After an opening episode of effective Spielbergian mood-building and suspense, beautifully shot by Zachary Galler using the paper girls’ bikes as an excuse for energetic and sweeping navigation of retro suburbia, and the jump 20-plus years into the future, the series adjusts its focus. It’s tremendously entertaining, though I’m not sure if it does a great job of clarifying its premise, so I thoroughly appreciate that Folsom and Rogers decided to foreground the bonding. Its colors are vibrant, its aesthetic a hyper-stylized ’80s pastiche and its four main characters expressive and instantly sympathetic, though they’re slaves to the storyline, bonding mostly in the pauses between breathless action sequences.
Within its early issues, there are wrapped figures who look like zombies (but aren’t), winged creatures that look like dinosaurs (and are) and layers of future tech and jargon.
Vaughan and Chiang’s comic is a wild thing. In the future, they find themselves stuck in a war between two factions, one bent on changing negative aspects of history and one determined to protect the integrity of the timeline at any cost, though it isn’t always clear or relevant who the good guys are. Before you know it - the Georgi Banks-Davies-directed pilot is a delightfully brisk 37 minutes - our young heroines are whisked to the future. Then fuchsia clouds fill the sky and a team of white-uniformed soldiers led by Adina Porter (or a character played by the great Adina Porter) swarm the neighborhood.
Four girls - tomboy Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), overachiever Tiffany (Camryn Jones), seemingly spoiled KJ (Fina Strazza) and newbie Erin (Riley Lai Nelet) - are riding their bikes through post-Halloween detritus, delivering newspapers in their quiet Cleveland suburb. Paper Girls begins on the morning of Nov. I was surprised by how much I loved the middle of the series, in which the narrative from the comics is jettisoned entirely in favor of well-played character dynamics, and then found myself chagrined when the plot of the comics returned at the end. It’s a mix that may cause problems, because the viewers attracted by the Stranger Things of it all will probably demand more end-of-the-world stakes, and the viewers mourning the demise of Netflix’s Baby-Sitters Club may find what end-of-the-world-stakes there are to be frustratingly intrusive. So although fantastical elements give Paper Girls its hook, what’s actually fantastic about the eight-episode series is its unexpectedly lovely depiction of preteen female friendship. Rogers served as executive producers, with Rogers as co-showrunner.
If you got the reference, but wonder why anybody would use a Halt and Catch Fire reference to describe a show that’s Stranger Things - sorry, it’s unavoidable - by way of The Baby-Sitters Club, it’s notable that while Paper Girls was created for TV by Stephany Folsom, Halt creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. If you don’t get that reference, get thee to a streaming platform that carries Halt and Catch Fire immediately. Cast: Sofia Rosinsky, Camryn Jones, Riley Lai Nelet, Fina StrazzaĬreator: Stephany Folsom from the comic by Brian K.