Paper Girls Season 1 Review: A Time-Travel Story With Lots of Heart
If you think you’ve had enough of 80s throwbacks this summer, think again. Prime Video’s show Paper Girls is a new sci-fi offering that tells its own distinct coming-of-age story with a healthy dose of time travel.
The show follows the eponymous “paper girls,” Tiffany Quilkin (Camryn Jones), Erin Tieng (Riley Lai Nelet), Mac Coyle (Sofia Rosinsky), and KJ Brandman (Fina Strazza), who accidentally cross paths with warring time travelers during their paper route in 1988.
For viewers worried Paper Girls might be an imitation of this summer’s other blockbuster streaming hit, don’t worry. Besides being an 80s-set sci-fi story where kids ride bikes, the show doesn’t have much overlap with Stranger Things. (It’s worth noting that the best-selling graphic novels written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang that the show is based on debuted before the Netflix hit.)
Watching the girls from Stony Stream reminds me more of the girls from Stoneybrook, AKA The Baby-Sitters Club. The life lessons aren’t packaged as neatly and there is a lot more cursing, but the genuine connections between the characters and moving performances of the break-out young actresses recreate a similar feeling when watching Paper Girls.
Part of finding their way home after they’re displaced in time involves confronting their older selves, a tactic that works to varying degrees. As their older versions frequently remind them, they’re too young to know what they want.
Although probably true it’s not the excuse you want to hear when your future self doesn’t match up to everything you imagined. Ali Wong is perfectly cast as the neurotic adult version of Erin, who provides this first dose of reality.
It’s fun to watch the impact she and her younger self have on each other, but also heartbreaking at times as the girls learn way too young some of the troubles to expect moving forward in their lives.
The show nails the casting of the older version of Tiff (Sekai Abenì), who is the second future version the girls meet to help them along their journey. This time in the 90s instead of 2019, you get to see what a difference there is at the different stages of life.
Whether the revelations are about their jobs, sexualities, or even their deaths, it’s not something most 12-year-olds are equipped to handle. Across the board, the actresses playing the girls manage their vulnerability with the stubbornness that comes with that age to create genuinely moving performances.
A line as simple as, “I think that maybe she sorted some things out,” spoken by KJ after realizing her future self is happy, carries as much emotional punch as any long monologue.
The friendships developed throughout the season allow the Paper Girls to learn more about themselves and each other. Whether it’s running from time-traveling soldiers or trying to figure out how the hell a tampon works, they go through the trenches together.
Unfortunately, despite the rich source material, Paper Girls‘ weakest element is its sci-fi world-building.
Even when answers are given there is still a distinct lack of detail and flourish that keeps the show from capturing the full magic of the comics. Paper Girls Season 1 Episode 1, “Growing Pains,” when the girls first stumble upon the warring factions, has the heaviest lifting to do in terms of getting the audience excited about the sci-fi aspect of the show yet uses the kinetic action of the source material so sparingly the pilot is boring at times.
Viewers have to make it further along in the season to see Paper Girls embrace all the full kookiness of the sci-fi aspect of the story (time machines that double as fighting robots! dinosaurs!) instead of being hooked from the start.
Jason Mantzoukas as Grand Father and Adina Porter as Prioress get woefully little substantive screen time despite their big scenes later in the season indicating they’re the kind of complex villains you actually want to spend time with. Grand Father’s comparison of the timeline to a mixtape that can’t be recorded over or it will eventually fall apart is an instant classic in terms of time travel explanations.
Fortunately with time travel in play, if there’s a character or version of a character you’d like to see more of there’s always a chance they can come back. Given the huge cliff-hanger the season ends on, the story needs a second season to live up to its full potential.
Paper Girls still has plenty of story left to tell, but Season 1 is enough to get you deeply invested in this gang of scrappy 12-year-olds and what comes next for them.
What did you think of this season of Paper Girls? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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Paper Girls Season 1 is streaming now on Prime Video.
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Breeze Riley
Breeze Riley is a pop culture enthusiast who decided to turn her love of watching too much TV into a hobby writing about it. Although she's a convention-going sci-fi and fantasy nerd, she's just as likely to be watching an off-beat comedy or period drama. She is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic.