The Paper Creators Say if The Office Was The Beatles, the Spin-Off Is Wings

Season 2 of The Paper is now streaming on Peacock.

In Season 2 of The Paper, the Toledo, Ohio-set spin-off of the American version of The Office, the sitcom sheds some of its Dunder Mifflin baggage. Although similarities between the two series remain (Oscar’s still there, judging every harebrained scheme and social faux pas), The Paper’s new batch of episodes points to a show that’s working hard to come into its own. Simmering relationships are sped up, office gossip takes a spicier tone, and the fictional documentary crew tries some new tricks.

I sat down for an exclusive interview with series co-creators and executive producers Greg Daniels (King of the Hill, Parks and Recreation) and Michael Koman (Nathan for You) ahead of Season 2’s premiere, where they broke down some of the show’s key moments and revealed a series of very deliberate decisions that went into pushing The Paper beyond the confines of The Office.

How Ned and Mare Are “Very Different” from The Office’s Jim and Pam

From the very beginning of Season 2, main characters Ned (The Toledo Truth Teller’s editor-in-chief, played by Domhnall Gleeson) and Mare (Ned’s right hand and star reporter, played by Chelsea Frei) hit the gas on their romance that had been bubbling since Season 1. Daniels and Koman say that, while there will always be inevitable comparisons to The Office’s Jim and Pam, The Paper’s shorter seasons mean everything gets compressed.

IGN: The spine of the show this season is the relationship between Ned and Mare. I think a lot of folks would say, "Oh, they're the Jim and Pam of The Paper." But you guys very much push past that yearning and longing that Jim and Pam went through for so many seasons. Why did you decide to move forward with the central relationship so much more quickly in this show?

Greg Daniels: Well, you never want to repeat the same stuff that's been done before. And that starts with the fact that they're very different characters. But then also I think the genre's different. This is 10 episodes every year dropped at once. And we've been thinking of it a little bit more like books in a book series than a weekly year-long serialized story. So this was Book 2 for us with the relationship. I think it's probably unrealistic to think that we're going to get 100 episodes to tell the story, so we [sped] it up.

With The Paper living on a streaming platform instead of linear TV, both Daniels and Koman say that they feel more liberated in crafting dialogue that’s more grounded in real-world office conversations. While the results are often humorous, the rationale actually goes deeper, as evidenced by a scene between Oscar (Oscar Nuñez) and Detrick (Melvin Gregg) midway through the season where the two characters discuss a potential love interest for Oscar.

IGN: I wouldn't deem the show risqué, but you guys definitely push it a little further in this new batch of episodes. There's some cursing, there's some blue humor in there. Is it one of the benefits of being on streaming as opposed to network TV?

Michael Koman: Well, you still have to abide by certain rules because you get a rating. So you try not to drift into TV-MA. This is a show that we would like a whole family to be able to watch. [But] you want the show to sound real. So in a certain way, when language gets too sanitized, it starts to stop sounding real.

It feels different, television to streaming. And so I do think that there is this feeling that we should push a little bit. I think it's more of an instinct than some real intellectual thought. But there's just this sense of like, “Well, maybe we could make this conversation sound just a little closer to how we really talk.”

Daniels: What I think you're probably talking about is the cock block conversation.

Koman: Oscar and Detrick were having an important conversation about “cock blocking.” But for me, Oscar is actually talking about safe sex. In a way, it was wrong to bleep a conversation where a person is actually advocating for safe sex, no matter what language they're using because what they're saying is actually good for people.

If The Office Was The Beatles, The Paper Is Wings

While the show shares a fictional universe with The Office, Daniels and Korman say that the characters currently in rotation dictate ongoing storylines, not blind adherence to what came before.

IGN: The show still exists in the world of The Office. There were some overt callbacks in the first season. With Season 2, was that more challenging to further differentiate it from what became before?

Daniels: You write for the cast that you have and the characters that you've created, and you can almost forget that Oscar was on the other show. I don't really think that we're thinking about the original too much other than if somebody pitches a funny idea and we realize it's too close to something that's already happened on the original. But I don't really feel like there's this enormous pressure to connect the two worlds.

Koman: I will say, the last thing we ever do is intentionally make a connection where one character in our show is doing something that's in any way meant to echo something that happened on the other show. I think if anything, it’s a Beatles / Wings thing. Yes, occasionally some things are going to sound like the Beatles.

