Domhnall Gleeson is back as Ned Sampson in season two of The Paper, and the strange thing is that the Toledo Truth Teller still looks like a paper in trouble even after last season ended with an award. The new run picks up after that victory and immediately puts Gleeson’s editor back in the same grind: trying to make a dwindling newsroom feel like a real going concern.
That matters now because the show’s latest chapter is not treating the award as a clean reset. It is using it as a test. If the paper won a prestigious local journalism prize and still cannot shake the sense that it is hanging on by a thread, then season two is asking a blunt question about whether praise alone can save a business built on decline. Gleeson’s Ned leads that charge with a Leslie Knope-ish can-do spirit that sometimes runs ahead of the facts.
The setup works because The Paper is not pretending to be a victory lap. It is a spin-off from The Office, but its own focus is the Toledo Truth Teller, a newspaper in decline that shares an office with a toilet paper company. Season two keeps that machinery in motion while the show continues to play as a sitcom about the death of print media, which means the jokes land inside a workplace that can never quite separate celebration from survival.
That pressure shows up in the details. A billboard bought to trumpet the paper’s success ends up reminding locals to cancel their subscriptions instead. An obituary for a beloved colleague goes off the rails when it is revealed that he had a comically dark secret life. Even the push notifications become a nuisance because everyone is annoyed by them. The show keeps finding ways to turn ordinary newsroom gestures into evidence that the operation is still unstable.
Domhnall Gleeson is not the only reason that instability holds the frame. Tim Key returns as a slightly villainous corporate strategist, and Lisa Gilroy shows up as an oversharing HR officer, both of them sharpening the sense that the paper’s problems do not begin and end with the bylines. Sabrina Impacciatore’s Esmeralda Grand is written as big and broad and loud, and the season leans into that energy hard enough to send her into a crate at one point and into a teenage-boy disguise at another, where she ends up beating up her own son. It is all over the top in a way that fits the show’s comic engine.
The romance thread keeps the human center in view. Ned and Chelsea Frei’s Mare shared a kiss in last year’s finale, and season two does not treat that as a throwaway beat. It hangs over the new episodes as part of the same question that follows the award win: whether anything in this newsroom can become stable, or whether every apparent advance just creates a new kind of mess. For Ned Sampson, the answer is the same one the paper faces — keep pushing, even when the proof of success only makes the next problem easier to see.
That is why the season starts where it does. The local prize gave The Toledo Truth Teller a headline, but not a rescue. Season two makes clear that the award changed the story people tell about the paper more than it changed the paper itself, and that gap is the engine of the show now.
