Peacock's 'Office' Spinoff 'The Paper' Returns for Season 2 as Disney+ Rolls Out Underwhelming 'Mandalorian' Film

September is shaping up as the month streaming pulls in two very different directions at once: one story about a franchise that couldn't quite stick the landing theatrically, and another about a first-season show that apparently more than did.

Start with the good news. Peacock's 'The Paper' is back for Season 2, premiering September 9 on the streamer. If you missed Season 1, the quick version is this: co-creators Greg Daniels and Michael Koman transplanted the mockumentary DNA of 'The Office' to a struggling Toledo newspaper called the Toledo Truth Teller, with Domhnall Gleeson playing an idealistic new editor-in-chief shadowed by the same doc crew that once made Dunder Mifflin infamous. According to TV Insider, Peacock not only renewed the show but has already confirmed Season 1 will get a full secondary run on NBC starting November 10 - the first time a Peacock original has been handed that kind of network encore. That's a significant vote of confidence, and honestly, an earned one. Season 1 worked because Daniels and Koman didn't try to recreate Michael Scott in a press room. They let the new ensemble - Gleeson, Sabrina Impacciatore, Gbemisola Ikumelo, Alex Edelman, Ramona Young, and Oscar Nuñez reprising his 'Office' role as an accountant who really did not want to see that camera crew again - find their own rhythms. The show had its own comic tempo. Season 2, according to TV Insider, picks up from a finale cliffhanger involving a kiss between Gleeson's Ned and Chelsea Frei's Mare, which suggests the writers are leaning into the will-they-won't-they engine that powered 'The Office' through its best years. Whether that's a trap or a feature depends entirely on execution.

Meanwhile, over at Disney+, 'Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu' landed on the platform September 2, completing its journey from theaters to your couch in roughly three months. The problem, as Variety reported, is the journey didn't go quite where Disney hoped. The film grossed $345 million worldwide - a number that sounds substantial until you learn that, according to Variety, it made it the lowest-grossing live-action Star Wars movie ever made, falling below the $393 million haul of 'Solo: A Star Wars Story.' Disney publicly admitted the underperformance.

Directed by Jon Favreau, the film stars Pedro Pascal as Din Djarin alongside Sigourney Weaver as Colonel Ward and features Jeremy Allen White voicing Rotta the Hutt, per the film's Disney+ press page. It arrived with an IMAX Enhanced presentation on the platform, a companion podcast, and a LEGO Star Wars special retelling all three Mandalorian seasons - a full content package that feels like Disney leaning hard into the home-viewing window to make up ground. On Rotten Tomatoes, as WDW News Today noted, the film earned a 60% critics score against an 86% audience score, which is a real gap. That's the kind of split where people who were going to love it loved it, and critics found it a reasonably good-looking television episode that happened to cost theatrical ticket prices.

The two stories together tell you something about where streaming strategy is in 2026. Peacock's play with 'The Paper' - drop everything at once, get the buzz, then push it to network to broaden the audience - is a more nimble, confidence-driven move than anything Disney is doing with Star Wars right now. Disney's approach is to build an enormous tent and then discover that ticket buyers didn't come in the numbers expected, and then pivot to the streaming subscribers who were probably going to watch it anyway.

For viewers, none of that is necessarily bad. Both shows are on now. 'The Paper' Season 2 is where I'd start.

Sources cited:
- TV Insider (https://www.tvinsider.com/1212749/the-paper-season-2-premiere-date-trailer-cast-plot/)
- TV Insider (Season 1 NBC run) (https://www.tvinsider.com/1191517/the-paper-office-spinoff-cast-premiere-date-trailer/)
- Variety (https://variety.com/2026/film/news/the-mandalorian-and-grogu-disney-plus-streaming-release-date-1236788894/)
- WDW News Today (https://wdwnt.com/2026/08/the-mandalorian-and-grogu-disney-streaming-date-announced/)
- Disney+ Press (https://press.disneyplus.com/news/star-wars-the-mandalorian)
- The Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/office-spinoff-the-paper-binge-release-peacock-1236350502/)