It doesn’t take long for the paper girls comics to get weird. the series of Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang opens with a dream about an astronaut with angel wings and a skull for a face, and before the first issue is over, you’ll have seen a strange partially organic space capsule and read completely incomprehensible language from people who might be monsters. . Things only get weirder from there.
But the new live-action series of the same name, whose first season is available on Amazon Prime Video, once again marks the strangeness. It’s still a sci-fi story about a group of girls from the ’80s who get caught up in a time travel war that spans centuries. But he’s not as amused by the concept as he is by his source material. It’s not until the end paper girls it really shows why it’s interesting, and you have to go through eight very uneven episodes to get to that point.
This review contains spoilers for the first season of paper girls.
paper girls is set in 1988 and begins very early on the morning of “Hell Day”, the day after Halloween, when four girls set off to complete their paper routes. The day is important because, in the wee hours of the morning, while the girls are biking around the neighborhood, there are still rowdy teenagers prowling the streets looking for kids to terrorize. After a few close calls, the girls – Tiff (Camryn Jones), Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), KJ (Fina Strazza) and rookie Erin (Riley Lai Nelet) – team up for the sake of safety despite barely knowing each other. . It doesn’t do much good, though, because it’s not long before a strange guy steals one of Tiff’s walkie-talkies and the girls discover that everyone in town has apparently disappeared. Oh, and the sky has turned a very unnatural shade of bright pink.
Superficially, paper girls feels a bit like Amazon’s answer to Strange thingswith its focus on children dealing with strange events in the 1980s. But while Strange things is about d&d-inspired supernatural events, paper girls It is a time travel story. While the girls initially worry about typical ’80s worries, the Soviets are invading! – instead, they are drawn into a complex time war between two factions with very different goals. One travels through the years to set things right and make life better for humanity, while the other believes in keeping the timeline pure and thus erasing the other side’s hard work. Girls don’t necessarily care about any of this. But when they are transported back to 2009, they are forced between the two factions as they search for their way back home.
paper girls it does some things very well. The best thing about the show is the girls themselves. Unlike most ’80s games you might be familiar with, it’s not about a tight-knit group of friends facing adversity. Instead, they are four kids who barely know each other, and who are very different from each other, who are forced to work together to survive and return to their own time period. They eventually become friends, but it doesn’t start out that way.
The cast is incredible. The main thing that propelled me through the show wasn’t the sci-fi side of the equation but, rather, the ongoing drama between the girls, who are forced to face harsh truths as they go into the future and, in some cases, they meet their future selves. This runs the gamut from know-it-all Tiff worried about getting into MIT to KJ learning about her sexuality and Erin disappointed at how boring her life is. In general, the program is very well chosen; the children even Look like their comic book counterparts. Other highlights include a surprisingly effective Ali Wong as Old Erin and an inspired Jason Mantzoukas as the hipster leader of one of the time-traveling factions who is obsessed with Public Enemy and Metallica.
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Unfortunately, the other side of the equation, the science fiction story, doesn’t hold up as well. To begin with, it is very poorly explained. You don’t really know anything about the time war until the season basically ends, so it’s hard to really care about any of the time-traveling characters that keep showing up (and, in some cases, dying more than once). More than that though, it feels generic.
Part of this is aesthetic. While paper girls the comic is vibrant and colorful thanks to colorist Matt Wilson, paper girls the show often comes across as bland and cheap, particularly when it comes to the CGI and the futuristic outfits and locations. The soldiers of the future look like background characters from the next generation. A key plot point revolves around a futuristic phone that the girls discover; in the comics, it’s a weird take on what the iPhone will look like, while the show makes it a generic black slab. (It’s not even a Fire Phone! The show also misses a perfect opportunity for an Alexa prank.) Sometimes the sky turns pink, but mostly, it looks like any other mid-budget sci-fi series.
There are some hints of fun along the way. Watching Ali Wong pilot a mech suit is as entertaining as it sounds. But for the most part, paper girls does not make the best use of its source material. Instead, it’s a great coming-of-age drama tied to a rather bland story about time travel. It’s not until the eighth and final episode that things really start to click: the war is explained, paths diverge, and most importantly, it gets downright weird. And by that I mean a dinosaur appears. However, it takes a long time to get to that point. The cast does their best to keep you interested along the way, but there are some very dull moments that you’ll need to look past to get past.
As is, paper girls sounds like it could be the start of something great. The story ends in an interesting place, and if Amazon takes something of that Lord of the Rings budget to fix things, there is a lot of potential. But the potential isn’t much of a TV series (especially without the current promise of a season 2). paper girls he has a lot to work with from the comics, but he never fully comes together in the debut season.
paper girls begins streaming on Amazon Prime Video on July 29.