Review: The Paper, "I Love You" & "Church & State" | Season 1, Episodes 7 & 8
Who is Ned Sampson?
I’ve written already about the limited real estate in The Paper’s first season, and although the writers no doubt knew that going in, we’re also seeing them find the show’s rhythm in real time. While it’s plausible that they had mapped out a broad arc for the season, these two episodes suggest a conscious pivot to figuring out Ned Sampson as this 10-episode batch approaches its conclusion.
As I’m writing this, the review embargo has broken, and multiple critics are logically engaging with how Ned fits within the archetypes offered by The Office. He’s a likeable romantic lead in moments, echoing Jim, but he sometimes also struggles with boundaries and socialization, like Michael. I’d probably ultimately side with Daniel Fienberg that he’s most similar to Andy, but I highly doubt the writers want that to be the case given how much The Office struggled to build a show around that character when faced with the challenge.
In one of my reviews of The Office, I made the argument that what made Michael Scott a valuable protagonist was his multitudes, allowing the writers to deploy different versions of him—romantic, bumbling, narcissistic, etc.—as an episode demanded. It’s similar to how The Simpsons approached Homer, with his intelligence level ebbing and flowing as necessary. You could argue this creates inconsistent characterization, and there’s no question that viewers will have differing opinions on what version of a character they prefer. In the end, though, writers want us to remember that people are complex, and their inconsistencies are what makes them human.
That’s something that you can learn to accept over multiple 22-episode seasons of a sitcom, but it’s harder when you’ve only got ten episodes to work with. “I Love You” and “Church and State” strike me as an assertion of Ned’s core identity, with the former bringing his Daddy Issues to the surface and the latter offering a better grasp of the person he was before coming to the Truth Teller. But whereas in a longer season these stories might have each made their own individual impact when separated by 3-4 other episodes, seeing them side by side calls attention to the “work” being done on the character as they try to figure out who they want at the show’s center.
