Paper Girls: Sci-Fi Girl Power In A Retro Frame
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B+
According to comic book writer Brian K. Vaughan, the inspiration for his series Paper Girls was his observation that in the late eighties in suburban Cleveland, “all of the paper boys in our neighborhood were suddenly replaced by paper girls.”
To be clear, he meant newspaper delivery girls, not actual girls made out of paper, though the characters he and artist Cliff Chiang created lived only the page in the award-winning series between 2015-2019, routinely described as Stand By Me meets War of the Worlds.
Now, the four intrepid 12-year-olds have been brought to life in a Prime Video series, which evokes and comments on the 1980s adolescent science fantasy movies of the Regan era.
Set in the fictional Cleveland suburb of Stony Stream, the series starts precisely at 4 am in 1988, the morning after Halloween, as the four girls — Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), KJ (Fina Strazza) and Tiffany (Camryn Jones) — head out on their bicycles on their morning paper routes.
After they are harassed by a gang of drunken teenaged boys in Halloween costumes, the girls are transported to 2019, during a war between rival gangs, who have travelled from different times in the future.
A young farmer and revolutionary named Larry (Nate Corddry), explains the stakes of the battle to the girls, a conflict that has an obvious analogue to the contemporary culture wars about whose stories count. The youthful Standard Time Fighters are determined to rewrite history to save humanity from its resource-deprived authoritarian future.
Their rivals are the Old Watch, led by a figure called the Grandfather (shaggy comedian Jason Mantzoukas) and his stone-faced enforcer, Prioress (Adina Porter) who are violently opposed to anyone attempting to rewrite the existing time line.
The mix of entertainment and cultural commentary is often an awkward one and Paper Girls doesn’t always get it right. The nods to generic whizzbang adventures — purple sky storms, magic insects, ravenous pterodactyls and Transformer-style fighting robots — are too tame for action fans.
For those hoping to enjoy the pop nostalgia without the ideological baggage, the series relies too much on non-ironic ethnic stereotypes: The quiet, responsible Asian girl, the rich academic Jewish girl, the street-smart African American, and the scrappy Irish American girl from the wrong side of the tracks.
Still, it’s heartening to watch these tough, smart girls, (particularly the fiercely good Rosinsky) confronting their fraught futures and challenging their often-disappointing future selves. Set a few years before the generational anxiety crisis of social media, the series is attuned to the intense social pressure on adolescent girls to narrow their options and accept, as psychologist Mary Pipher’s wrote in her influential 1994 book Reviving Ophelia, the convention that their “power comes from consenting to become submissive adored objects.”
The character of Erin, who aspired to a career in law and politics (in dream sequences, she debates a fuzzy digitalized Ronald Reagan) is the first to meet a disappointing version of her grownup self (played by comedian Ali Wong), a woman whose insecurity has sabotaged her own potential.
Check out Bonnie Laufer's interviews with Paper Girls stars
Tiffany, the smart kid with a fondness for video games, is initially dazzled by her stylish, sexy older self (Sekai Ebenì) until she realizes how she has set her standards too low. Mac’s revelations about her future lead to a deep 12-year-old existential crisis.
The tomboy KJ has an insight into her future sexual identity while watching a couple make out in a movie theatre at a Stanley Kubrick retrospective (which is showing both Lolita, a title that defines the sexualized adolescent, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, a movie synonymous with visionary science fiction.)
It can’t be a coincidence that series creator Stephany Folsom, who sold the series to Amazon, once wrote a woman-centred script based on the conspiracy theory that Kubrick was involved in helping fake the 1969 moon landing.
Although Paper Girls was created by adult males, the series has undergone a second fermentation process under mostly female oversight in its television adaptation, with all eight episodes directed by women, though Folsom left the series as executive producer and co-showrunner last year. There were 30 issues of the Paper Girls comic and future seasons of the TV show seem inevitable. Fingers crossed, it can continue to strike a balance of entertainment and provocative ideas in its exploration of female futurism.
Paper Girls. Created by Stephany Folsom. Based on the comic book series by Brian K. Vaughn and Cliff Chiang. Starring Riley Lai Nelet, Sofia Rosinsky, Fina Strazza, Camryn Jones, Ali Wong, Nate Corddry and Adina Porter. Available on Prime Video from July 29.