The most dangerous thing that can happen to a struggling newspaper is not that nobody reads it. It is that the people who own it start to.

Season one of The Paper ended with the Toledo Truth Teller winning awards, which is the kind of ending that makes you think the hard part is over. Season two, which premiered on Peacock on 9 September with ten new episodes, starts from the opposite assumption.

The awards have bought the staff no goodwill from upstairs. What they have bought is attention. Marv, the CEO played by Allan Havey, does not hand out raises. He starts turning up in the newsroom.

You may have watched this happen to a real publication, from the outside, on a feed.

Last season asked whether a local paper should exist at all. This season asks who it answers to. Marv’s growing interest begins to shape what the Truth Teller chases, including an investigation into the owners of a local golf course, and by the end of the season it has reached Ned’s private life too.

This is the better question. A paper nobody reads is a sad story. A paper that someone with money has started reading is an uncomfortable one, because the joke is no longer whether anyone cares. It is what happens when someone does.

Ned and Mare kissed at the end of season one, and the show gives them most of its emotional weight this time. Domhnall Gleeson plays Ned with the same unfashionable sincerity as before, a man who cannot stop believing in something even when it complicates his life. Chelsea Frei makes Mare the steadiest person on screen.

An editor dating his best reporter would be a problem in any real newsroom. The show treats it first as a workplace romance and only second as a question about independence, and part of me wanted those two reversed. This is a season about who a paper answers to. Ned now answers to the person whose stories he edits, and I wanted the show to stay in that awkward spot a little longer before letting the two of them be sweet. It does get there. It just gets there quickly.

Sabrina Impacciatore’s Esmeralda Grand is still the loudest thing in the building, and she is still scheming against Ned with the help of Ken. She is the funniest person in the room or the reason you reach for the remote, and the show does not try very hard to make her anything in between.

The wider cast is more uneven. Travis and Adelola finally get room to be people, not just lines. Nicole is less fortunate. Her arc after the break with Detrick arrives abruptly and sits oddly beside everything else. Ten episodes is not many for an ensemble this size.

Season one leaned on the older show’s names and jokes, and season two largely lets go. That is probably the right instinct. It also means the show has to be funny on its own terms, without a twenty-year head start. Mostly it is. It is not often unforgettable.

You are probably still not reading a newspaper. But this is a more interesting second season than I expected, from a show that is still working out what it wants to be. I would watch a third, mostly to see what Marv does next.