Paper Girls Review: A Singular, Satisfying Take On Girlhood And Time Travel
Prime Video By Valerie Ettenhofer/July 29, 2022 8:00 am EST
People say never to meet your heroes, but what if your hero is yourself? This is the thought exercise that reverberates across time in “Paper Girls,” a tremendously heartfelt and funny sci-fi series premiering on Prime Video today. A character-driven series headlined by four talented young leads, “Paper Girls” is the rare comic book adaptation that both honors and improves upon the source material.
The show is written by created and written by Stephany Folsom (“Toy Story 4”), based on Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s now-complete Image Comics series that began in 2015. It begins in 1988, when four newspaper girls suddenly encounter strange anomalies — people who seem to be from the future, and a sky that turns bright pink. Soon, the group is hurled into the future, where they recruit the help of their future selves to find a way home — and a way to avoid starting an all-out war between two dueling political groups with different ideological opinions on the ethics of time travel.
The Paper Girls are great
Prime Video
The ragtag group of twelve-year-old time travelers includes new girl Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), a second-generation Chinese-American immigrant who’s wary about leaving her mom’s side to start a job. There’s also smart and driven Black girl Tiff (Camryn Jones), sensitive, uncertain Jewish girl KJ (Fina Strazza), and Mac (Sofia Rosinsky) a scrappy, smack-talking tomboy with a bad home life.
Mac is like the Richie Tozier of the group — if the “It” character’s foul-mouthed and offensive quips were the obvious result of a rough and tumble upbringing. The TV show never minimizes her flaws, including a sure-to-be-controversial confident bigoted streak early on in the series. Yet Rosinsky is a clear breakout star, seamlessly selling Mac’s hidden vulnerability as well as her more bullying tendencies. Every one of the young leads gives fantastic, empathetic performances, carrying both lighthearted and quietly heartbreaking scenes with ease. One of the best directing choices “Paper Girls” makes involves framing important shots on the girls’ faces, trusting the actors to convey the truth of their characters’ most formative moments.
Paper Girls Review: A Singular, Satisfying Take On Girlhood And Time Travel
Prime Video
By Valerie Ettenhofer/July 29, 2022 8:00 am EST
People say never to meet your heroes, but what if your hero is yourself? This is the thought exercise that reverberates across time in “Paper Girls,” a tremendously heartfelt and funny sci-fi series premiering on Prime Video today. A character-driven series headlined by four talented young leads, “Paper Girls” is the rare comic book adaptation that both honors and improves upon the source material.
The show is written by created and written by Stephany Folsom (“Toy Story 4”), based on Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s now-complete Image Comics series that began in 2015. It begins in 1988, when four newspaper girls suddenly encounter strange anomalies — people who seem to be from the future, and a sky that turns bright pink. Soon, the group is hurled into the future, where they recruit the help of their future selves to find a way home — and a way to avoid starting an all-out war between two dueling political groups with different ideological opinions on the ethics of time travel.
The show is written by created and written by Stephany Folsom (“Toy Story 4”), based on Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s now-complete Image Comics series that began in 2015. It begins in 1988, when four newspaper girls suddenly encounter strange anomalies — people who seem to be from the future, and a sky that turns bright pink. Soon, the group is hurled into the future, where they recruit the help of their future selves to find a way home — and a way to avoid starting an all-out war between two dueling political groups with different ideological opinions on the ethics of time travel.
The Paper Girls are great
The ragtag group of twelve-year-old time travelers includes new girl Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), a second-generation Chinese-American immigrant who’s wary about leaving her mom’s side to start a job. There’s also smart and driven Black girl Tiff (Camryn Jones), sensitive, uncertain Jewish girl KJ (Fina Strazza), and Mac (Sofia Rosinsky) a scrappy, smack-talking tomboy with a bad home life.
Mac is like the Richie Tozier of the group — if the “It” character’s foul-mouthed and offensive quips were the obvious result of a rough and tumble upbringing. The TV show never minimizes her flaws, including a sure-to-be-controversial confident bigoted streak early on in the series. Yet Rosinsky is a clear breakout star, seamlessly selling Mac’s hidden vulnerability as well as her more bullying tendencies. Every one of the young leads gives fantastic, empathetic performances, carrying both lighthearted and quietly heartbreaking scenes with ease. One of the best directing choices “Paper Girls” makes involves framing important shots on the girls’ faces, trusting the actors to convey the truth of their characters’ most formative moments.
Mac is like the Richie Tozier of the group — if the “It” character’s foul-mouthed and offensive quips were the obvious result of a rough and tumble upbringing. The TV show never minimizes her flaws, including a sure-to-be-controversial confident bigoted streak early on in the series. Yet Rosinsky is a clear breakout star, seamlessly selling Mac’s hidden vulnerability as well as her more bullying tendencies. Every one of the young leads gives fantastic, empathetic performances, carrying both lighthearted and quietly heartbreaking scenes with ease. One of the best directing choices “Paper Girls” makes involves framing important shots on the girls’ faces, trusting the actors to convey the truth of their characters’ most formative moments.
The show thoughtfully side-steps nostalgia
The show is also stunningly anti-nostalgic. It juggles multiple timelines, presenting each one with distinctive, era-specific details, but doesn’t waste time fawning over late-80s music or idealizing the days when kids could ride bikes at night. At Comic-Con last week, Vaughan said the series “isn’t so much a love letter [to the ’80s] as it is a death threat.” That’s apparent here: “Paper Girls” cares deeply about its girls and their future, but couldn’t care less about “remember when?” moments. The show never beats its point home, but its vision of ’80s America is a place that’s clearly tough for immigrants, people of color, queer people, and the poor. This is a vanishingly rare level of retrospect these days, and it’s truly a wonder what a story can accomplish when it isn’t constantly stopping to marvel about walkie-talkies.
It’s a much-needed inversion of a classic story
The show subverts classic Stephen King or Steven Spielberg tales (and imitators like “Stranger Things”) not just by gender-swapping its group of outsiders, but by giving each character a breadth of experience that goes beyond the few definitive “growing-up” moments we’ve been trained to hinge our coming-of-age viewing experiences on. This isn’t a story about the familiar rites of passage that push a person towards emotional maturity; rather, it’s about what it feels like to have that maturity rush up to meet you whether you’re ready or not.
“Paper Girls” is now streaming on Prime Video.
