Considering the massive success of Stranger Things, it’s a bit surprising that we haven’t seen more networks and streaming sites attempting to find and create their own series centered around tweens stumbling into a situation where they will be called upon to save the world from outside threats. After all, there was the great “What’s the next Game of Thrones?” push following that show’s final season. Though, one supposes hitting the child actor jackpot and putting together a story that appeals to teens as well as adults is a bigger risk than throwing one’s lot into the realm of high fantasy. But with Paper Girls, Prime Video’s adaptation of the graphic novel series with the same name, we finally have our first real contender for another Stranger Things.
If you’re at all familiar with the comic incarnation – which I am not, outside of what I’ve gathered from a quick online search – you’ve likely been wondering why it’s taken so long to see this story dramatized for the screen. However, let me be the one to tell you: It is worth the wait. Is this a perfect story? No, there are several issues I had with it upon finishing the eight episodes provided for critics. But I found myself fully invested in the narrative arcs of the series’ four central characters, rooting for them to not only make it out alive but to also find the inner strength each character has buried under their own personal traumas and tween insecurities.
The series, for the uninitiated, follows four 12-year-old girls from 1988 who, while completing their morning paper route, get pulled into a time war (yes, there is time travel involved, and no, it’s not adequately explained – I’ll get to that later in the review), pulled into the future, and forced to work with various individuals in an attempt to return themselves back to their right time – but not before each girl learns key pieces of information about who they are destined to become as they grow-up.
The series works best when the tween girls – that would be the rich but sporty KJ (a great Fina Strazza), the poor tomboy Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), the new girl Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), and the smart and driven Tiffany (Camryn Jones, who shines later in the season) – are bouncing off each other rather than dealing with various factions in the time war or confronting the adults they need to work with (including some older versions of themselves) along the way. That isn’t to say that there aren’t stand outs among the show’s adult cast – there absolutely are, particularly Ali Wong as an adult Erin (her scenes with Nelet are stellar), Nate Corddry as Larry, a potential ally for the girls, and Adina Porter as Prioress, who lends an air of gravitas to what could become a rather ridiculous premise – but the series is anchored by the four young leads, and when they are working alongside each other, the story feels at its peak.
One of the things that makes stories about younger characters confronting a seemingly all-encompassing and complex threat particularly interesting is that they must both appeal to younger audiences – who see themselves in the protagonists and recognize that their adolescent struggles reflect some of the larger struggles of the characters they are watching – and to an adult audience, who can grasp how the difficulties of youth (hoping and dreaming for a particular future, struggling with friends and family, figuring out romantic entanglements for the first time, etc.) come into sharper focus when looked back at with an adult perspective. And from that angle, Paper Girls has a particularly unique story to tell. When the girls do run into their future selves – or key characters from their 1988 present in the future – they are directly confronted with the knowledge their adult selves know. They still have an idealism of youth – or, in the case of some of the characters, a sense of fear at what they might find when they see who they turn out to be – and when they are forced to confront just what happened to themselves once they “figured things out,” well, it’s something that adults watching the series will understand far more than the show’s younger audience.
Because, for all its sci-fi trappings – and there are plenty – this is a series about what happens when the innocence of youth is stripped away and a kid begins their journey into adulthood. Only, these four characters get dragged into an adult world when they should still be getting a chance to be kids for a few more years (something Mac expresses herself later in the season when she’s forced to confront some particularly difficult truths about her future). And it’s watching the series confront that truth – that loss – where the show is at its most successful. Those moments – and each of the four leads gets their chance to walk that particular path for their character – are the ones that read the most truthful. Each actress is able to delve into a stillness, emotions clear on her face, as her character comes to terms with how her life is set to play out in ways both hoped for and undesired. And we, the audience, can’t help but feel a tug at our heartstrings as we recognize that loss of innocence for what it is. And, like the girls, we wonder . . . now that they know how things are set to unfold, is there a way to change things?
And that’s where the story gets murky. Time travel stories are often turn into more of a headache the longer you think about them – trying to piece together the rules of the particular story, how each change to the future changes the past. And Paper Girls works best when you don’t bother thinking about the time travel of it all and just delve into the emotional ties between the central characters (and don’t get me started on the time war itself – it’s also woefully poorly explained and I honestly couldn’t really tell you why it was happening or anything about the two factions other than one is coded as good and one as evil). But you have to talk about the time travel when a series is built upon the conceit that the characters go to the future, some meet and interact with their future selves, and then want to go back to the past.
For one, the future version of the girls never once know their past selves are coming – suggesting a loop to be completed upon meeting their past self – but then are all too willing to share heaps of information about the ensuing years between 1988 and 2019. And then there’s the conundrum that comes about later in the season, wherein a character native to 2019 travels with our main characters into the past, is killed there, and then their present-day past self is also killed – so, does that mean that the 2019 version of the character wasn’t able to return to the past with the main characters? Could any of them make it to the past since the dead character was crucial to their travels there? Like I said, there are a number of strange time travel questions raised by the story that it seems wholly uninterested in answering fully. Something that I suspect will become a much more complicated problem for the series should it get a second season order – there are a lot of questions that will need to be answered, and I suspect the series doesn’t really want to grapple with them all that much, presenting a major conundrum.
But if you can look past the logistics of the time travel elements (and the time war stuff – again, not really explained all that great throughout the season) and focus on the human stories the series is telling – about the adolescent loss of innocence, dreams of children and their counterparts in adults, and how it’s only when we are challenged with adversity that we can truly begin to understand who we are, what we want, and what we are capable of – the series works. Sure, some of the performances from the central four young actresses can wobble a touch from time to time – that’s par for the course with younger actors (and something that can be seen in shows like Stranger Things, even today as their cast hits adulthood). But the emotional center of the story and of the characters never falters. And that’s what makes coming of age stories truly sing. When Paper Girls is letting its characters shine, the series is impeccable.
Paper Girls premieres on Friday, July 29th on Prime Video. All eight episodes of the first season were provided for review.
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