‘The Paper’s Domhnall Gleeson and His Co-Stars Break Down Season 2’s Biggest Turns

Published Sep 10, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT Tania Hussain is an Executive Editor at Collider responsible for creative, editorial, and managerial duties. In addition to leading content ideation and development, she works to generate innovative and compelling ideas for feature articles and reviews with her editorial team across Features, Lists, Reviews, and Interviews. She also serves as the primary editor overseeing Collider’s Signature Series profiles, spotlighting some of the most influential voices in film and television. Tania has helped cover and ideate content for major events for Collider, including the Toronto International Film Festival. She has also conducted more than 100 interviews since her start in the business more than 15 years ago. Some favorites include Joel McHale, Charlie Cox, Jennifer Garner, Tina Fey, Kate Winslet, Bob Odenkirk, Andy Richter, Jordan Schlansky, Jamie Dornan, Yeardley Smith, Rafe Spall, Esther Smith, and a reasonable toss-up between Cookie Monster and Kermit the Frog. She has covered set visits, in-person junkets, and red carpets for several films and TV shows, including most recently, The Sheep Detectives, Masterchef, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy. Sign in to your Collider account Editor’s Note: The following contains full spoilers for ‘The Paper’ Season 2Season 2 of The Paper gives its cast more to dig into this time around, especially once work and the Toledo Truth Teller staff’s personal lives start bleeding into each other. Series star Domhnall Gleeson best put it to Collider when describing his character Ned’s problem: “I think he wanted a throuple,” the actor laughs while breaking down the sophomore season of the Peacock sitcom. That “happily ever after” throuple would have included the paper, which he loves to pieces, and his new girlfriend, Mare — played by Chelsea Frei. But as things come to a head behind the scenes, their newfound relationship impacts Mare more than Ned. She ends up at the Cincinnati Chronicle to avoid an HR nightmare but gets exactly what she always wanted from the job, admitting her character had been “losing herself a little bit” back in Toledo — and in some ways, with Ned. Meanwhile, for Ramona Young, Nicole’s increasingly messy behavior comes down to one thing: “Nicole is afraid of losing control,” Young says. But that gets harder to do as Detrick (Melvin Gregg) starts finding his footing without her. But not all of Season 2’s chaos is emotional. For one, Sabrina Impacciatore claims she “looked like a maniac” while secretly studying kids at the gym for Esmeralda’s undercover turn in the finale, while Eric Rahill remembers trying to talk showrunner Greg Daniels out of Episode 7’s tornado stunt before eventually doing it himself. “It was like four men pulling on my body,” he says of the sitcom’s wildest two minutes that involved him and co-star Gbemisola Ikumelo’s Adelola seeking refuge in a ditch from a Midwest tornado. With a season full of laughs and genuine heart, the cast opened up to Collider about the relationships that still have some unfinished business, characters who are still finding their footing, and what it took to pull off some of Season 2’s wildest moments. ‘The Paper’ Season 2 Stars Break Down Ned and Mare’s Complicated Relationship “If you get everything you want, it doesn’t mean you can make it work.” After Ned steals a kiss from Mare in the Season 1 finale following the Ohio Journalism Awards, the intrepid editor finally gets what he wants in his sophomore year at the Toledo Truth Teller: a girlfriend and the chance to chase a good story that matters. The problem, according to Gleeson, is that Ned assumes all three can fit together very neatly. “He found out that if you get everything you want, it doesn’t mean you can make it work, and that’s really conflicting,” Gleeson says. “Because if you get everything you want, and then it doesn’t work, what does that say about what you want and your own ability to manage your own life?” That is where Gleeson’s very specific “throuple” theory comes in. “I think he thought that [he] and Mare and the paper could be these perfect three things that can all make each other happy, and it’ll be perfect forever because they all love each other so much,” he laughs. “And he just found out that throuples are hard to make work.” For Mare, though, that arrangement comes with a cost, which Frei believes her character only really sees once Cincinnati gives her some distance from Ned and Toledo. “I think she felt like she was maybe, in hindsight, losing herself a little bit back in Toledo,” she says. “I think [she] and Ned have such different ways of going about getting a story and journalism and working, and I think she probably, within the honeymoon stage and crush stage, let herself get away — let who she is get away from herself a little bit, if that makes sense.” But being on her own changes that. “She goes to Cincinnati and has to stand on her own two feet and have this independence. I think it’s really scary, and then it’s like, ‘Oh, wait, I forgot, I also am good at this, and in a different way than he is,’” Frei says. When the show returns for Season 3, she is especially excited by what that could mean for Mare back at the Truth Teller: “You’d get to see her come back with this newfound knowledge and independence and confidence.” Not to mention, Ned giving Mare the Glass Club death investigation in the finale also lands differently after everything the two have gone through. Gleeson calls it a “truly selfless moment,” pointing to something that has always been underneath Ned’s many, many screw-ups. “He’s definitely got pride and ego,” Gleeson says. “But actually, he’s there because he wants to make the world a better place, and he wants to practice what he preaches. I think he’s imbued with a really good sense of decency. He just messes up a lot, but I always think he’s trying his best.” More importantly, Gleeson doesn’t see the gesture of giving her his biggest story ever as Ned trying to win Mare back. “He respects her as a journalist so much that he’s like, ‘You’re what we need for our paper,’” he says. “It kills him, but he respects it.” That restraint comes even after Ned admits to the documentary crew that seeing Mare walk into his hospital room after getting sick from a moldy muffin makes him realize he loves her and “can’t live without her” — only to immediately decide he isn’t