when the characters feel like people rather than vessels for punchlines.
Scranton still shows up all over the place, and sometimes the show leans too heavily on it, but The Paper is getting better at building its own world. Twenty episodes in, The Paper is one hell of a good story.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.