Threats faced with sass and chutzpah
Paper Girls delights with its diverse characters and twisting of traditional 80s tween movie tropes, writes James Croot.
With its tween protagonists, 1980s setting, American Midwest backdrop and sci-fi stylings, it’s hard not to view Prime Video’s latest series Paper Girls as Amazon’s answer to Stranger Things.
And Paper Girls, the eightpart adaptation of Brian K Vaughan and Cliff Chiang’s comic-book series, definitely leans into any comparison. It fills its initial surroundings of 1988 Cleveland, Ohio, with a plethora of pop-culture references, from Freddy Krueger and Teen Wolf costumes to walkmans and the threat of nuclear war.
It’s 4.26am on November 1. As she prepares her allocated copies of the morning edition of The Cleveland Preserver, it dawns on Erin Tieng (Riley Lai Nelet) that she picked a stupid day to start as a delivery girl.
Halloween ended only four hours ago, so not only are there plenty of extra obstacles on her route, infamous teen bully Wally Becker (Carter Shimp) and his gang are lying in wait. Fortunately, they haven’t reckoned on the fearless Mac (Sofia Rosinsky).
Armed with firecrackers, the city’s ‘‘first paperboy who wasn’t a boy’’ distracts and repels their attack, before introducing Erin to fellow poorly paid Preserver employees KJ (Fina Strazza) and Tiffany (Camryn Jones).
However, any celebration is short-lived by the unnerving lack of cars or adults around, followed by an attack on KJ and Erin, a power outage and a purple sky. At first, the girls fear a nuclear strike, but, as they suddenly find themselves in the middle of a firefight, Erin is shot and their attempt to get her to a hospital is thwarted by two men who bundle them into a bunker.
When they eventually
awake and emerge, it’s to eerily unfamiliar surroundings. Although relieved Erin isn’t dead, they’re astounded to find they appear to now be in the year 2019. Desperately hoping this is a strange dream – rather than a psychotic break – they race back to Erin’s house. But rather than finding her mother there, Erin comes faceto-face with her adult self (Always Be My Maybe’s Ali Wong).
An appealing mix of The Goonies, Stand By Me and the Terminator and Back to the Future series, Paper Girls delights with its diverse characters and twisting of traditional 80s teen and tween movie tropes. Our central quartet are all more than onenote characters, displaying plenty of sass and chutzpah, and also laying bare their hopes, fears and respective brushes with racism, antisemitism and other forms of abuse.
And while the spectre of Stranger Things looms large, two things differentiate this. Adults play far less of a role here, and, as creator Vaughan has recently pointed out, this is less a love letter – and more of a death threat – to the 1980s. Soundtrack cuts include Cher’s If I Could Turn Back Time and The Bangles’ version of a Hazy Shade of Winter and one character’s love of the theme to TV’s Growing Pains is undercut by another’s observation that ‘‘life isn’t supposed to be like a perfect sitcom’’.
Even as they lament and revel in their potentially lost youth in their now abandoned favourite mall, Mac reminds them they should ‘‘stop talking about the good old days as if they were actually good’’. You almost expect one of them to break out into a heartbreaking speech a la Phoebe Cates’ Kate in Gremlins.
While perhaps not as slick – nor as scary – as the Duffer brothers’ world-conquering Netflix series, Paper Girls is maybe a more inclusive, thought-provoking coming-ofage tale, and all the more impactful for it.