Tag: Mockumentary

For this week’s Fault Lines column, Jon Allsop is filling in for Jay Caspian Kang.

Early on in “The Paper,” a new Peacock mockumentary series that follows the staff of the Truth Teller, a fictional newspaper in Toledo, Ohio, viewers are shown a grainy flashback to the institution’s heyday, in 1971: the newsroom is bustling, and the publisher is boasting about its foreign bureaus and a recent story that got a third of the city council indicted on bribery charges. In the present day, it’s clear that the Truth Teller is in much worse shape. Its staff is tiny, and shares a floor with Softees, a toilet-paper brand—and a more lucrative enterprise—owned by the same parent company, Enervate. Mare Pritti (Chelsea Frei), the compositor who puts the newspaper together, pulls mind-numbing stories from a newswire. (“Elizabeth Olsen Reveals Her Nighttime Skin Routine”; “UV nail lamps cause hand Melanoma but not with these 12 tricks.”) “Enervate sells products made out of paper,” an executive named Ken (played by the excellent British comedian Tim Key) says. “That might be office supplies, that might be janitorial paper—which is toilet tissue, toilet-seat protectors—and local newspapers. And that is in order of quality.”

Enter Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), the Truth Teller’s peppy new editor-in-chief. He studied journalism in college but then decided to take safer jobs selling high-end cardboard, for his father’s company, and toilet paper, for Enervate, and is only now stepping into the news business. “When I was a kid, I didn’t wanna be Superman,” Ned says. “I wanted to be Clark Kent, ’cause to me Clark is the real superhero. He’s saving the world, too, by working at a newspaper.” Ned intends to revive the Truth Teller by hiring new people to do original reporting around town and cutting the “garbage clickbait nonsense.” Ken gives him short shrift. “Enervate is Tom Brady,” he says. “Very healthy, very rich. The Truth Teller is a sick mouse hiding behind Tom Brady’s fridge. Now, Tom Brady, he likes mice. But this mouse is fucked.” Ned has to make do with the staff that he already has.

“The Paper” is set in the same universe as the U.S. version of “The Office,” but, as my colleague Inkoo Kang suggested in her review of the show this week, it might have more in common with “Parks and Recreation,” which also revolves around a cast of eccentrics on a civic mission, in that case within a local parks department, in Indiana. Greg Daniels, who co-created all three shows, has said that the newsroom setting was attractive because newspapers play a vital democratic role but are in increasingly dire straits—zombified by unscrupulous owners who come in and cut the journalism to the bone. “The Paper” shines a light on “people who have been a little bit beaten down,” he told The Wrap. “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.’ ” Alex Edelman, a writer on the show who also plays Adam, a dopey accountant, described it more pithily, to the Boston Globe, as “a love letter to local newspapers.”

Sure enough, the show touches on many of the challenges facing local journalism: corporate consolidation, the rise of individual content creators, the tyranny of the online comments section. In the end, the comedic payoff often comes from the fact that the Truth Teller’s work isn’t very good—a curious bait and switch, if the show truly does aspire to prove the worth of dogged, ethical accountability reporting. This is not to say, though, that “The Paper” fails as “a love letter to local newspapers.” It is one of those, in a surprisingly literal sense.

I got my first major byline in 2017, in what might be America’s oldest continuously published newspaper, the Hartford Courant. The story, an investigation focussed on people who had won Connecticut’s state lottery with improbable frequency, began as a journalism-school project that I went on to develop with two veteran reporters. It was a heavy lift, which involved parsing unwieldy data sets, scouring court records, and driving around for days knocking on subjects’ doors. It was the sort of ambitious swing that local newspapers ought to take. Some still do. But these days many local papers, like the pre-Ned Truth Teller, are stuffed with wire copy, and, according to data from Northwestern, the U.S. has lost more than a third of its newspapers altogether in the past two decades. In 2020, the Courant closed its physical office; the following year, it was acquired by Alden Global Capital, a financial firm whose name is a byword, in journalism circles, for aggressive cost-cutting.

In “The Paper,” as in real life, local newsrooms are still capable of punchy work; in one scene, Ned has a video call with the editor of an Enervate paper in Cincinnati, who is coded as intimidatingly competent. But the call is intended to emphasize a contrast with the Truth Teller—Ned takes it while wearing an exfoliating blue face mask as part of a newsroom-wide product-review assignment, a brand of journalism that his Cincinnati counterpart dismisses as “lame.” This is far from the only time that the Truth Teller’s shaky standards are played for laughs. In the second episode, when Ned asks his neophyte staff whether they have any newspaper-writing experience, one replies that he has written some tweets. They then go out on disastrous reporting assignments that result in, variously, an accident, an arrest, and a made-up story about a supposed craze in which people pretend to be dogs.