Commentary

Struggling Local Media Is Subject For Peacock Sitcom

An upcoming sitcom on Peacock puts the spotlight on struggling local media -- in this case, a fictional newspaper.

Toledo, Ohio, is the locale for this paper called The Truth Teller

Information about the show -- titled “The Paper” and premiering Sept. 4 -- is scanty at the moment, so there is no way of answering the question: Why Toledo?

The same question might have been asked of “The Office” and the location of the fictional Dunder Mifflin office-paper sales establishment in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Both shows are from Greg Daniels, developer of the American version of “The Office.”

Like that show, “The Paper” is styled as a one-camera mockumentary covering the travails of this local paper, whose new publisher (photo above) is gung-ho to revive it.

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The two shows may even share a common character, Oscar Martinez, member of the accounting department at Dunder Mifflin who takes up the same job at The Truth Teller.

The newspaper accountant is to be played by Oscar Nuñez, who played Oscar Martinez in “The Office.” Maybe Oscar the accountant moves from Scranton to Toledo.

The TV Blog theorizes that Toledo was chosen as the location for The Truth Teller because the West Coasties who are making “The Paper” must consider it to be a “typical” Midwestern city.

In any case, let the record show that Toledo still has its own newspaper, The Toledo Blade, first published in 1835, two years before Toledo was incorporated as a city in 1837. 

Today, The Blade is doing what it can to navigate the headwinds of change in the media business.

It now prints actual papers on just Thursdays and Saturdays, but its website runs seven days a week.

No screeners for “The Paper” are yet available. When TV shows come along that are set in newsrooms, the TV Blog has traditionally examined them closely for the authenticity of their newsroom settings.

The problem is, I have not been inside a newspaper newsroom in 20 years, having sensibly migrated to the web.

I am familiar with the plight of struggling newspapers, however. Despite the fact that the fictional Truth Teller is struggling for its survival in 2025, these struggles have long been based on the same factors -- money, circulation and the arrival of new media.

Newspapers, for example, took a hit starting in the 1950s with the gradual arrival of TV news. Radio news likely had an earlier impact too.

A great movie about such a struggle was released in 1952, “Deadline-USA,” starring Humphrey Bogart as the editor of a big-city, family-owned paper on the verge of extinction. It is a personal favorite.

The Peacock sitcom carries the same title as “The Paper,” the 1994 movie directed by Ron Howard about a day in the life of a New York City tabloid.

For me, it is the best newspaper movie ever made. “Citizen Kane” was pretty good, too.

I cannot remember any previous TV comedies built around the subject of a dying newspaper.

But the plight of a struggling local radio station was the subject of a sitcom long ago -- “WKRP In Cincinnati” (CBS, 1978-82).

The show has been in the news the last few days following the death on Sunday of one of its stars, Loni Anderson.

In a bit of irony, Peacock’s new sitcom about a dying newspaper -- a legacy medium if there ever was one -- is not coming to NBC, but going exclusively to streaming, a new medium that arrived about a decade ago that is hastening the demise of another legacy medium, television.

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