Greg Daniels’ long-awaited spinoff of “The Office” is set to premiere in September, and will focus on employees of a newspaper. According to the creator, he decided on that group in part because newspapers in real life are actually struggling.
Speaking to TheWrap ahead of the final season premiere of his series “Upload,” releasing on Prime Video on Monday, Aug. 25, Daniels explained that the decision to follow a newsroom in 2025 was not actually based on the timeliness, but more on the “mission” of the people.
“When you think about it, the original show, they were selling stationery in a world where people had iPads. So, the sort of timeliness is not the point,” he explained. “The point is, in this show, it’s sort of like people who have been a little bit beaten down in an uninspiring particular situation, becoming inspired by somebody new — and I think journalism as a pursuit, is so important. And the newspapers have been hollowed out by these economic forces.”
“The villains are often these tech companies, I have to say,” he continued. “Google, eBay, like, there’s a lot of places that have stripped all of the source of money out of newspapers. And it just seemed like the mission is so great, and it’s such a thing for the characters to be inspired by somebody who comes in and says, ‘Let’s really do this and do it like it used to be done.’”
Daniels has not been shy of casting tech companies as villains in the past, openly poking fun at their potential futures in “Upload” for three seasons now. But, more than drawing attention to their threat to journalism, Daniels noted that it makes for a good underdog story too.
“And I guess it’s also like when you’re kind of rooting for the Bad News Bears team,” he said. “The more difficult the thing is that they’re trying to pull off, the more you want them to win.”
Back in 2023, Daniels told TheWrap that any kind of reboot of “The Office” was “not of interest” to him at all, simply because “I feel like we ended that story beautifully” and everyone had closure. What he did want to do was something in the same universe, suggesting that maybe the documentary crew follow a new company. And indeed, that’s what “The Paper” will be.
The new mockumentary series from Daniels and Michael Koman sees the documentary crew that captured years of Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch as they head to a historic Midwestern newspaper where the publisher is trying to revive it.
There will be some returners — Oscar Nuñez’s beloved character Oscar even appears in the trailer, though he’s not pleased to see the documentary crew again — but otherwise, it’s an entirely new story.
“The Paper” premieres Sept. 4 on Peacock.
