The Paper: Season One (2025) [Blu-ray Review]

What is it about The Paper continuing that long streak of NBC comedies that make you go, well it has to get better in Season 2?

When Peacock announced it was making a spin-off of The Office, the collective reaction was somewhere between skepticism and dread. The Office is one of the most beloved American sitcoms ever made, a comfort-watch juggernaut that people have streamed into the ground, and the graveyard of television is littered with spin-offs of beloved shows that never should have left the vault.

So the bar for The Paper was set exactly nowhere, and expectations were low. And then a funny thing happened: the show turned out to be good. Not Office-good, not yet, but genuinely warm, funny, and promising, a worthy continuation rather than a cynical cash-grab. Now Universal has brought the complete first season home on Blu-ray, released July 28, 2026, and I’m here to walk you through both the show and the disc.

Let me be honest with you up front, the way I always try to be. The Paper is a very good first season of a show still finding its footing, not an instant classic, and the Blu-ray itself is a solid but completely barebones release that will test the patience of anyone who loved the extras-packed Office DVDs. But if you’re a fan who wants to own this on disc, it does the core job well. Let me tell you why the show works, and whether this release is worth your money.

The spin-off nobody asked for, and everybody needed

To understand The Paper, you have to understand the weight of expectation it was carrying, because that context is the whole story of its reception.

The Office, in its American incarnation, became something bigger than a hit sitcom. Long after it went off the air, it became the default comfort show for an entire generation, streamed endlessly, quoted constantly, and beloved with a devotion few shows ever earn. That kind of love is a blessing and a curse for anyone trying to build on it. Fans are protective. They don’t want their favorite thing cheapened. And television history strongly suggested that revisiting that world was a terrible idea.

What tipped the odds was the person in charge. The Paper was created by Greg Daniels, the man who adapted The Office for American television in the first place and shepherded it through its greatest years, working alongside Michael Koman, a sharp comedy mind with credits on some of the more inventive shows of the past couple of decades. Daniels didn’t come back to simply photocopy his old hit. He came back with a new setting, a new ensemble, and a new idea, while retaining the documentary conceit and the storytelling craft that made the original sing. The result earns the benefit of the doubt that its pedigree promised, and then quietly exceeds it.

What it’s about

Here’s the premise, and it’s a genuinely clever piece of world-building.

The conceit is that the very same documentary crew that spent years filming the employees of the Dunder Mifflin paper company in Scranton has, twenty years later, gone looking for a new subject. What they find is this: Dunder Mifflin was eventually bought out by a company called Enervate, based in Toledo, Ohio, and Enervate happens to own a historic but dying local newspaper, the Toledo Truth Teller. Sensing a story, the crew turns its cameras on the paper, and specifically on Ned Sampson, an idealistic, relentlessly optimistic new editor-in-chief who has arrived with a quixotic mission: to restore the once-great Truth Teller to its former glory, largely by convincing the company’s untrained office staff to moonlight as volunteer reporters.

If you’ve never seen a mockumentary sitcom, the format is simple and worth explaining. The show is presented as if it’s a real fly-on-the-wall documentary, complete with handheld camerawork, characters who glance knowingly at the lens, and the signature talking-head interviews where individuals speak directly to the unseen crew, revealing what they really think. It’s a format The Office perfected, and The Paper deploys it with the confidence of people who know exactly how it works.

And there’s a crucial thread connecting the two shows. Oscar Martinez, the dry, long-suffering accountant played by Oscar Nuñez, is now working at Enervate, which means he’s the one returning face from the Dunder Mifflin days, and he is absolutely horrified to see the documentary crew again. He’s the audience’s bridge from the old world to the new, a man who has been through this once already and knows exactly what he’s in for.

The heart of it: a newspaper dying in real time

Here’s what elevates The Paper above a simple change of scenery, and it’s the smartest thing about the show.

The Office was never really about paper. It was about a group of oddballs finding family and meaning in the mundane, set against the quiet melancholy of a paper company in a dying industry. The Paper inherits that structure and sharpens it, because its dying industry is one we’re all watching disappear in real time: local journalism. The slow collapse of the American local newspaper, gutted by the internet and left to wither, is a genuinely poignant and timely subject, and by building its comedy on top of it, The Paper gives itself real stakes and a beating heart.

