Diksha Sundriyal
The second season of Peacock’s ‘The Paper‘ takes the Toledo Truth Teller and its journalists to some very unexpected places. The ten-episode season explores some interesting storylines. One focuses on Ned and the team trying to expose the mystery behind the murder of a man who worked at the elite Glass Club. The second plotline takes Mare to Cincinnati, where she briefly breaks from the Truth Teller to work at the understaffed Cincinnati Chronicle. By the finale, both plotlines converge in a way that sets up an exciting third season, but it also leaves one wondering about the truth behind the two locations that play such an important role in the show. SPOILERS AHEAD.
The Glass Club and the Cincinnati Chronicle are Fictional Additions to The Paper Season 2
While the events of ‘The Paper’ take place in Toledo, Ohio, the show is actually filmed in California. The majority of scenes, particularly those set in the paper’s offices, are filmed at the Universal Studios Lot, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, California. The lot is also used to film other outdoor locations in Toledo, including the Glass Club. The building comes into the picture in the latter half of the season, and it is likely that all the scenes focusing on it, especially the restaurant scenes, were filmed at a set in Universal Studios. In the same vein, the Cincinnati Chronicle is also a fictional addition to the second season. The scenes featuring its newsroom were filmed at The LA Times’ offices at 2300 East Imperial Highway in El Segundo, California.
The idea of using the Times’ building to film the second season took root when the show’s co-creators, Greg Daniels and Michael Koman, visited the building for an interview and photo shoot focused on the first season. Daniels recalled his visit to the place and found it interesting that the office was so close to the freeway. “It looked so good on camera with all the cars going by. It had this sense of energy and excitement. And the planes taking off. It seemed cool,” he added. So, while working on the second season, when they decided to send Mare to the fictional Cincinnati Chronicle, they thought about using the Times’ building to showcase the difference between the Chronicle and its sister paper in Toledo.
The idea was to visually show the difference between Cincinnati and Toledo and how much smaller Toledo is. Koman described it as Cincinnati having money while Toledo doesn’t. The show’s crew set up camp three floors beneath the main levels of the Times’ newsroom. The show’s production designer, Susie Mancini, drew inspiration from the Times’ newsroom, photographing the smallest details that informed the Chronicle’s set design and breathed life into it as a real newsroom. These details ranged from sticky notes on computers to boards listing story ideas from the journalists. This, combined with Mare’s plotline of proving herself as a journalist, turned the fictional Chronicle into a real newsroom.
Read More: The Paper Season 3 Cast and Plot Theories
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