Paper Girls review: the Amazon series takes too long to get fun and weird - The Verge

Paper Girls, a live-action adaptation of the comic from Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, comes to Amazon Prime Video on July 29th.

It doesn’t take long for the Paper Girls comic books to get strange. The series from Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang starts out with a dream about an astronaut with angel wings and a skull for a face, and before the first issue is done, you’ll have seen an odd partially-organic space capsule and read a completely incomprehensible language from people who might be monsters. Things only get weirder from there.

But the new live-action series of the same name, the first season of which is available on Amazon Prime Video, dials back the strangeness. It’s still a science fiction story about a group of girls from the ‘80s who are pulled into a time-traveling war that spans centuries. But it doesn’t have nearly as much fun with the concept as its source material. It isn’t until the finale that Paper Girls really shows why it’s interesting — and you have to wade through eight very uneven episodes to get to that point.

This review contains spoilers for the first season of Paper Girls.

Paper Girls is set in 1988 and starts very early in the morning on “Hell Day,” the day after Halloween, when four girls set off to complete their paper routes. The day is important because, in the wee hours of the morning while the girls are biking through the neighborhood, there are still rowdy teens prowling the streets in search of kids to terrorize. After a few close calls, the girls — Tiff (Camryn Jones), Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), KJ (Fina Strazza), and newbie Erin (Riley Lai Nelet) — band together in the interest of safety despite barely knowing each other. It doesn’t do much good, though, because it’s not long before some weird guy steals one of Tiff’s walkie-talkies and the girls discover that seemingly everyone in town has disappeared. Oh, and the sky has turned a very unnatural shade of bright pink.

Superficially, Paper Girls feels a little like Amazon’s answer to Stranger Things, with its focus on kids dealing with strange events in the 1980s. But whereas Stranger Things is all about D&D-inspired supernatural occurrences, Paper Girls is a time-travel story. While the girls initially worry about typical ‘80s concerns — the Soviets are invading! — they’re instead pulled into a complex time war between two factions with very different aims. One travels through the years in order to fix things and improve life for humanity, while the other believes in keeping the timeline pure and thus goes about erasing the other side’s hard work. The girls don’t necessarily care about any of this. But when they’re transported to 2009, they’re forced in between the two factions as they go about finding a way back home.

https://www.theverge.com/23280703/paper-girls-review-amazon-prime-video

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