Ned’s mission to save the Truth Teller is funny precisely because it’s a little hopeless, a man bailing out a sinking ship with a teaspoon and a smile. But the show takes his idealism seriously, and it has a genuine conviction about why local journalism matters, about the value of someone showing up to cover the city council meeting and the high school game and the small truths of a community.

This isn’t an abstract concern, either, and the show is smart to know it. Across the country, local newspapers have been vanishing at a staggering rate, leaving behind what researchers have grimly taken to calling news deserts, communities with no one left to hold local power to account or simply to chronicle ordinary civic life. There’s a real, quiet tragedy in that, and The Paper lets it hum underneath the comedy without ever turning preachy about it. That earnestness, that belief in the mission underneath the jokes, is straight out of the Greg Daniels playbook, the same warm sincerity that powered Parks and Recreation. It keeps The Paper from being merely a collection of workplace gags and makes it something with a soul.

The cast

A show like this lives and dies on its ensemble, and The Paper assembles a strong one, anchored by a genuinely inspired lead.

Domhnall Gleeson, the gifted Irish actor known for films ranging from science fiction to Star Wars to the lovely time-travel romance About Time, plays Ned, and he’s terrific: sincere, boundlessly hopeful, a little goofy, the kind of relentlessly positive boss you can’t help rooting for even as you wince at his schemes. I’ll flag one honest point of debate among viewers, though. Ned begins the season as a competent, driven, genuinely capable optimist in the mold of a Leslie Knope, and as the episodes progress, the writing nudges him toward a more bumbling, oblivious buffoon in the older Michael Scott tradition. Whether that shift works for you is one of the season’s real dividing lines, and it’s worth going in aware of it.

Opposite him, Sabrina Impacciatore, so memorable on a certain acclaimed resort-set drama, plays the paper’s abrasive managing editor, a chaotic force who is easily the show’s most polarizing character, loved by some viewers and grating on others. And then there’s the deep supporting bench, including Chelsea Frei, Melvin Gregg, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Alex Edelman, Ramona Young, and Tim Key, a mix of newcomers and comedy veterans who fill out the newsroom with distinct, promising personalities. You can browse the full cast and crew on IMDb, and it’s a roster with real depth. It’s the kind of workplace ensemble that rewards time, the way these shows always do, as the writers learn what each actor does best.

A word too on the show’s restraint, because it’s smarter than it might have been. It would have been easy, and cynical, to stuff The Paper with Dunder Mifflin cameos, trotting out beloved old faces to goose the nostalgia. Instead the show holds the line, bringing back exactly one Office character, Oscar Nuñez’s Oscar Martinez, and using him beautifully. He’s the connective tissue, the one person who has lived through a documentary crew before and knows precisely how ridiculous and invasive it can get, and his weary horror at their return is both a great running joke and a clever bit of world-building. By resisting the temptation to lean on the past, the show forces itself to earn its own identity, and it’s stronger for the discipline. For a very different but equally affectionate workplace comedy, my review of UHF digs into how eccentric personalities bouncing off each other in a struggling media outlet is a formula with a long, funny history.

The pedigree behind the camera

It’s worth dwelling for a moment on the craft, because it’s a big part of why The Paper works as well as it does out of the gate.

Greg Daniels is one of the most accomplished comedy showrunners of his generation. Beyond developing the American Office, he co-created Parks and Recreation, worked on King of the Hill and some of the best years of a certain long-running animated institution, and more recently created the inventive sci-fi comedy Upload. He knows how to build a workplace comedy from the ground up, how to balance jokes with genuine emotion, and how to give an ensemble room to breathe. His partner Michael Koman brings a sharper, stranger comic sensibility from his work on some cult-favorite deadpan comedy. Together they bring a level of structural polish that most first-season shows simply don’t have. The editing is crisp, the documentary rhythms are assured, and the whole thing moves with the confidence of people who have done this before. When The Paper stumbles, and it occasionally does, it’s never for lack of craft.

The mockumentary, twenty years on

It’s worth stepping back to consider the format itself, because The Paper arrives at an interesting moment for the mockumentary sitcom.

