'The Paper' Season 2 Lands on Peacock With a Split Critical Reception

Greg Daniels and Michael Koman's Office-universe mockumentary is back, and critics can't quite agree on what they're looking at.

The Paper Season 2 dropped all ten episodes on Peacock on September 9, and the reviews landed in roughly the same formation they always do when a spinoff of a beloved IP tries to grow up: some people think it finally did, some people think it's running on nostalgia fumes, and a few think both things are true at once.

The show's setup is worth restating for anyone who sat out Season 1. As Peacock describes it, the same documentary crew that immortalized Dunder Mifflin's Scranton branch has turned its cameras on the Toledo Truth Teller, a struggling Midwestern newspaper, and the idealistic new editor brought in to revive it. That editor is Ned Sampson, played by Domhnall Gleeson, and according to Wikipedia, he's a former toilet paper salesman who genuinely believes in local journalism. Which is either the most poignant thing on television right now or the setup for ten episodes of comic humiliation, depending on your threshold for sincerity.

The critical consensus leans positive, but not unanimously. Collider called Season 2 "faster, funnier, and more confident in the type of sitcom it wants to be," and singled out an episode where a routine reporting assignment collides with a tornado as a standout set piece. Media Play News wrote that the season is "sharper, funnier and more assured of its potential" than what came before, with the show pulling its comedic focus away from the death-of-print-journalism premise and toward the office relationships that hold any workplace comedy together.

Not everyone's buying the upgrade. RogerEbert.com called Season 2 "breezy but uneven, pleasant but rarely memorable", which, honestly, is the kind of review that's harder to shake than a pan. And Comic Book Club's Alexander Zalben wrote flatly that the show features a storyline where a volunteer reporter fabricates quotes and faces essentially no consequences, calling the choice "horrifying" and concluding, per the Comic Book Club review, that "there is a show to be made about the state of journalism in 2026, but with bizarre and off-putting choices like this, it's clear The Paper is not that show."

That's a real tension worth naming. The first season built its whole emotional foundation on the idea that local newspapers matter, that the people who keep them alive are doing something worth caring about. If the second season treats journalistic ethics as a punchline, it's not just a tonal misstep. It's a betrayal of its own premise.

Where most critics do agree is on the cast. That Love Podcast noted that Domhnall Gleeson gives Ned "enough optimism to be funny and enough insecurity to be relatable," and that Oscar Nuñez's return as Office alum Oscar Martinez "feels useful rather than purely nostalgic." InBetweenDrafts put its finger on the structural problem: with ten episodes and a large ensemble, the show keeps running out of room, and a 22-episode network-style season would suit it better.

That's a critique worth holding onto. The streaming format optimized for binge delivery keeps squeezing character comedies into shorter runs, and The Paper is exactly the kind of show that loses the most in compression. A few more episodes and it might stop feeling like it's always one scene away from becoming the thing it's trying to be.

Season 2 is streaming now on Peacock. Season 3 status is listed as pending.

Sources cited:
- Peacock (https://www.peacocktv.com/stream-tv/the-paper)
- Wikipedia, The Paper (2025 TV series) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Paper_(2025_TV_series))
- Collider (https://collider.com/the-paper-season-2-review-peacock/)
- Media Play News (https://www.mediaplaynews.com/the-paper-season-two-review/)
- RogerEbert.com (https://www.rogerebert.com/streaming/the-paper-season-2-office-spinoff-peacock-tv-review-2026)
- Comic Book Club (https://comicbookclublive.com/2026/09/02/the-paper-season-2-review-peacock/)
- That Love Podcast (https://www.thatlovepodcast.com/post/the-paper-season-2-review-2026)
- InBetweenDrafts (https://inbetweendrafts.com/the-paper-season-2-review-peacock/)