Paper Girls review: Amazon Prime Video’s answer to Stranger Things is an endearing sci-fi coming of age

The easiest way to explain Paper Girls – and, probably, the way Amazon Prime Video might hope for you to understand it – is “Stranger Things, but”. It’s Stranger Things, but about four 12-year-old girls rather than a group of teenage boys. It’s Stranger Things, but set (mostly) in the 90s. It’s Stranger Things, but with more of a sci-fi leaning than a horror inflection. It’s Stranger Things, but it’s about time travel rather than fighting monsters. So on and so forth.

After a while, the usefulness of that comparison starts to falter (not least because – and with apologies to Matthew Modine, because I know how he worries about these things – I’ve not actually seen Stranger Things). It’s a broad-strokes account of Paper Girls’ closest analogue – something that the comic was compared to when it was first published in 2015, and something that was surely thrown around in pitch meetings when this adaptation was first commissioned – but doesn’t quite capture the specific contours of the show, all the little details and affectations that make it so watchable.

Erin, Mac, Tiff, and KJ are newspaper delivery girls. It’s November 1, 1988 – Erin’s first morning on the job, and one of the most dangerous days of the year for the girls, with post-Hallowe’en mischief still abound. Belated pranks turn out not to be their biggest worry, though: the sky turns a stark violet colour and cracks wide open, and the girls are suddenly catapulted into the future. At its most sci-fi, Paper Girls has an endearingly cheap quality to it, pointedly lacking any prestige television sheen – it’s better for it, though, giving those more out-there excesses (all the classics: soldiers with rayguns, dinosaurs, giant robots) a pleasingly goofy sensibility, almost like a live-action cartoon.

All that, though, is just wallpaper and set decoration. What Paper Girls is more interested in is confronting the girls with their future, in each case (obviously) not quite what they expected it to be. After that brief jaunt into the time war, they find themselves stranded, first in 2019 and then for a while in 1996 – even as war rages around them, with agents from opposing factions the Old Watch and the STF Underground in pursuit, they can never quite resist the temptation to look up their future selves in the phone book. (Or not, as the case may be – the series gets a lot of good jokes out of the late 80s girls facing a changed society.)

It takes quite a relaxed pace, often more willing to indulge in its new settings than to try and engender any particular sense of tension. That works well though, positioning the series less as a thriller (much as it can be thrilling at times) and closer to a kind of hangout show, about the characters first and foremost. It’s a clever perspective to take, and a neat spin on the coming-of-age genre – bringing the girls face to face with their future selves, seeing how parental expectation and personal aspiration eventually collided with the passage of time. It’s always the most compelling part of the series, and Paper Girls gets a lot out of it, from comedic moments to more poignant ones.

The young cast do well with the material, too. Their characters are, admittedly, broad and simple archetypes – Riley Lai Nelet’s Erin is shy but ambitious, Sofia Rosinsky’s Mac is an antisocial tomboy, Camryn Jones’ Tiff is driven and intelligent, and Fina Strazza’s KJ strains against the life she’s ‘supposed’ to have – but the actors each do well with what they’re given. They’ve got a nice, light-hearted chemistry with one another, and more than hold their own against the adult cast (Ali Wong and Riley Lai Nelet are great together as the two Erins, and For All Mankind’s Nate Corddry is good fun as a temporal agent who could believably be intimidated by 12-year-olds).

What’s smart about Paper Girls (even as end-of-the-world stakes loom in the background) is that it tends to keep things small and personal. The disappointments and surprises that the girls face in the future are simpler, almost more intimate, focused more on changes in their future relationships – estrangement from a family member, a closeness with someone unexpected – that make them reconsider what they think they know about themselves now. Rosinsky and Strazza both do great work in particular with the more emotionally substantial plotlines, but again, the cast are impressive across the board.

After a spate of cancellations at Amazon Prime Video – one of which, The Wilds, was even announced the morning of Paper Girls’ debut – its easy to be dubious about the likelihood of any new show returning for a second series. But, on the strength of Paper Girls’ first series, one can’t help but hope it has a long future ahead of it.

Paper Girls is available to stream as a boxset on Amazon Prime Video now. I’ve seen all eight episodes before writing this review. You can read more of our TV reviews here.