I'm not familiar with the Brian K. Vaughan comics that "Paper Girls" was based on. However, I suspect that Amazon decided to produce a show about a quartet of preteen girls from 1988 having harrowing time travel adventures, in order to catch the attention of the "Stranger Things" crowd. There's a lot of thematic and aesthetic crossover, even though these are fundamentally different stories. "Paper Girls" isn't the crowd pleaser that "Stranger Things" is, but I found it much more satisfying to watch.
The action takes place the morning after Halloween in Stony Stream, a fictional suburb of Cleveland. It's the first day on a paper route for Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), a sheltered Chinese-American twelve year-old who worries over her mother and younger sister. She meets fellow paper girls Tiff (Camryn Jones), KJ (Fina Strazza), and Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), who decide to band together to escape bullies and finish their routes. Unfortunately, they become caught up in a conflict between rival groups of time travelers - the authoritarian Old Watch and the rebel STF Underground - and end up being transported to the year 2019. While trying to find a way home, they meet an adult version of Erin (Ali Wong) and are hunted by an Old Watch officer called the Prioress (Adina Porter).
What I immediately appreciate about "Paper Girls" is that it isn't nostalgic and it doesn't have much interest in the idea that time heals all wounds either. While all the business with the warring factions of time travelers is diverting enough, the heart of the show is about the adult and child versions of the girls all coming to terms with each other, and being honest about their faults. Eventually we meet the adult versions of some of the other girls and their siblings, and some are better off, and some are worse. The grown up Erin is estranged from her family. Adult Tiff (Sekai Abeni) seems cool at first, but has her own set of problems. Mac works through a bundle of personal issues and spoilers with her a drastically changed version of her older brother Dylan (Cliff Chamberlain).
The four girls take the lead every step of the way, and the four young actresses do a fantastic job with some often difficult, emotionally fraught material. Initially, I was a little worried that the girls seemed to fit into very common types - Tiff is African-American and smart beyond her years, and Mac is a foul-mouthed tomboy from the wrong side of the tracks. However, all of them turn out to be very nuanced, interesting personalities, and it's great to watch them become friends, fall out with each other, make up, and generally act like real preteen girls onscreen. My favorite scene in the show involves the four of them trying to figure out how tampons work. Later, when KJ realizes that her adult self (Delia Cunningham) has made some different life choices than she assumed, it takes her time to process. And the show lets her and the others have that time.
Genre fans looking for easy action and spectacle might come away disappointed, because the series doesn't have a very high budget, and is much more concerned with its character drama than making its time travelers and their toys look cool. However, there's something tremendously appealing about the imperfect, outdated effects and the occasionally too-literal comic book imagery. It makes the adventure feel more kid-relatable, even if the content often touches on more adult subjects. I should clarify that there's very little sex in the show, and only moderate violence, but a good chunk of time is spent frankly discussing sexuality, puberty, and adult relationships. The handling of the more sensitive material is excellent the whole way through, especially when it's contrasting the adult versus the kid POV on various topics.
"Paper Girls" was released with so little fanfare that I'd be stumping for it a lot harder if I didn't know that a second season is already in the works. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and am happy to proclaim that this is one of the best comic-to-screen adaptations that we've had so far. The four leads are bound to get more attention after this show, particularly Sofia Rosinsky and Camryn Jones. And I didn't know I needed the image of Ali Wong piloting a giant mecha in my life, but I did, and "Paper Girls" gave it to me.
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