A new kind of optimism
The Office brought audiences Michael Scott, the boss of the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin and someone who isn’t exactly a boss you’d enjoy working for. He was aggressively himself and that wasn’t always a good thing. But then came Parks and Recreation with Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) as the Deputy Director of the Pawnee Parks and Recreation department. If you mix those two together, you have Ned on The Paper.
Played by Domhnall Gleeson, Ned Sampson had a dream of running the Toledo Truth Teller. And we, as the audience, can tell that he really does care about the work that he is doing. The show is designed as a “spin-off” of The Office by loosely being tied to Dunder Mifflin and having Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nuñez) as part of it. But unlike Michael and very much like Leslie, Ned really wants to be what the Truth Teller needs.
Catching up with the Ned Sampson
As part of the junket for season 2 of The Paper, I spoke with Gleeson about the role and brought up how Ned is more like Leslie than he is a Michael Scott role and asked him about the optimism that exists within a character like that.
Well, thank you for saying that. Amy Poehler is obviously an absolute genius but I do see a shared DNA in terms of how much they care about what they do and the purity of their central sort of journey or mission. The purity of their central mission. I think they definitely have in common. And I think what you then have to do to make sure that they still can operate comedically is make sure that they’re not always succeeding. And I think a lot of the time, the reason Ned doesn’t succeed is, first of all, he doesn’t have the ability to back up his belief and he doesn’t have the experience to allow him to reach the heights he feels the paper can get to. He feels like what they’re doing is making their city a better place. He feels like they’re making Toledo a better place. So when he fails, it’s crushing for him. And I think there’s lot of fun to be had in that as well. A little bit of drama, enough drama to keep us floating along as well.
You can see our full chat here:
About The Paper
A documentary crew searching for a new subject finds a dying Midwestern newspaper and its publisher’s efforts to revive it using volunteer reporters.
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