When the original British Office introduced this style to a mass audience at the start of the 2000s, it felt genuinely radical: the squirming discomfort of the handheld camera, the excruciating pauses, the characters caught glancing to the lens for sympathy. The American Office refined it into something warmer and more sustainable, and in the two decades since, the format has spread everywhere. Parks and Recreation, Modern Family, What We Do in the Shadows, Abbott Elementary, and a dozen others have all made the talking-head interview and the fly-on-the-wall aesthetic into something close to the default grammar of the modern sitcom. It’s no longer novel. It’s the water television swims in.

So a fair question hangs over The Paper: does the mockumentary format still feel fresh in 2025, or is it starting to show its age? The honest answer is that The Paper doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and viewers fatigued by the style won’t be converted. But the format endures for a reason. It remains a superb engine for exactly the blend of comedy and poignancy this show is after, and there’s a neat logic to setting it in a newsroom, among people who professionally understand what it means to be documented and to document others. The old tools still work when they’re in skilled hands.

So, is it any good? An honest verdict

Let me level with you, because I promised. The Paper is not, at least not yet, the equal of the show that spawned it, and it would be unfair to either series to pretend otherwise. It takes a handful of episodes to find its footing, some of its choices are genuinely divisive (that drift in Ned’s character, the polarizing managing editor, a joke or two in the early going that land badly), and it occasionally leans a little too hard on the audience’s affection for its predecessor.

But here’s the thing: it’s genuinely funny, it’s genuinely warm, and it gets better as it goes. You can actually watch it find itself across the ten episodes. The early installments, from the “Pilot” through episodes like “The Five W’s,” carry the heavy burden of establishing this whole new world, introducing the paper, the staff, and the mission, and they’re a little busy and uneven as a result. But somewhere in the middle stretch, around sharp episodes like “Churnalism” and “Church and State,” the show relaxes into itself. The characters stop being sketches and start being people, the jokes get more confident, and the emotional beats start landing. By the time you reach the finale, “The Ohio Journalism Awards,” the whole enterprise is humming, and the newsroom feels lived-in and real. It’s the arc of a show teaching itself how to work in real time, and it’s genuinely satisfying to witness. The consensus among viewers and critics landed in roughly the same place, that this is a promising, well-cast first season with the makings of the next great comfort comedy, a worthy successor that just needs a little more time in the oven. Peacock evidently agreed, renewing it for a second season. If you go in expecting an instant classic, you may be disappointed. If you go in wanting a warm, funny, easy-to-love new workplace comedy with a genuine heart, The Paper delivers, and it leaves you excited to see where it goes.

The disc: how it looks

Now to the Blu-ray itself, and here the news is straightforwardly good on the technical front.

Universal’s release spreads all ten first-season episodes across two discs in a standard keepcase, presenting the show in full 1080p high definition at its original 1.78:1 broadcast aspect ratio. As a recent, digitally shot production, The Paper looks exactly as clean and polished as you’d expect. The image is sharp and detailed, colors are accurate, and the whole thing has the crisp, controlled clarity of modern television. It’s a solid, dependable presentation that holds up nicely and won’t disappoint anyone.

I’ll offer one honest note for the videophiles. This is a 1080p Blu-ray, not a 4K Ultra HD release, and the show streams on Peacock in 4K with high dynamic range. So in the strictest technical terms, the streaming version actually carries the higher-resolution presentation, and the disc represents a small step down in raw specs. In practice, for a dialogue-driven single-camera comedy, the difference is minor and most viewers will never notice, but it’s worth knowing if pristine 4K is your priority.

It’s a slightly odd situation when you sit with it, and one that comes up more and more with modern television on disc. For a big, effects-heavy spectacle, the jump to a 4K disc is transformative and the physical release is clearly the premium option. But for a modest comedy like this, the streaming presentation actually holds the technical high ground, which flips the usual logic of why you’d buy the disc. Here, you’re not buying the Blu-ray because it looks better than the stream. You’re buying it because you want to own the thing outright, and because a solid 1080p presentation is more than good enough for a show whose pleasures are entirely about writing, performance, and timing rather than resolution. It’s a reminder that, for television, the reason to go physical has quietly shifted from picture quality to simple ownership. If you enjoy complete-series television sets on disc generally, my review of the Looney Tunes Cartoons collection covers a very different but lovingly assembled example of the form.

