Extra! Extra! Read all about it! The critically-acclaimed Eisner Award-winning comic “Paper Girls” created by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang has been adapted into a television series for Amazon Prime! Following four young girls who get pulled into a sci-fi conspiracy in the process of completing their early morning paper route, “Paper Girls” is a colorful and vibrant comic with a fun cast of characters, a strong sense of humor, a compelling mystery and a blast of a premise that offers a nuanced take on ever-trendy 80s nostalgia. Surely all those elements were maintained on the journey from book to screen, right?
The pilot of Paper Girls certainly hits the ground running with its first episode, speeding through a series of thrilling events and sometimes giving the audience enough time to notice that they happened. There’s plenty to unpack here, so let’s dive into the timestream.
Here’s five thoughts on Paper Girls’s pilot episode, “Growing Pains.” Spoilers below.
1. Hi Ali Wong, Bye Ali Wong
Actress and comedian Ali Wong is one of the most recognizable names attached to the show, but she’s also barely in the pilot episode. It makes a certain amount of sense that Paper Girls goes out of its way to introduce her right out of the gate. It’s almost like the show is offering a preemptive corrective to the half hour that’s about to come – don’t worry, we know you’re going to be a little put off by almost exclusively following four teenage girls you’ve never seen before through a blurry mess of events that are tough to engage with, but we’ll get back to something familiar soon enough.
The show opens on Wong waking up in bed at night in her home to a flash of purple light and what sounds like someone breaking into her home. She calls someone for help who doesn’t pick up, and then heads out to investigate the cause herself. As she walks through a shadowy hallway to the sounds of bustling and we jump back in time to 1988. How does this relate to the rest of the episode? Stay tuned!
2. Fast Forward
Here’s the point where I fully tip my hand – this episode, relatively brief as it is, is a pretty rough watch. The biggest problem with it (beyond the aesthetic, which I’ll dig into a little below), is that the events largely just happen, with little time for any of the titular girls to reflect on them. “Growing Pains” is a table-setting episode, treating its characters and plot beats more like a means to an end than an actual piece of entertainment in and of itself. You get the feeling that it finds what’s coming next far more interesting than where it’s starting.
If you’re a fan of the “Paper Girls” comic, you’ll notice the episode roughly covers the events of the first arc of the series, crammed down into 38 minutes. The show accomplishes that trick by making a lot of cuts, speeding through a cliff notes version of the arc that barely stops on a plot beat long enough to make an impression. In the back half of the episode, as the scenes get more chaotic and we’re seeing a blur of action, that somewhat works to the show’s benefit in selling the sense of confusion the girls must be feeling. However, given how disconnected the girls are from each other and how little the audience is allowed to engage with their feelings, the choices Paper Girls makes feel more messy than intentional.
The main challenge that breakneck pace creates comes from one of the changes the show opts to make to the source material: in the adaptation, none of the girls know each other very well prior to the events of the episode. While this provides some energy for the show to build on when each of the girls’ distinct personalities butt up against each other, it robs the episode of a sense of camaraderie. If the show is going to build up to the four girls trusting and relying on each other, it certainly has a long way to go to make that journey feel believable.
3. Hell Night Is All Right for Fighting
Continued belowWe get to know the titular paper girls on Hell Night (the morning after Halloween), 1988. As each of them wake up in their homes and ready themselves for their delivery routes, we see little glimpses of their lives. Tiff (Camryn Jones), a level-headed Black girl, is woken up for work by her mother; Erin (Riley Lai Nelet), a Chinese-American new girl who is about to deliver her first route, helps her non-English speaking mom and has ambitions of becoming the President; KJ (Fina Strazza), a Jewish girl who comes from some amount of privilege, chafes against the expectations of her family; and Mac (Sofia Rosinsky), a lower class (and casually racist and anti-Semitic) girl, bums cigarettes off of her drunken mother. After a couple of sour encounters with their customers and the crummy, drunken teens roaming the neighborhood, the foursome decides to stick together for the rest of the night so they can finish their routes in peace.
Since the episode takes place mostly at night, a lot of the episode happens in near-darkness. That, coupled with the show’s decision to not really play into any of the 80s tropes, leaves the neighborhood looking empty and muddy. Aside from a stray George H.W. Bush election sign, there aren’t many visual elements that establish “Growing Pains” as a period piece. The show has been getting some comparisons to Netflix’s Stranger Things due to its kids-on-bikes-style premise; though Stranger Things can occasionally lean so hard on 80s nostalgia that it becomes grating, Paper Girls sidesteps that by stripping most of that aesthetic out and substituting nothing at all.
When Erin gets attacked by some dark hooded figures and they make off with Tiff’s walkie-talkie, the girls vow to crack some skulls and “get their shit back.” They track the figures to an under construction housing development, where they conflict comes to blows.
4. Paper Girls vs. The World
This is the point where the speed at which the episode is moving and the blandness of the aesthetic really start to hurt it, as the action following this scene is both uninteresting and disorienting. The girls pull off the hoods of one of the attackers, and though they react in disgust the scene moves on too quickly to give a full shot of what they’ve seen (later we get a better look at the scarred faces of what turns out to be two teenage boys). The girls flee the house and find themselves staring up into a purple, cloudy sky, the first burst of color to bring some life into the episode’s visuals.
From there we’re treated to a rapid-fire series of events and conflicts that arise and then immediately resolve in quick succession. The girls take shelter at Mac’s house; Erin tries to leave to find her mom, and the others overrule her; Mac takes out her Dad’s gun, and when the girls protest she accidentally shoots Erin; they drive to take her to the hospital but are stopped by a man in white pointing a futuristic spear gun at them; the man is immediately shot by the hooded attackers, who promise they can protect the girls and heal Erin; the girls follow them into a spaceship, where Erin is healed by some sort of technological bugs; the girls flee the ship out into an open field, where they’re attacked by an army of the white-suited figures, who execute the two boys; the girls are discovered hiding in the bushes by one of the men, but KJ knocks him out with her hockey stick.
All of these things happen in a little over ten minutes of screen time, with each runs into the next without a moment to breathe. “Growing Pains” is the shortest episode of the season; a few extra minutes would have greatly helped this portion of the episode. If there were important details that were dropped in those ten minutes, they were buried in the cascade of images.
5. Erin, Meet Erin
As it turns out, where the episode ends is back at the beginning, as we discover that the sound Ali Wong’s character heard was the paper girls “breaking in” to her house. Only they weren’t breaking in – as KJ and Tiffany put two and two together by looking at some pictures on the fridge, Erin and Erin (a.k.a. Ali Wong) realize that they’re one and the same, and that younger Erin is looking at her older self still living in her childhood home. Time travel!
This closing scene doesn’t make a ton of sense with the opening sequence – the timing, lighting, and sounds of the opening don’t match up with the way it unfolds at the end of the episode in the slightest – but it does at least leave the characters in an interesting position moving into the rest of the series. There has only been a surface-level of development for the young characters, and the choice to let their relationships to each other build in tandem to the sci-fi mystery could make for a compelling watch as the season goes on. “Growing Pains” took pains to arrange all its players on the field with a series of awkward exchanges and jumbled events; hopefully the next episode can pick up the ball and run with it.
