Paper Girls (Season 1)

It might seem condescending to describe Amazon’s Paper Girls, adapted from the comic book by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, as a “junior varsity Stranger Things”… but categorizing the show as the younger, spunkier, brattier cousin of the Netflix juggernaut is very much meant as a compliment.

The parallels in premise speak for themselves. Like Stranger Things, Paper Girls is set in a seemingly nondescript midwestern town (Stony Stream, Ohio to be specific) in the 1980s… and like Stranger Things, it revolves around a quartet of 12-year-olds (swapping out boys for girls) who get swept up in an unlikely paranormal adventure… while on their bikes. The titular foursome have virtually nothing in common when we first meet them, aside from their paper routes. Shy, Chinese-American Erin (Riley Lai Nelet) is starting her first day on the job and soon makes the acquaintance of tech-savvy Tiffany (Camryn Jones) and field hockey star KJ (Fina Strazza), who’s ambivalent over her family’s prominent social standing… which makes her a convenient  target for Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), who’s basically from the wrong side of the wrong side of the tracks. Navigating the notoriously-fraught early morning hours post-Halloween, the four girls see a strange light in the sky and next thing they know, they’ve been inadvertently transported to the year 2019, caught in the middle of some sort of cross-dimensional time war.

Stranger Things began with relatively simple building blocks (a sinister government lab; a monster from another dimension; a girl with special powers), but Paper Girls, in many ways, takes the opposite approach, plunging the viewer into a convoluted mythology involving factions with portentous names such as The Old Watch and The STF Underground. But the show is smart enough to keep its focus entirely on the girls, who epitomize the concept of ordinary characters thrust into extraordinary circumstances. Its four young actresses are unconventional leads, and each of them is outstanding in her own way. Rosinsky seemingly has the showiest role - and makes the most of it - but it’s Fina Strazza who makes the most indelible impression; her KJ is the quiet, thoughtful center of the group, and yet also arguably its fiercest member. When she declares “We’re Paper Girls… and we stick together” during the season finale, it’s a battle cry that resonates across the entire series. 

Aside from the impetus to find a way home, much of the first season drama revolves around the girls coming to terms with facets of their future - both welcome and unwelcome. Erin is brought face-to-face with herself as a neurotic, self-medicating adult (a smartly cast Ali Wong) still living in her childhood home, while Mac is thrown by the revelation that her burnout brother grew up to become a successful surgeon (the reason *why* he became a successful surgeon even more troubling). The best by far though is Tiffany landing in 1999 and locking horns with her insufferably chill 20-something self (played by Sekai Abeni), who seemingly threw away their childhood dreams of MIT to become a part-time DJ. This all proves much more compelling than the actual Time War, which remains fuzzily sketched throughout the first season and is mostly distilled into a single Old Watch agent (Adina Porter) pursuing the girls with Terminator-like determination (in one of the show’s few missteps, an attempt to turn the very funny Jason Mantzoukas into the Old Watch’s sinister “Big Bad” doesn’t entirely land... though he does have one standout moment in which he uses Mac's mixtape as a metaphor for the space-time continuum).   ​

Paper Girls is far less reliant on 80s nostalgia and cultural referencing than Stranger Things, but moments of Brian K. Vaughan-inspired wit shine through (in 2019, Tiffany ruminates on the fact that “Weird Al is dead,” then admits she’s talking about her pet hamster, not the singer, who Erin assures her is probably just “middle-aged”). The season, not surprisingly, builds to a cliffhanger (one that hints that time travel may not be the arbitrary plot catalyst it initially appeared)… but, disappointingly, Amazon has already pulled the plug on a second season. Alas. Such is the relentless barrage of content in the streaming era that premature cancellations are rarely dwelled on for long or with much in the way of genuine mourning… but the demise of this extremely promising series does leave a more bitter tang than most.