A Prelude to Peacock's 'The Paper'

This blog is always in danger of becoming an unfinished project. I’m willing to be open about that. I have ADHD, it wasn’t diagnosed until I was 24: I’m not good at finishing things.

The fact is, since there’s nobody telling me when my blog pages are due (since there’s nobody to disappoint but myself) I am always going to prioritize doing this last.

UNLESS…I develop a new hyperfixation.

On that front...

I have a very good feeling about Peacock’s The Paper, which is dropping all ten episodes of its first season tomorrow.

Promotional image courtesy of Peacock

First of all: It’s Greg Daniels. I trust basically everything he does. I cannot tell you how many times I have watched The Office and Parks and Recreation more times than I can count, and his Simspons episodes are what drew me in to the show in the first place. (Admittedly, Space Force was kind of a swing and a miss, but even that had its moments.) I do wish Michael Schur was involved—those two are the dream team—but hey, never say never.

Actually, though, none of that is the real, main reason I’m excited.

The Office was a mockumentary about a dying business. Paper sales were becoming, not wholly unnecessary yet, but certainly an extremely niche kind of business. They were over in their corner just kind of fading into obscurity quietly.

The same can be said for local papers now: They’re one of the only forms of small-time journalism left that you can’t really just set robots to do, and some people really do still care about them. It probably used to be, if not a prestigious job, certainly a much more important-feeling one than it is now. Way more people used to know their local reporters' names, at least the ones that reported on things they were interested in.

Their disappearance is a hallmark of our recent loss of community as a society. Just as Michael Scott bristled at the notion that the role of a salesman could be considered passe, I’ll bet that the one character in The Paper who’s still really jazzed about the local rag is going to be bristling at the idea that it’s being used almost exclusively as a coffee coaster and puppy pee pad.

This is a little personal for me: I was an entertainment reporter five years ago. I watched as a really fun, diverse, dynamic business got swallowed, first by dudes in suits working writers to the bone to churn out more half-true gossipy clickbait than anyone could ever read, then by the robots they were convinced could do our jobs better. (And, I mean, if that's all you want them to do...then yeah. I guess they can. Because writing clickbait is miserable.)

I invite you to read the story of what happened to me at my last in-person job—but in summary, after nearly a year of entertainment journalism, higher-ups we had never met decided to change our format and told us all we should be making YouTube videos instead. No further specification than that.

The idea that any writer could easily become a video content producer is probably what we saw in the trailer from the one girl who was messing with the ring light—I’m willing to bet she’s going to be played as frivolous and vapid like Kelly Kapoor, but that she’s also going to get Her Moment when she finally figures out a video format that readers of the paper—or young people in the area—want to see.

At least, that’s what I’m hoping for. That’s a character I’d write. (Or have written, I guess. Did I mention that the first thing we did on YouTube was to make a webseries about our exact situation? Check it out! It won awards!)

This show is necessary. The Paper is going to show us something we’re losing, something that we might not realize we should have cared about until after it’s gone.

I’m gonna go out on a limb here: One of the reasons the economy is so terrible right now (I mean, one of the reasons that wasn’t driven by politicans) is that it’s way too easy to make a purchase without even looking at another person now.

The Office made the point: Sales may seem entirely unnecessary…until you realize that taking the person out of the equation makes it so much easier to take advantage of them. It’s sort of like the principle we found with what people are willing to say on the internet: It’s really much easier to be mean when you’re not looking directly into the face of the person you’re trying to hurt.

Similarly, it’s much easier to overcharge someone when you never have to have a personal relationship with them—when everything you do is allowed to live behind the responsibility barrier of The Company.

(I submit to you, as support for my argument, the entire A-Story from The Office’s “Prince Family Paper,” an episode which I actually find harder to watch than “Scott’s Tots.” At least those kids had options ahead of them; they graduated high school on a college track. The Prince family lost their ENTIRE LIVELIHOOD. ALL of them. And if it hadn't been for Michael Scott, nobody would probably even have THOUGHT about the human implications behind that.)

That’s not to say that we should bring back salesmen for everything—I’m not a luddite, most advances in technology are well worth the few drawbacks and tradeoffs once we figure out how to incorporate them, and we’ve done that by now—but this, the local paper, and news in general, is something we really, really, REALLY need to stay Human. If news stories aren’t told with enough compassion, they are often being told wrong.

Moreso than that, though, the local paper may be one of the last places you can find news that doesn’t need a whole lot of text manipulation and keywords thrown in to get people to click on it. It’s not trying to reach a global audience: It’s news for the people in the area, things they might want to know about. More “There’s a fair this week!” or “A local kid got into Harvard!” and less “16 were killed in an inner-city shootout” or “this politician did something egregious.” Not just stuff people care about, but stuff they WANT to care about.

I hope this show gets popular enough to become part of the public conversation. I hope it gets people talking and thinking about the value of small-time journalism, and about a time when the goal behind EVERYTHING wasn’t to go viral and/or get famous. I hope it gets big enough that the people making the decisions about how news outlets are run are forced to give it consideration.

I hope The Paper is another show about how we just need to let people be People.

And I mean, hey, Oscar’s there. My hopes are high.