Scifi that delivers

Prime Video’s new scifi adventure isn’t the next Stranger Things. It’s better, writes Robert Lloyd.

THERE is a lot of science fiction on television these days and a lot of it relies on special effects and/or the built-in advantage of belonging to some extended, mutually promotional universe. Action and mythology can take precedence over character and relationships.

That is not Paper Girls, which has premiered on Prime Video. I have no idea whether it will attract the audience it deserves, or even who exactly that audience might be. Developed by Stephany Folsom from a comic by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, and counting Halt and Catch Fire’s

Christopher C. Rogers and Chris Cantwell as directors, it centres on a quartet of 12-year-olds. But the ideas are mature, involving identity, memory and youthful hopes coming literally face to face with adult reality, and it is more than usually subtle about loss and death. Between occasional bursts of action, the pace remains leisurely, with room for stillness; there is very little in the way of spectacle. Still, I would rank it as one of the year’s best shows, for what it does right and what it doesn’t bother doing, for the intelligence of the writing and the natural flow of its dialogue, and the impressively deep performances of its phenomenally talented young cast.

Given that it begins in the 1980s — it’s a time travel show, so it doesn’t stay there long — and involves young people caught in the middle of science-fictional forces, the series is sure to be compared to Stranger Things.

Like all time travel stories, it’s useless to try to make logical sense of it; and like all science fiction, it requires a certain amount of just going along for the ride. But the show is emotionally coherent, and the ratio of sci-fi set pieces to ordinary human interaction is, in any case, low; conversation and significant silences are what carry the show. On the whole, its tone and group dynamics remind me more of a show like Reservation Dogs than Stranger Things.

The series starts slowly, even poetically, as the four heroines wake up early to deliver newspapers before dawn, heading out on their bikes into the dark, empty streets. There is Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), a child of poverty who talks tough and is (though not as tough as all that); brainy Tiffany, called Tiff (Camryn Jones), with her sights set on MIT; softspoken KJ (Fina Strazza), who carries a hockey stick; and Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), on her first night of work, and who will be called ‘‘new girl’’ for a while. Each actress makes her own kind of music.

It is November 1, 1988, Hell Day, a post-Halloween riot of pranks, vandalism and bullying, which leads the four to band together. As in the comic, they are a diverse group; Erin is Chinese, Tiff is black and KJ is Jewish; Mac, who is white, begins with some inherited bad ideas about Japanese people taking factory jobs and Jews having money. The series allows them time to get to know one another, which will take some work.

‘‘Have you ever heard of the Holocaust?’’ KJ asks, after Mac goes on about her privilege.

‘‘Oh, give me a break,’’ Mac replies. ‘‘Ask my grandmother sometime. I’m sure she really enjoyed it.’’

‘‘This isn’t Nazi Germany.’’

‘‘And yet someone wrote ‘Jew B **** ’ on my locker last year.’’

‘‘I wouldn’t,’’ KJ says after a pause. ‘‘I wouldn’t do anything like that.’’

In a somewhat confusing flurry of events, they find themselves kidnapped, or perhaps rescued, by a couple of blackclad teenagers and wind up stranded in the year 2019. Their abductors/saviours will turn out to belong to the Standard Time Fighters, also called the Underground, who would be the Rebel Alliance in this scenario, who are at war with the Old Watch, your Empire stand-in; their skirmishes take place across history. As explained by Larry (Nate

Corddry), a 20th-century recruit whose path the girls cross, the

Old Watch has banned time travel in order to maintain their privileged station in whatever far year they have come to power, while the STF wants to adjust history in the pursuit of a more equitable future for all. The fact the Old Watch regard time travel as a capital offence puts the girls in danger.

As in a Shakespeare play, the warring armies are represented by a handful of actors, running about the forest in their contrasting costumes, shooting their ray guns. But for much of the series, the Old Watch is represented by a lone, singleminded soldier (Adina Porter), who shows up in various wigs and costumes, often with an appropriate gift of food, as she tracks the girls.

Looking for shelter and unaware of their temporal dislocation, the girls follow Erin to her house, where she meets her future self (Ali Wong), still living there, having achieved none of young Erin’s dreams. Each girl will encounter her own perhapsnot-immutable destiny, leading variously to disappointment, hope, confusion, conflict, collaboration and some comedy.

In their attempts to evade capture, return to their own time and provide for themselves, our protagonists will prove to be unusually though not unbelievably resourceful. But they are also young, impressionable, unformed and uninformed; one long, delicately rendered (but not unfunny) passage involves Erin getting her first period and the four working out what to do about it. (As I said, not your average sci-fi show.)

Inevitably, some bits will recall other scifi stories and genres but Paper Girls is above all its own thing; importantly, it doesn’t feel burdened with the sort of front-office interference that can make a possibly difficult original property into something more obvious. Into, say, the next Stranger Things. But this is better. — TCA