The Paper Comes to the Paper

The Paper, Peacock’s mockumentary sitcom from The Office creator Greg Daniels and comedy writer Michael Koman (Nathan For You, Saturday Night Live) visited your very own Austin Chronicle last week. Following their first season, which released to streaming in September 2025, cast members Chelsea Frei, Sabrina Impacciatore, Oscar Nuñez, and Melvin Gregg joined co-creators Daniels and Koman at the ATX TV Festival – and made a pit stop at our office to talk shop and print media.

Much tittering about potential sources of inspiration and the show’s direction passed between journalists, ad and marketing folks, and people who play them on TV. Daniels was part of his college newspaper, he told the Chronicle, but that wasn’t necessarily what drew him to set his sights on a staff of local journalists. 

“Our Office documentarians were looking for something else to cover,” he explains of the spinoff show. He sees the subject, through the eyes of that fictional camera crew, as office place dynamics, following in the footsteps of the beloved nine-season mockumentary about a paper and office supplies company. 

Nuñez, whose number-crunching character from the original show has taken a new job at the newspaper after Dunder Mifflin shut its doors, is the only other throughline from the original series, which ended in 2013. His character, Oscar Martinez, soon finds a niche making puzzles for the paper. “I’m an accountant,” he says of the character. “I’m just trying to do my job and these documentary cameras keep following me around.”

In the case of the new series, that film crew follows a small but mighty staff barely keeping local Ohio rag the Toledo Truth Teller alive. Their day-to-day life gets flipped upside down by a new editor in chief, Ned Sampson, played by Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, and The Office documentarians stick around to see what happens next. 

A major difference underlying these new relationships, as Koman pointed out, is that the employees in The Office weren’t “motivated by loving their jobs, like people really are in journalism.” 

Still, other than Sampson, and Frei’s character Mare Pritti, the onscreen staff have no journalistic experience. They eagerly volunteer some of their work time to track down local leads, and fall into plenty of pitfalls along the way. Pritti, Gregg, and a few other cast members spent time with journalists at the Palisadian-Post to inform their characters, but the scrappy, learning-on-the-job plotline means the characters, actors, and audiences are learning to be reporters throughout the series.

“It’s like Journalism 101,” says Daniels. “You see them learn how to be reporters as the show goes on.”

While some of Sampson’s staff embrace new positions as fledgling reporters, others, like Impacciatore’s Esmerelda Grand, resist the change.

“There was always a part of me that wanted to be a journalist,” admits Impacciatore, an Italian actress who sassed her way into American hearts as Valentina in the second season of HBO’s White Lotus. Between casting for The Paper and receiving the script, she eagerly did research for her role. “Once I read the first page, I stopped,” she says, realizing her stylish character was far more saboteur than hard-working reporter. Impacciatore is holding out hope that she’ll get to bring her dream to the screen, plot willing. Whether or not that’s in the cards for season two, which is set to premiere on Peacock in September and picks up on the Monday following the season one finale’s dramatic events, no one can say. 

What Impacciatore can say about the 10-episode sophomore release is this: “It’s funnier, it’s crazier,” she says. “It’s going to be explosive.”

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