TOLEDO – A new spinoff to the beloved sitcom The Office was announced this month by NBCUniversal, and it’s gearing up for its first season debut on Peacock in September.
The new series, called The Paper, is the successor to producer Greg Daniels’ signature mockumentary style, but the location has now moved on from the Electric City (Scranton, Penn.) to the Glass City for a story centered around local journalism.
During the search for the location, FilmToledo was told the production had toured a number of different Midwest newsrooms to find a home for the new show, but was not definitively told Toledo would be the chosen location.
According to cleveland.com, “Editor Chris Quinn [of cleveland.com/The Plain Dealer] disclosed that producers of The Paper had approached his organization about getting Cleveland materials for use in the mockumentary series.” He told NBC “no.”
In short, “We were not going to be the subject of buffoonery,” Quinn said.
For now, it’s uncertain how far the search for a new location went, but production for The Paper started reaching out to a variety of Toledo fixtures in spring 2024, starting with the Toledo Regional Chamber of Commerce, who directed the sitcom team towards FilmToledo.
“It was really like an educational session for them, because they really didn’t know Toledo too well, but they really wanted to get it right,” said Michael DeSanto, executive director of FilmToledo.
“At the time, we didn’t know that it was called The Paper. We knew it was connected with The Office, being written and produced by Greg Daniels and his team. But obviously, they couldn’t go into too much detail, but we already had a pretty good idea of what the project was about.
“Most of their work was done last year,” DeSanto said. “But they had gone into the [Toledo] City Paper and The Blade [for] a little bit for research, and from what we’ve heard, they did pop in to film a couple things.”
Riley Runnells was the editor of the Toledo City Paper at the time, and she got to meet one of her favorite actors during NBC’s fact-finding tour of Ohio’s fourth largest city.
“It was actually very random,” Runnells said. “It was presented to me via email that they [NBC] were researching for a show that they were putting together, and it was going to be about journalists in the Midwest.
“They came across my work online, and they wanted to shadow me, or they wanted to have their actor come in and shadow me for a day to see the logistics of running a newsroom.”
To Runnells’ surprise, Domnhall Gleeson, the lead in the 2013 movie About Time and the new lead for The Paper, showed up on the Toledo City Paper’s doorstep without any sort of entourage.
“I am a very, very big fan of his,” Runnells admitted. “I was expecting, you know, maybe a writer or a producer or somebody from the show to come in, but I did not expect the lead actor to come in. It was so exciting.”
Runnells went through her day as normally as she could, considering a famous actor following her, and then spent at least two hours giving Gleeson an in-depth understanding of the relationship she had with her newsroom.
Michael Koman, one of the show-runners for the show, reportedly visited The Blade, according to Runnells.
More vaguely, DeSanto also mentioned that NBC visited The Blade, Toledo’s oldest newsroom, although this visit seemed to happen before FilmToledo or the Toledo City Paper were aware of the project, according to a Blade article. It states, “Kim Bates, executive editor of The Blade, said writers for the show were at The Blade in December 2023, during which time they spoke with a variety of newsroom employees.”
Gleeson’s visit to Toledo happened in June 2024, so that may be an indication of what kind of newsroom is represented in The Paper.
No one except the NBC execs will truly know what The Paper will be like until it releases, but Runnells did not share cleveland.com‘s fears of being the butt of a joke.
“I think it shows a great deal of maturity to be able to laugh at yourself,” she said. “I’m certain that there will be some shots taken at the community, but I think what really makes that okay and what will make that funny is that they will also have a lot of really heartfelt moments regarding Toledo.
“There’s definitely going to be that pride for the the local element, because you can’t have a show about a local newspaper and not have at least some of the characters be really passionate about where we’re living.”
One of the original cast members, Oscar Nuñez, who played the accountant Oscar Martinez on The Office, serves as a throughline between the two shows; he was reported to have told The Hollywood Reporter that he wanted the show to take place in a more cosmopolitan setting.
“Greg heard me and moved Oscar to Toledo, Ohio, which has three times the population of Scranton,” Nuñez said. “So it’s nice to be heard.”
A single still photograph has been released from the show, with lead actor Gleeson appearing to stand on top of a desk, and is presumed to be the newsroom for the Toledo Truth Teller, serving as an early glimpse into what will come out in the fall.
The set looks similar to that of The Office, with a few different set choices, as Toledo’s own JŪPMODE noticed.
“You can see it in the bottom right corner. It’s blurry, but that was cool,” said Stephen Gullette, the marketing and social media specialist for JŪPMODE, as he pointed to one of the JŪPMODE designed mugs visible in a shared photo of the show’s upcoming production.
“I noticed it this morning,” he said the day after NBCUniversal announced the show.
“They had searched on our website a couple of items they wanted,” and asked him if they could use those items for the show. “I’m excited. We were talking this morning about how they might portray it [Toledo].”
Gullette said he was a bit worried about Toledo getting a portrayal like the one on the Netflix show A.P. Bio, which he said took a number of jabs at the city. Undeniably, he said, the show will poke fun at Toledo, but hopefully, “nothing too serious.”
However, JŪPMODE’s retail art director, Shannon Mossing, who designed much of the Toledo specific merchandise the studio chose, said it was exciting and she was honored to have her designs in the show which represented Toledo.
Another Toledo businesses contacted by the studio was local coffeeshop Black Kite, whose general manager, Emerson Dupont, said, “I gave them a bunch of cups,” for reference.
The Toledo Free Press was not contacted by the show because it wasn’t in operation yet. The TFP website didn’t officially go live until August 2024, months after Gleeson’s visit.
Either way, it’s clear there will be at least an attempt to portray Toledo in a genuine way, served up alongside a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of the floundering print local news industry.
