There’s a new comedy streaming on Peacock that doesn’t make me laugh. It’s too true to be funny.
It’s called The Paper and it’s about a newspaper. The unfunny twist is that it’s about a typical local newspaper in the 21st century.
One of the first things you learn in this show is that this newspaper is housed in a magnificent building in Toledo, Ohio, with its name engraved in huge letters on the wall above the grand entrance — The Toledo Truth Teller.
Then you discover that the miserable remains of The Truth Teller are crammed into a few square feet of this vast building. All The Truth Teller’s grandeur is lost; the rest of the building is occupied by the paper’s new corporate owner, which makes its real money selling . . . toilet paper. To double up on that belly laugh, the idealistic new editor-in-chief arrives in the office after quitting his previous job. He was a toilet paper salesman.
The only real journalist on the Truth Teller is a young woman who spends her life staring at a screen to cut and paste agency copy into the paper. The ad sales guy and the office bean counter are sent into the streets in desperate hunts for local news. There’s a click-bait editor putting up stories like You’ll Never Guess How Much Liam Neeson Tipped His Chauffeur. This scoop arrives online, a couple of sentences at a time, between endless ads, before the breathless moment arrives when the amount is revealed.
Everyone reading this who has lived with newspapers knows what I’m writing about and understands how painful it is to watch. The Paper is an only slightly satirical picture of the real circumstances facing hundreds of local newspapers — those, that is, that still survive in a changing world.
The Paper does dig up some real humor at the expense of the depressing truth that newspapers are a vanishing thing. A lot of newspaper people — Brits at least — laugh in the way their parents and grandparents found humor in the Blitz.
A few great newspapers will survive. We might even keep calling them newspapers; other terms — cut, paste, and cc — live on in the digital world, beyond their original meaning. But we won’t be able to hold these newspapers in our hands.
When this series runs its course, you can imagine the final episode; the entire cast troops out of the office, with their possessions in boxes, and the doors are locked forever behind them.
Les Hinton 
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