É«É«À²

In fact, right off the top of our video interview, series co-creator Michael Koman expressed his love for the É«É«À² Star. 

“My family lives in É«É«À² and I read it often,” said Koman, a former “Saturday Night Live” writer, executive producer of “How to With John Wilson” and co-creator with Canadian Nathan Fielder of “Nathan for You.”

On “The Paper,” Koman has partnered with Greg Daniels, the revered developer of the American version of “The Office” as well as the co-creator of another beloved mockumentary, “Parks and Recreation.”

The conceit is that the crew who began filming inside the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company in 2005 in “The Office” have turned their cameras on the Toledo Truth Teller, a newspaper owned by the paper products outfit that bought Dunder Mifflin — but the journal is ranked below that firm’s toilet paper in importance.

So what prompted comedy vets Koman and Daniels to set their show at a lowly newspaper at a time when this particular form of journalism is in decline?

It started with the idea of “ghost newspapers,” Daniels said: a publication that “looks like a newspaper from the outside, but it doesn’t cover any of the local issues; there’s no original content there.” Then “a very idealistic guy comes in and says, ‘No we wanna cover our community, we’re gonna have original content, we’re gonna have different beats.’

“And his struggle is that the company doesn’t want to pay for it and he … gets the company to approve that all of the people who are selling ads and doing the graphic design can spend a few hours a week as reporters. So he has to train, basically, citizens to be journalists. And you get a better appreciation for how important journalism is.”

“I think newspapers, especially local ones, sometimes they’re like insurance,” added Koman, “something that it’s very easy to overlook how much you need it until you wish it was there. What’s nice is that it’s something worth fighting for.”

That brings us to Ned Sampson, the enthusiastic new editor-in-chief of the Truth Teller, who has a journalism degree but no professional experience. Still, he opines that he’d rather be Clark Kent than Superman because Clark “is saving the world too by working at a newspaper, and that to me is much more noble and much more achievable.”

Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson, who plays Ned, said he based the character in part on his younger self — although he never worked at a newspaper.

“Ned used to be an editor of the college newspaper and he hasn’t done journalism since. And now he’s been flown in to be the editor of an actual newspaper at the age of 40 or whatever he is. And that’s crazy,” Gleeson said. “So I looked back at myself in college and thought about how little of the world I knew, but how excited I was by it, and all the things I thought I knew that I didn’t have any clue about.”

Ned’s saving grace is that the staff of the Truth Teller are even more clueless about journalism than he is — all except Mare (Chelsea Frei, “The Moodys”), an army vet who used to write for the Stars and Stripes military paper and spends her days filling holes in the Truth Teller with pre-written “wire” stories.

She’s conscripted to produce local stories alongside circulation manager Nicole (Ramona Young, “Never Have I Ever”), ad salesman Detrick (Melvin Gregg, “Nine Perfect Strangers”), accountants Adam (comedian Alex Edelman), Adelola (Gbemisola Ikumelo, “A League of Their Own”) and Oscar — yes, from “The Office,” played by Oscar Nuñez — and the paper’s only real reporter, Barry (Duane R. Shepard Sr., “American Crime Story”), who usually covers high school sports. Oh, and Travis (comedian Eric Rahill), who works for the toilet paper part of the company.

“Even though our characters are not great at it, they’re trying really hard,” said Gleeson. “And I think it’s a really cool thing to have at the centre of a show.”

Then there’s the interim managing editor, Esmeralda, a former reality dating show contestant who tries to thwart Ned at every turn. She’s played by Italian actor Sabrina Impacciatore, who’s funnier here than she was in “The White Lotus.”

Koman said Impacciatore didn’t even read the words on the audition pages when she tried out for the role by Zoom, but “it was so much better. When she was explaining why she wasn’t going to do the (pages), it was the character talking.”

As for Gleeson — known for the “Harry Potter” and “Star Wars” franchises, as well as playing a serial killer in “The Patient” opposite Steve Carell of “The Office” — Koman said he and Daniels found out that the actor had been in an Irish sketch comedy show, “Your Bad Self,” when he was in his 20s.

“He seemed so young, but it was real, hard comedy, and then it felt like, ‘Holy cow, he has a fantastic sense of humour. He can do a lot of things,’” Koman said. 

Gleeson said he had always been attracted to well-executed American TV comedies.

“So the opportunity to be doing it with some of the best people who’ve ever done it, I mean, what more do you want in your career? And then they were also really passionate about local journalism, about how important it is.

“And I liked the fact that it’s tied to ‘The Office’ in some ways, but it was totally its own thing, that my character was not a new version of Michael Scott (Carell) or of David Brent (the boss in the U.K. version), because you can’t compete with that. That made me feel really comfortable about tackling it as a new project.”

(Besides having Daniels and Nuñez in common with “The Office,” “The Paper” shares several of that series’ directors, including Paul Lieberstein, the “Office” showrunner who co-starred as the much-mocked Toby. There’s another connection in that Koman is married to “Office” cast member Ellie Kemper.)

The closest Gleeson ever got to newspapers in his own life was when he worked at a gas station on weekends and had to put together the separate sections of the papers sold there. He said he’s good at folding broadsheets.

“I do love them,” Gleeson said of newspapers.

“People talk about it being a dying industry — people have been talking about that for 25 years and it’s still alive. There is great journalism happening all the time across the world in places where it’s even harder to do than here,” he added.

Nonetheless, he, Daniels and Koman all admitted they mostly do their newspaper reading online. 

“We live in a town where the L.A. Times is one of the fattest newspapers that exists. And I just can’t keep throwing away that many trees,” said Daniels.

“I will be honest and say if I’m buying the physical newspaper, the crossword is often involved,” said Gleeson.

“The Paper” debuts Sept. 4 at 10 p.m. on Showcase and streams on StackTV.