Paper Girls, Season 1 (2022)

 

1 November, 1988.  Four young women (Mac, Tiff, KJ and Erin) rise in the pre-dawn hours to begin their jobs as bicycle-riding paper delivery girls.  For Erin, it is her first day on the job.  For the others, it is 'the worst day of the year', as they know that Halloween's most dedicated (and often inebriated) celebrants are still out and about, and will almost certainly get in their way and complicate their jobs.

This year, though, there are even stranger folk about than the usual ghosts and witches.  Strangely-clad outsiders, speaking a foreign language, steal a walkie-talkie the girls are using.  When the four teenagers pursue, they stumble into a conflict between warring factions of time-travellers.  The deadliness of said conflict is soon made apparent, and as the quartet scramble to survive, and the sky turns pink, they find their escape path leading them into the very strange world of 2019 ...

This show is based on a comic book of the same name, but I think it is a fairly loose adaptation.  While the TV show and comic share the same core cast and the same basic premise, a lot of the plot specifics seem to be different.  Certainly, the girls' initial jump into the future in the comic is only to the 1990s, not the modern day.   My knowledge of the comic is fairly limited, though.

Judged purely on its own merits the TV show is a pretty solid one.  It is perhaps a little slow to get started, but once the cast reach 2019 - which is by the end of the first episode - things begin to motor along quite well.

The cast is definitely one of the strengths of the show. All four of the young actors are very good.  They're all obviously a bit older than the characters they are supposed to be playing, though not quite to the "30 year olds pretending to be in high school" standards of some other TV shows.  And when that's the only complaint I can level against them, they are clearly doing their jobs well! 

The supporting cast are also good.  I particularly enjoyed Mac's interactions with her vastly more grown-up brother in the modern day, and when they later end up in the 1990s, KJ's encounters with her older self's girlfriend were delightfully done.

Budgetary constraints clearly were something of a limitation on the show.  In an era where producers are spending tens of millions of dollars per episode, Paper Girls has a decidedly less opulent look to it.  We're certainly not at early 1980s BBC levels of poverty, but there is a clear gap between the money being splashed on screen here and what I saw in a show like Carnival Row.

Alas, the show does not seem to have found the audience it deserved, and has been cancelled after one season.  It's a shame I won't get to see the end of the Paper Girls' story (or at least, the TV version thereof - I could still read the comic!), but I am sure I will see the cast in other things.  They definitely deserve success.