As the core staff of the Toledo Truth Teller continues to gel, a few new faces drop by this season to throw a wrench into ongoing storylines. New head of HR Lisa (played by Lisa Gilroy) stirs up incredibly inappropriate trouble the moment she shows up on screen. Likewise, Mare’s new colleague Todd (Jon Lovitz) crashes The Paper with a heavy dose of grouchy cynicism.

IGN: This season we see the addition of Lisa Gilroy as the new outspoken, borderline offensive, HR representative. Why did you decide to bring that character into the world?

Koman : We had thought about that character at the beginning of the season as somebody who was going to be very young, 19 years old or something like that. That was all we really had in our mind about what this character would be, and that she was in charge of HR and just was inappropriate, almost out of not knowing any better. And then when Lisa came up, it just seemed like, “Oh, well, that's the funniest possible person we could get to play the role.” She gives you a half an hour of options for a two-minute scene. I always think of Fred Willard and Catherine O'Hara as just the top of the mountain for improv. And to me, it was like that.

IGN: Jon Lovitz is a big part of this season. Were you guys thinking about him for this role? Did you write the part for him?

Daniels: I worked with him on Saturday Night Live, and I think he is an amazing actor. His work on A League of Their Own is so great. We were trying to think of some other journalistic types that you would find in a newsroom. And we had this idea of a very negative person, a sort of an Eeyore kind of reporter. And we had written it into the script as a John Lovitz type. And then we were like, "Well, wait a minute, maybe we could actually get Jon Lovitz to play the John Lovitz type! He'd probably be really good at playing a John Lovitz type!" And he just crushed it. So satisfying.

Esmeralda Has a Backstory, and It’s Hilariously Tragic

While new characters abound in Season 2, Daniels and Koman promise that some long-held questions about core characters do indeed have answers. For instance, Esmerelda, the Truth Teller’s narcissistic, vivacious, very Italian managing editor, played by Sabrina Impacciatore.

IGN: Why is Esmeralda in Toledo? Are we going to find the answer to that question? Is that somewhere where you guys have an episode dedicated to her backstory?

Daniels: We are talking about getting into her backstory more. We're sort of talking about what to do with her. But our backstory is that she was in a small town in Italy. An American came in, kind of swept her off her feet, promised her a very big time life in America. She left her little town basically with the attitude of, "So long, suckers." And then

Koman: She burned every bridge she had in Italy. There's no going back.

Daniels: There's no going back. And then he left her with a baby and now she's a single mom who can't go home and has made a pretty good life for herself until Ned shows up.

Daniels and Koman also made a deliberate attempt to make The Paper bigger in Season 2. Key moments include a tornado bearing down on Toledo, leading reporters Travis (Eric Rahill) and Adelola (Gbemisola Ikumelo) to seek shelter in a roadside ditch, and Mare and Ned spending a weekend away together, which is interrupted by cameras mounted on robotic food carts.

IGN: Maybe the biggest scene of the entire season is the scene in the ditch with the tornado.

Daniels: I knew you were going to say that! We love that scene. We protected it. It's so funny. That was part of the reason to do a tornado episode.

Koman: Ultimately, that image really made us laugh and we wanted to see it. I think that when you're making this kind of show, there is a point where you're looking at the resources that are being expended on this and feeling like I really hope this is worth it. There are cranes and pulleys involved and after all of that. But I mean, for my personal enjoyment, I felt like it was worth every penny.

IGN: On the opposite side of the spectrum was the food delivery cart camera. You had to be inventive to get that in there.

Daniels: The documentarian is a little bit morally compromised in that episode because he is kind of peeping into their hotel room. So we went back and forth a lot with the network about that because they were worried that we were going to make the documentarian a creep. We're very strict with the rules of the camera. And I think one of the things that always bugs me certainly is when you're on a supposed mockumentary and there's scenes in a bedroom and you're like, "Okay, wait a minute. Are they really going to do that with the cameraman there?" So we try to take that into account and it led to something funny.

IGN: I await Season 3 where you guys have Flock cameras recording.

Daniels: Flock cam, dashboard cam. There's a lot of cams everywhere.

For more on The Paper, read our Season 2 review and find out why we said the show continues to be a refreshing comedy and a worthwhile successor to The Office .