Paper Girls: well-drawn, well-acted characters can’t save this muddled time-travel series

At the crack of dawn on 1 November 1988, the morning after Halloween, 12-year-old Erin (Riley Lai Nelet) sets off on her first paper round. She teams up with three other paper girls, KJ (Fina Strazza), Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), and Tiffany (Camryn Jones), after one of their own is attacked by a group of teen boys overexcited from the permissiveness of Halloween night. Before long they are accosted by more teenagers, who steal Tiffany’s prized walkie-talkies. But these boys are odd-looking and speak an indecipherable language, and eventually draw the unwitting girls into a time-travelling war between two factions – the powerful and mercenary Old-Timers, and the STF, a resistance group also called the Teenagers. The girls accidentally travel to 2019 and must find their older selves to try to get back to 1988.

As a metaphor for the paper girls’ own fear of ageing and distrust of authority, these warring factions are not subtle (the Old-Timers are led by a sinister man literally called “Grand Father”, played by Jason Mantzoukas), but these thematic streams are warmed by genuinely affecting scenes between the girls and their older selves as they confront the dark realities of growing up: disillusionment, death and disappointment. Erin ends up not as president, but as an anxious legal aid, reeling from her mother’s death; Tiffany is admitted to her dream school only to be expelled, moving home to pursue middling creative hobbies; KJ has an adulthood in the closet to look forward to; and Mac has glimpsed an even more destabilising future for herself.

While these moments of confrontation between the girls and their adult counterparts are relatable and well acted, they slow the narrative to a halt. They also dominate each episode to such an extent that one wonders if the infrequency of the action sequences were less a deliberate choice than a concession to a limited budget. Paper Girls suffers from the inevitable comparison to Netflix’s unprecedented phenomenon, Stranger Things (also about a group of 1980s pre-teens battling supernatural elements encroaching on their small midwestern town), which benefits from one of the largest TV budgets of all time. Though it doesn’t deliver the supernatural thrills and the era-specific immersion of the larger series, Paper Girls leans into the psychological nuance and the sheer pluck of its characters. Its most surreal moments aren’t the time-tripping dinosaurs or the portals in the sky, but the deepfake Ronald Reagan that Erin debates in her dreams.

But watching Paper Girls, one wonders whom the series is intended to appeal to: fellow twelve-year-olds, excited to project themselves into a high-stakes time-travel scenario? Gen-Xers nostalgic for the cultural markers of their youth? Or the millennials who dominate Stranger Things’ passionate, vocal fanbase?

As a time-travel show, Paper Girls might more intelligently have mined nostalgia for the 1970s, 1999, or even 2019, the pre-Covid-19 era that in many ways now seems like halcyon days. But the show doesn’t take advantage of this time-hopping, instead making the accurate but not exactly edifying point that small American towns are often out-of-step with progress. Things change, both through building and decay (by 2019, the malls have been abandoned, while the rock quarry has been turned into an upscale housing development), but visual markers for the eras are thin on the ground. The series instead relies heavily on music cues, which are on the nose and occasionally confusing (a significant moment in the 2019 timeline is soundtracked by an LCD Soundsystem song from 2007).

Paper Girls is based on a comic by Brian K. Vaughan. While it’s less political as some of his previous comics, such as the 9/11 superhero story Ex Machina (2004-’10) and the Iraq War-set Pride of Baghdad (2006), issues of racial intolerance, homophobia and financial precarity still pursue the girls throughout the timelines. Their prejudices and traumas are yet more legacies passed on from the previous generation that they’re struggling to shed. In Vaughan’s breakout comic series, Y: The Last Man (2002-’08 – adapted for TV by the FX network last year), an unexplained cataclysm claims the life of every male creature on the planet. Yorick, the only man left, is an unemployed magician surrounded by exceptional, highly capable women, including a president, a geneticist and a secret agent. Paper Girls echoes this theme of female ambition and exceptionalism as well as the dangers of unchecked progress. Y: The Last Man takes place in a world where women have already ascended to the height of power, but as the first paper girls in their small town, our foursome strive to grow up on the frontier of a new age.

► Paper Girls is available to stream on Amazon Prime now.