Most of the time on Peacock’s comedy series “The Paper,” pushy Toledo Truth Teller managing editor Esmeralda Grand (Sabrina Impacciatore) is an obnoxious — and hilarious — nemesis to new editor-in-chief Ned Sampson (Domhnall Gleeson), whose ambitions to transform his local newspaper into something meaningful are thwarted by Esmeralda’s more crass commercial concerns every step of the way. Yet in the first season’s fifth episode, “Scam Alert,” we see a softer side of Esmeralda when she learns she has been conned by a man she met on a dating app.
“I was able to explore another side of Esmeralda, which is her vulnerability,” Impacciatore said during IndieWire’s recent Emmy-season panel discussion on the series. “Which is very surprising for this kind of character because she’s supposed to be very manipulative — but then she doesn’t even realize when she’s been manipulated herself.” According to co-creator, co-showrunner, executive producer, and writer Michael Koman, the documentary style that “The Paper” carries over from the series that inspired it, “The Office,” lends itself to revealing the subtleties in Esmeralda’s character as well as the rest of the cast.
“The documentary style is very good for small comedy,” Koman said. “ It can observe very small behavior; in some ways it’s harder to go big because you don’t want to break the reality.” While Esmeralda is a big character with outsized reactions, the “Scam Alert” episode allowed her to go in the opposite direction with smaller, more quiet moments — moments that were captured by director Tazbeh Chavez with sensitivity and precision.
“I do a lot of prep on the visual and blocking side,” Chavez said. “I do a lot of character arc breakdown in my prep so that on the day, the only thing we really have to focus on is performance. That allows for a lot of important discussions, and it involves being able to have some freedom to play. The environment I try to create on set is one in which the cast and crew feel very empowered to be the masters of their craft.”
Central to Chavez’s approach was the desire to give let the actors try as many different options as possible in order to “find lightning in a bottle” — something that made the episode both a pleasure and a challenge for editor Julie Moran. “When we were cutting there were endless options in terms of the levels,” Chavez said of calibrating the comedy to find moments that were both funny and true. “I think that actors are the missing link. You can think all of this through, and they’re going to do something that I could never imagine and the writers could never imagine — and you’re like, ‘That’s the thing.’”
For Moran, the key was finding those moments in abundant coverage that sometimes allowed for a unique approach. “In a normal scripted show, you have fairly traditional coverage with a wide shot, and then a medium shot and a close-up, and it’s very easy to cut,” Moran said. “In this show, every single take is different and getting different things. I have a background in reality and documentary, so I called upon a lot of that to be able to just pick out, oh, there’s a funny little laugh here. Let me stick that in there.”
Moran said that the best scenes are “always a mix of what’s on the page and all of the great stuff that Sabrina and the other actors are bringing, which is often a ton of improv.” Koman concurs. “ In my experience you make 100 plans, and you think things have to be a certain way, and then usually in the editing something that an actor did that you didn’t really particularly notice when it happened is what saves you,” he said.
“The Paper” is produced by Universal Television, a division of Universal Studio Group. It is now streaming exclusively on Peacock.
IndieWire partnered with Universal Studio Group for USG University, a series of panels celebrating the outstanding artistry and artisans behind the 2025–2026 television season across NBCUniversal’s portfolio of shows. USG University, a Universal Studio Group program, is presented in partnership with the Motion Picture & Television Fund.
