Amazon Prime’s Paper Girls review: A beautifully written time-travel story

Apart from the current flood of catchy pop nursery rhyme remixes and the traumatic consequences of growing up, the most devastating thing to childhood is without doubt the rapid, humiliating devastation that adulthood brings. Slowly but surely, the marine biology daydreams of middle school become froyo job applicants hungry for a master’s degree. The music of youth — my favorite was Ashlee Simpson’s debut album, Autobiography (pre-lip sync scandal) — becomes, over time, someone-your-age’s child’s uncool oldie, a dusty relic pointing back to the Mesozoic era when an iPod had no screen. So is the problem at its center. Paper Girls: My older self is so dull. How come my older self’s apartment lacks the presence of a Nobel Prize, or even a laundry unit? And how come we’re still renting? The hard pill response to all of these inquiries is the echo of one’s own asking. Adulthood sucks because it couldn’t care less about your dreams or wants. It will always be there for you. Similar to tax season.

Amazon’s Paper Girls, A faithful adaptation by Cliff Chiang and Brian K. Vaughan of their well-loved comic, this is a touching story about girls and the uncertainty of growing up, and eventually becoming unrecognizable. Like its small yet mighty leads, the show oscillates between nostalgic ’80s coming-of-age yearning and bizarro intergalactic theater, wherein youth must confront the flicker of 2000s tech-store fluorescents, the awkward confidence of ’90s rave culture, and the dreaded and jaded older self, head-on. Across the season’s eight episodes, time is shattered alongside walkie-talkies, college dreams, sibling hatred, the uterine lining, and heterosexuality to boot.

Our titular paper girls — Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), Tiffany (Camryn Jones), Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), and KJ (Fina Strazza) — begin their journey in 1988. Not friends but also not strangers, the girls adopt a buddy system on their routes to help avoid altercations with aggressive neighborhood boys, until, in the middle of an escape, they chance upon… aliens. Suddenly thrust into a future where the sky oozes a syrupy Pepto Bismol pink, the paper girls expedite their friendship for survival purposes and attempt to return home to the ’80s. The problem is, being children, they can’t simply walk to the nearest Motel 6 and buy a room for the night.

Thus begins a series of encounters with their older selves in exchange for a roof over their heads as they try not to lose hope of ever returning back to the bikes they abandoned in the past’s suburbia. Oh, and they’ve inadvertently time jumped into the middle of a space war between veiny-faced spaceship technicians and pterodactyl-controlling overseers. The politics surrounding this war continue to be obscured. However, girls find themselves in enemy number one because they are in the wrong spot at the wrong times.

The four paper girls standing and facing away from the camera at the bright pink sky

Three of the Paper Girls running through a field

For a show that thrusts giant battle robots and dinosaurs at viewers like a child in search of a babysitter. Paper Girls It works well when girls struggle with the dilemma of not being able to grasp the concept of what they want but still having enough time to do so. Mac is a tough, troubled and strong-talking Jane Lane wannabe. Happiness looks like stability in the household, as well as a promise that dinner will be served at her table every night. Played to snarky perfection by Rosinsky, Mac’s narrative arc is perhaps the heaviest — unlike the other girls, she doesn’t get the luxury of participating in a meet-and-greet with her older self. In less capable hands, Mac’s storyline could easily veer into after-school special territory, but Rosinsky never allows Mac to dissolve into cliche tear-jerker histrionics written specifically for Emmy Awards clips. Mac remains determined in her determination for a better future and a reason to hold it. By the end of the season’s cacophonic and slightly overstuffed doomsday proceedings, Mac emerges as the show’s most fully realized heroine.

This isn’t to say that the other girls aren’t handed their fair share of growing pains. For KJ, a rich kid struggling with confidence and self-articulation, growing up means accepting the fact that one’s present knowledge of the self might look completely different come morning. KJ must confront a quirkiness she only recently discovered as a teenager, while watching her older self distantly. Strazza’s nervy performance acutely captures the repressive state of adolescence as it pertains to the coming-out process. She is at once trapped presently within the kind of social expectations that would see her closeted and tight-lipped forever, and achingly aware of her future self’s unconscious approach to romance and self-liberation. Her silent expressions do more to suggest that it does really get better for queer youth more than any Dan Savage video campaign she’ll have to suffer through once the 2010s roll around.

Jones plays Tiffany as a brilliant brainiac and strong-minded person. Her conversations with her older self — a dropout DJ with a sick apartment — are sobering in their truths about institutional racism and what it means to be Black in predominately and historically white spaces. Jones is able to handle the newsflash in her adult life with determination, which suggests that she might not be fully set for her future.

Erin and Mac leaning against a window looking up at the sky

Older Erin blocking younger Erin from something off-camera

And then there’s young Erin, the newest paper girl on the block. In Nelet’s capable hands, Erin navigates the treacherous terrain of adulthood with equal parts confidence and naivety. Her coming-of-age leads to some of the series’ more tender moments, such as when she and the rest of the girls struggle to figure out the strange dimensions of a tampon and how to use it. Ali Wong plays Ali Wong’s older self. She expresses her strength most clearly in conversation. Ali Wong is a great comedian and performs a stripped-down, unscripted performance which every standup comic must do at least once. Thankfully, she nails adult Erin’s joyless arrested development with the air of a seasoned couch-surfer. Wong’s Erin is stuck in every sense of the word. She still lives in the house she grew up in, balancing on a tightrope of simmering familial resentments and a longing for something more, something just out of reach that will push her back into the driver’s seat of her life.

The series, in which the adult Erin is used mostly as a mirror reflecting back to the child, reveals that the process of growing up can be a constant project with new and sometimes difficult beginnings. Only when they are confronted by the ghosts from their youth, can the older paper girl confront themselves and see what the future holds. How do you react when your rearview mirror shows up? Some people have a difficult conversation about unmet goals or shifts in perspective that only come with age. Some people find that the conflict between the now and the past is a necessary wakeup call, allowing them to transform their lives.

But while each actor pulls their weight — there’s not a weak link among them — they are repeatedly let down by shoddy visuals that pale in comparison to their source material. What made Vaughan and Chiang’s comic series so lovable, aside from the characters at the heart of it, was the erratic visual excess of every page, a cotton-candy fever dream of neon hues and dazzling machinery. You won’t find such spectacle here. Save for a few fun visual effect moments pertaining to a dinosaur’s monstrous mouthbeak, Paper GirlsIt suffers from drab lighting in certain locations, and lacks a clear vision for the future. It’s hard not to wonder what kind of visual magic might’ve happened on screen if the show had a Stranger Things budget or if animated live-action proceedings are used instead of being rendered in the flesh.

We are now left with the dullest and most boring giant robot battles ever seen on small screens. The sequence is thankfully short, but it stands out in the worst of ways; you’ll find more action and imagination watching a 7-year-old play with Bionicles on the carpet. It is also very difficult to see the motivations of the villains. I was often unaware that the girls were even being pursued. The tensions of the show can be felt more tangibly during the emotional excavations performed by the girls themselves, as they strive to become bigger than the unsatisfactory futures they’ve witnessed play out in front of them. Paper Girls The best of the book is when it focuses on the emotions and concerns of its central four characters as they sit together and laugh, cry and plan. If you’re looking for a story hellbent on shoving visual excess into your corneas, I’d suggest picking up the paper copy. But if you’re looking for a show that understands the absolute devastation of girlhood and holds it up next to a belief in second chances, you could do a lot worse than Paper Girls.

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