‘Paper Girls’ Review: A Clichéd Sci-Fi Teen YA Series That Doesn’t Excel At Either Genre

It’s 4:30 am on Hell Day, aka the day after Halloween 1988, in Stony Stream, Ohio, and four 12-year-old paper girls – Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), KJ (Fina Strazza), and Tiffany (Camryn Jones) — are just trying to finish their routes unscathed, fighting off teenage punks and racist homeowners, when they find themselves inadvertently drawn into an ongoing war between two factions of time travelers. 

Developed by Stephany Folsom (“Toy Story 4”) from the comic book series of the same name by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, “Paper Girls” is a sci-fi drama that desperately wants to be far more revolutionary than it ultimately ever is. Stretched thin over eight episodes of varying length, the story never feels as urgent as its end-of-the-word conceit should demand. The characters are a rag-tag collection of cliches masquerading as inclusivity. 

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There are half-assed critiques of Reaganomics through the suburb’s slowly eroding factory-based economy, which plays out in the background as the girls hop from 1988 to 2019 and then back to 1999. The girls themselves seem created solely to serve learning purposes. Mac is a girl from the wrong side of the tracks whose deadbeat dad and alcoholic stepmom are largely absent from her life. Erin is a first-gen Chinese immigrant facing racism from neighbors who think people like her are only there to steal their jobs. On the verge of her bat mitzvah, KJ is continually lobbed with antisemitic remarks about her family’s wealth. Tiffany is a science-obsessed overachiever with dreams of attending MIT to prove something to herself and her mom. 

There should be an immense emotional impact as these girls slowly meet their older selves, yet these roles — and the revelations about themselves they reveal to their younger selves — are rife with even more cliches. The connection Mac has with the grownup version of her older brother Dylan (Cliff Chamberlain) is touching due to the actors’ strong sibling chemistry. Still, it’s undone by the cloying revelation that Dylan got his life together and became a doctor because — you guessed it — in the original timeline, Mac dies of brain cancer a little bit after her sixteenth birthday. The future developments of the girls don’t fare much better in terms of trading in staid cliches either. What could have been a nuanced look at aging and mortality becomes at best hokey and at worst dishonest. 

As the grownup Erin, Ali Wong does her best with the bland material she’s given. It’s nice to see her in a role outside what we’re used to from her. Still, any genuine character development ultimately winds up sacrificed for unfunny digs at Dave Matthews Band and one terrible sequence involving a Transformers-esque time travel vehicle that somehow has been hidden inside a corn silo for a few decades. Jason Mantzoukas, clad in ’90s rap shirts, does the same gonzo slacker schtick he’s done many times before. He’s clearly having a blast, and maybe the only actor on the show who understands this is all just so silly, but his energy doesn’t fit with the morose tone into which most of the show settles.

All the futuristic elements — time travel vehicles, medically healing robot bugs, the factions’ weapons — are brought to life by extremely chintzy CGI. The budget, it seems, was allocated instead to the show’s soundtrack, which is filled with late-’80s hits by New Order and Danzig, ’00s indie bands like LCD Soundsystem and Beach House, and ’90s tunes from Whitney Houston, and yes, even Dave Matthews Band. As much as I love a banger soundtrack, most tracks are used in such on-the-nose ways that they detract more than add to the show’s vibe. 

The young actresses are tasked with keeping all this hodgepodge on track, and unfortunately, because their characters are so underdeveloped, the show sinks when it should fly. Sofia Rosinsky as Mac brings a real angsty River Phoenix/Edward Furlong energy with her that helps elevate her character beyond just another stereotypical young rebel. Camryn Jones also gets some standout scenes acting opposite Sekai Abenì as her older self. 

Unfortunately, these dynamic moments are few and far between, with the characters often saddled with clunky dialogue. They also withhold information from each other in a way that does not feel natural for how conversations actually work. Instead, it acts as a way for the writers to attempt to ramp up tension for the audience. This mostly winds up frustrating instead of riveting. 

Worst of all is the racial optics of the two factions. Eventually, the girls discover the war is being fought by one group called The Old Watch, which they’re told are the bad guys, run by “rich reactionaries who want to keep the timeline as it is, so they stay in power.” Yet the main antagonist from this faction, Prioress (Adin Porter), is a Black woman whose brother they accidentally kill. Their main contacts with the other faction, Standard Time Fighters, the supposed good guys, are a pair of white teenage boys and later a white corn farmer from Ohio named Larry (Nate Corddry). It’s hard to look at, well, everything that’s happening in this country and understand the impetus behind that decision. 

Filled with cheap emotions, faux progressivism, and a story that is somehow both alarmingly thin and endlessly complicated, “Paper Girls” is full of wasted potential. After the eight episodes, it’s only vaguely implied that these girls may actually do something in this time war, ending on an unsatisfying cliffhanger engineered to make viewers want another season. Ultimately, this first one is not time well spent. [C-]