It’s true, a group of plucky, young, bicycle-riding kids in the ’80s gets into some extradimensional shenanigans as they are hunted and navigate life-threatening plots, all while classic needle drops blare in the background in between suspenseful electronic music. Obviously, this sounds familiar, but Paper Girls is so much more than a Stranger Things knockoff; it certainly deserves to be compared to such a record-breaking show as Stranger Things, but this thing’s stranger and deserves to stand on its own.
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Paper Girls is Over-the-Top, Delightful Fun
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Paper Girls offers a female, time-traveling twist on the great Stranger Things formula. It follows four middle-to-high-school-age girls who work on a paper route, waking up at four in the morning in order to make a little preteen side hustle before school. None of the girls are close, but the morning after Halloween finds them having to band together to avoid some bullies trick r’ treating til dawn. Before the sun ever comes up, they’ll have a lot more to worry about than high school punks.
The girls stumble (or are drawn) into a massive, slightly ridiculous time war — soldiers in all-white jumpsuits shoot laser guns, the resistance movement uses Gundam-like mecha robots, and so on. It’s all over-the-top and downright bananas, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun in a media landscape that has arguably swung too far in the ‘gritty, dark, serious’ direction. Paper Girls is also self-aware enough that it feels in on the joke of its occasional silliness; its ‘big bad,’ after all, is the wildly bearded, shorts-and-sandals-wearing comedian Jason Mantzoukas (absolutely incredible here) from Kroll Show, The League, and so many other comedies.
Despite being sometimes too wacky to fit into the era of ‘Prestige Television,’ there are nonetheless very real stakes in Paper Girls which make it thrilling in both a dramatic and emotional sense. Watching these girls develop a friendship as they hop around time, chased by a very real threat that does actually kill people, it’s hard not to develop as much of a bond with the characters as they have for each other. One of the best parts of this emotional investment comes from Paper Girls’ character-driven use of time-travel, in which the girls rely upon their older, future selves in order to survive.
Time-Travel and Old Paper Girls
When the girls land in different parts of the future and gradually get in contact with themselves, Paper Girls starts to have some surprisingly poignant things to say about disappointment, purpose, and maturity. Erin (the expressive Riley Lai Nelet) meets her older self (the comedian Ali Wong) first and is heartbroken to find that she’s grown up to be kind of a loser. “What happened to us?” she asks her older self. It’s fascinating to watch young Erin be ashamed of old Erin, and to see the crushing weight of uncertainty and probable mediocrity which befalls most of us.
Tiffany (a really spunky Camryn Jones) fares a bit better with her older self, satisfied that she’s graduated first in her class and went to MIT as she’s always dreamed. But old Tiffany (a charming Sekai Abenì) is a far cry from the precocious bookworm of her childhood, having left MIT early to work at some sweet pre-Y2K raves and have hookups with guys she doesn’t respect.
The girls also learn about their own deaths, their post-pubescent sexuality, the sad fate of some family members, and the trajectory of a world that’s left them behind. This relationship between the confident expectations of youth and the likely let-down of adulthood is possibly the best part of Paper Girls, and never feels forced or like a mere narrative tool.
Logical Inconsistencies Don’t Stop the Paper Girls
Of course, a possible drawback to this is that it doesn’t seem to pass the muster of realistic time-travel science. None of the older versions of these girls have experienced what the younger versions are going through, which seems to be impossible. If they’re the same person, then the older versions of themselves would already know everything that would happen to them. This means that Paper Girls is either dealing with some kind of multiverse situation, has a major logical fallacy, or will reveal something in the future for this to make sense.
The Watch (the militaristic group led by beach bum Mantzoukas) is supposed to enforce the laws of time-travel, though, in order to keep reality from falling apart; they get rid of time-travelers and erase the memories of everyone involved so that there won’t be a major change in the universe’s timeline. So perhaps The Watch will erase all the girls’ memories (except for old Tiffany, possibly), which would resolve the issue, though this hasn’t happened in the eight episodes of season one.
Other than this, however, the time-travel angle is a lot of fun, allowing for a great deal of character development and humor while fleshing out a massive war and looming showdown. Logical inconsistencies are, after all, a rather petty thing to accuse a really entertaining television show that swings for the rafters and often hits home runs.
Brian Vaughan’s Comic Comes Roaring to Life on Prime Video
Paper Girls was based on the 30-issue, five-year-long comics from Brian K. Vaughan (illustrated by Cliff Chiang), who also made the popular Y: The Last Man and Runaways, the latter of which also focuses on kids but through a superhero lens. Vaughan is very good at detailing the realities of childhood and the difficulties of growing up, something that the show’s creators and producers (Christopher C. Rogers, Christopher Cantwell, and Stephany Folsom, who left after the scripts had been written) never shy away from. In between all the suspense and exciting action sequences, the show makes ample time for small moments and little gestures which authentically depict the troubles of growing up, especially as a girl.
One of the funniest, boldest, and most heartwarming scenes in Paper Girls, oddly enough, is the tampon sequence halfway through, when the series takes a couple of delightful episodes to slow things down and really sit with all the characters. Erin has her first period, something none of the other girls had experienced, and together they try to negotiate how to get tampons and then how to use one. It seems like such a small detail, but it’s so rare to see this kind of frank conversation on television, even in coming-of-age stories about women.
Outside these subtle, funny moments, Paper Girls is a big, purple-hued spectacle; it knows when to get small, and it knows how to get huge. It’s an incredibly fun and well-plotted series that, like Stranger Things, will appeal to teens and older audiences alike. It deserves to stand apart from that flagship Netflix show, though, because Paper Girls has a lot of wisdom to impart about maturity and thwarted expectations, along with a great deal of humor and a unique perspective.
Produced by Legendary Television and Plan B Entertainment, all eight episodes of Paper Girls are available to stream now on Prime Video.
