Why ‘The Office’ Spinoff Isn’t Haunted by Ghost of Michael Scott

John P.

Fleenor/Peacock This piece first ran on the Obsessed by Kevin Fallon Substack .

Subscribe here to read more like it! As Alex Edelman knows, it’s incredibly freeing to be an idiot.

The Emmy- and Tony-winning writer-actor-comedian is certainly not one.

Even Barack Obama sought him out to praise his work.

But when you’re intellectual and funny and empathetic and all the things it is objectively accurate to describe Edelman as, man, it is a respite to escape for a while and be just plain dumb.

That’s what Edelman gets to be in The Paper , the spinoff of The Office now streaming on Peacock.

Edelman both writes and stars in the series as Adam Cooper, an accountant for a local Ohio newspaper whose social and conversational bumbling is countered by his endearing enthusiasm and dad-like doofiness. (Adam has four young kids because his wife doesn’t believe in contraception.) “I wanted my character to be stupid,” Edelman told me in a new episode of Obsessed: The Podcast .

“Well, not stupid.

Let’s say there’s an emotional intelligence that carries a more oblique currency.

He’s not book-smart or street-smart.

He’s emotionally intelligent.” Then, he laughs: “Maybe not even that.” On The Paper , the dwindling staff of The Toledo Truth Teller is called in for an all-hands-on-deck effort to save the struggling paper.

That means accountants like Adam and his deskmate, the sardonic Adelola (Gbemisola Ikumelo), are recruited as reporters outside of their regular jobs.

“I thought, what’s the most annoying thing for a wry, too-cool-for-school person to share a desk with? That’s going to be an idiot who’s, like, a chipper golden retriever who’s always in your space,” he said.