The disc: how it sounds

Each episode carries a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack, which is the right call and does its job well. This is a talky comedy, so the sound design is, unsurprisingly, tame and front-focused, keeping dialogue clean, clear, and perfectly intelligible at the center of the soundstage, which is exactly what matters most here. The surround channels come to life occasionally, carrying a bit of music or the ambient chatter and clatter of a busy newsroom out into the room, but this is never going to be a track that tests your system. It’s a clean, capable, appropriate mix for the material, and dialogue reproduction, the one thing a comedy absolutely cannot get wrong, is excellent throughout.

What’s in the case: the barebones problem

Here’s where I have to register a genuine complaint, and it’s a significant one.

The Paper: Season One (Universal)
Video	1080p HD, 1.78:1
Audio	DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Subtitles	English SDH
Discs	2 (all 10 episodes)
Total Runtime	Approximately 288 minutes
Digital Copy	No
Release Date	July 28, 2026

That table tells the whole story of the extras, because there aren’t any. This is a completely barebones release. There are no bonus features of any kind: no deleted or extended scenes, no gag reel, no bloopers, no making-of featurettes, no cast interviews, and no audio commentaries. There’s no digital copy included, and at least some copies ship without even a slipcover. You get the ten episodes, cleanly presented, and absolutely nothing else.

For most genres I’d shrug this off, but for a comedy it genuinely stings, and here’s why. The Office set a gold standard for this exact thing. Its DVD and Blu-ray sets were legendary among fans precisely because they were stuffed with deleted scenes, extended cuts, bloopers, and webisodes, hours of extra material that fans treasured and rewatched endlessly. A mockumentary comedy generates a mountain of hilarious unused footage by its very nature, and leaving all of it on the cutting room floor, giving fans nothing but the aired episodes, feels like a real missed opportunity and a failure to understand what makes owning a comedy on disc special. It’s the single biggest knock against this release, and it’s a shame.

Should you buy it?

Let me split it a few ways, because the answer really depends on who you are.

If you’re a dedicated fan who wants to own The Paper on physical media, free from the whims of streaming services that add and drop titles at will, this set does the fundamental job well. The episodes look and sound great, and having a permanent copy on your shelf has real value in an era when nothing on streaming is guaranteed to stick around.

That last point deserves emphasis, because it’s the whole case for buying television on disc in 2026. We’ve all watched it happen: a show you love quietly disappears from the service you pay for, pulled for licensing reasons or corporate accounting or simply because some executive decided it wasn’t earning its keep. Streaming libraries are rented, not owned, and the tenant has no say. A disc on your shelf is yours, permanently, playable whether or not Peacock still exists in a decade, whether or not the show gets quietly memory-holed after a cancellation. For a series like this one, still early in its life and dependent on a single streamer’s continued goodwill, that permanence is not nothing. It’s insurance against the increasingly precarious nature of digital ownership, and for a lot of collectors, it’s reason enough. Just go in with clear eyes about the total absence of extras, and I’d wait for a sale rather than paying full freight for an episodes-only release.

If you’re a casual viewer, the calculus is trickier. The show streams on Peacock in 4K with HDR, which is technically a better-looking presentation than this 1080p disc, and streaming spares you the sting of a barebones, extras-free package. For a lot of people, streaming will be the better value here, and there’s no shame in that.

But if you’re a committed physical-media collector, a cord-cutter, or someone who simply believes in owning the things you love, this is a perfectly respectable way to bring season one home. It nails the essentials, even if it leaves the frills entirely on the table. Manage your expectations, catch it at a good price, and you’ll be happy to have the newsroom on your shelf.

Where to get The Paper: Season One on Blu-ray

The Paper: Season One is available now on Blu-ray and DVD from Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, released July 28, 2026, at Amazon, Target, and other major retailers. The two-disc Blu-ray carries all ten episodes of the debut season.

An idealistic editor, a dying newspaper, a documentary crew that just can’t quit, and the one accountant who really wishes they would. The Paper is a warm, funny, promising new chapter in a beloved comedy universe, a spin-off that had every reason to fail and quietly succeeded anyway. This barebones disc won’t wow you with features, and I wish it tried harder on that front, but it brings the Toledo Truth Teller home in fine shape, and for fans of smart, big-hearted workplace comedy, that’s a story well worth following into season two and beyond.

But, you can also buy The Paper: Season One on Blu-ray at MovieZyng!