Many fans of The Office were puzzled when NBC announced the classic show would be getting a streaming-only spinoff, The Paper, which followed a failing newspaper rather than a failing newspaper company. The spinoff dropped on Peacock recently and has earned some surprisingly solid reviews. Nonetheless, I have bad news for fans and NBC execs alike: despite these good ratings, this spinoff of The Office is still doomed to fail.
On (ahem) paper, the new spinoff has had a great start: on Rotten Tomatoes, The Paper’s first season has a critical rating of 85 percent. That’s considerably higher than the 71 percent critical rating that The Office earned for its first season. But the fan reaction reveals something different: on Rotten Tomatoes, the audience score for The Office Season 1 is 81 percent while the audience score for The Paper is 75 percent.
This helps illustrate the first reason why The Paper is doomed to fail, at least by the standards of the show it spun off from. The first season of The Office was admittedly rocky, and many critics who didn’t love its debut compared it negatively to the original British version of the show. But audiences immediately fell in love with quirky characters like Michael, Jim, and Dwight. The characters on The Paper, however, are mostly hollow amalgams of the characters on The Office, which is why Oscar is there: to serve as a constant reminder that this weird new spinoff is (despite not being as good in any way) related to one of the greatest sitcoms of all time.
That’s bad news for The Paper, which might (like The Office before it) get a better handle on its characters if given enough time. But it is less likely to get more time for the simple fact that this is a streaming-only show on Peacock, one of the streamers with the fewest subscribers. The Office got to thrive as a network sitcom with millions of viewers; The Paper is likely to die because it’s a niche show on a niche streamer, and it will only take a weekend or two before everyone who enjoyed its 10-episode Season 1 moves on to the next big streaming release.
It’s also worth noting that, regardless of its quality, The Paper has to compete in a much, much more crowded media landscape. The Office debuted in 2005, the same year that YouTube was invented and two years before Netflix began streaming rather than simply mailing out discs. Most people turned to TV for their entertainment needs back then, and airing on the popular network NBC helped the show gain immense momentum years before streaming was normalized as the default form of entertainment for audiences (especially younger audiences).
Now, the best-written episode of The Paper has to compete with countless YouTube and TikTok channels, endless streaming-only series, and a nonstop bevy of TV sitcoms. This is great for consumers, of course: there’s constantly something new to watch and some new favorite waiting to be discovered. But this is terrible for The Paper because it will never be able to gain nearly as many fans as The Office, a show that became a pop culture phenomenon back when its competition was limited almost entirely to television.
The Paper may still be successful in its own way, limping along another season or two, so that NBC can try to lure new subscribers to sign up for Peacock. Ironically, though, one of the primary reasons to get a Peacock subscription is to watch the extended editions of The Office, many of which feature great gags and character moments that were cut for TV. But NBC’s ambitious new spinoff is doomed to die in the shadows of its predecessor as more fans discover they’d rather just check out extra footage of their favorite Office characters than emotionally invest in these hollow doppelgangers over on The Paper.
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