going to tell her. His co-star, Frei, similarly sees the Glass Club handoff as something bigger than whatever happens romantically between them. “Outside of romance, outside of everything, it’s like, ‘We need to do this for our community,’ which is, I think, what they both always come back to, which is so lovely,” she says. “There’s something so incredibly selfless about it, and it’s what I love about local journalism. I’m happy we ended on that note.” ‘The Paper’ Season 2 Stars Explain Nicole’s Spiral and Detrick’s Big Turn “Nicole is afraid of losing control.” Image via John P. Fleenor/Peacock While Ned and Mare spend Season 2 trying to figure out whether love and work can co-exist, Nicole and Detrick are heading in opposite directions. Thanks to her hard work, Nicole gets Esmeralda’s office and more authority at the Truth Teller. But along the way, almost everything else she thought she had a handle on starts slipping away, which Young admits she had no idea how far the writers were going to take it. “I was incredibly surprised and a huge fan of all of the inner workings of Nicole kind of exploding outwards in a very messy, chaotic way,” Young tells Collider, adding that she had “fun” exploring that depth behind Nicole. But for the mechanics of her character, the actress reveals what’s happening is actually pretty clear-cut: “Nicole is afraid of losing control,” she says. “Nicole likes to be in control of herself — she likes to know how she presents herself, how she comes off.” As the season goes on, that actually becomes a bit harder to fake. “I think in Season 2, she feels like she’s in control of her life and in her career and in her relationships,” Young explains. “Even if it’s falling apart, she’s like, ‘Yeah, I chose this,’ but really, she is kind of spiraling, and she is losing a sense of control, and I think that freaks her out.” Meanwhile, Detrick does something Nicole struggles to do all season—just let it go. Gregg believes the breakup from last season has finally given his character more room to figure out who he is outside the relationship. “As much as I love working with Ramona, and I really do, I feel like Detrick needed some time away for himself to grow as just a person and [find] himself, but also to let Nicole miss him,” he says. On top of all of that, Detrick finally starts putting all that energy elsewhere. “I think it was good and healthy for him to take some time for himself and become one of the good reporters of the paper,” Gregg says. “Because now he sees that if he invests the same energy he did into Nicole into his work, he can flourish and be a great asset to the team, and I love that for him.” By the finale, Ned sees it too. Detrick is staying late, digging into the Glass Club investigation and proving he can be trusted with a major story for the Toledo Truth Teller. “Detrick is a committed individual. He’s enthusiastic. He wants to do good. He wants people to like him,” Gregg says. “He’s going to do the work. He’s going to stay late. He’s going to do everything that needs to be done to make the story as good as possible, and he’s actually good at it.” So, does all that growth mean Nicole and Detrick might finally find their way back to each other in Season 3? Gregg doesn’t hesitate: “I do.” Young is right there with him, adding, “In an ideal world, yes.” Best of all, Gregg argues, Season 2 proves the two are more alike than they may have realized, using the relationship with the paper’s HR manager, Lisa (Lisa Gilroy), as the answer. “Once you see his relationship with [her], you realize how similar he is to Nicole,” he says. “The lengths that Nicole is going to this season [are] similar to the lengths that he went last season. So they’re very similar; the timing has just been bad.” And with both of them now having experienced the messier side of that equation, Gregg thinks another shot at their relationship could look very different. “Now that they’ve both seen both sides of one another, I think getting together in Season 3, it’ll be more balanced, and the timing will be better,” he says. “It’ll be an equally yoked relationship.” ‘The Paper’ Season 2 Cast Reveals How Its Wildest Comedy Moments Came Together “I looked like a maniac.” With a season that is funnier and delivers some of the biggest laughs so far, the best, wildest moments take a little more commitment than just showing up. For Impacciatore, that meant figuring out how her larger-than-life character Esmeralda could go undercover as a 12-year-old boy in the finale — something that initially terrified her. “When I read the script, I couldn’t sleep at night,” she tells Collider. “I thought, ‘I’m not able to do this. I’ve never done this in my life. I can’t do this.’ I was very, very, very, very scared.” But to help create a convincing pre-teen, she did some very normal, discreet research: “I went to the gym to study young kids. I looked like a maniac, I think,” she laughs, recalling the casual observations she made. “I was hiding to see, like, a 12-year-old kid and how he would move. So I was really reproducing the movements and everything.” Once she had the character down, though, Impacciatore decided to test it on the people who had written the episode. “I made a surprise in the writing room where Greg Daniels, Michael Koman, and all the writers were during a meeting,” she says. “I entered with this cap on, and then I started to do it, and I saw Greg Daniels cracking and having tears — he was laughing with tears.” The actress goes on to share how she even found an unlikely coach once filming began. An 11-year-old on set became what Impacciatore calls her “secret director,” with Impacciatore repeatedly asking the young performer whether she actually looked like a kid. “She was encouraging me so much that I believed,” she says. “To make her happy, I made that character the way I did it.” Meanwhile, Rahill had a very different problem when Travis and Adelola (Ikumelo) find themselves caught in a tornado. The actor admits he actually tried to talk Daniels out of one of the scene’s biggest physical gags, which finds Travis clinging to kettlebells over Adelola as the wind repeatedly lifts him off the ground, creating a visual that looks far more inappropriate than his rescue attempt actually is. “I actually remember trying to talk Greg off the ledge with this one,” Rahill says, recalling that he suggested Travis maybe did not need to do quite so much. Even the day before filming, he was still looking for an escape hatch. “I was like, ‘Maybe the stunt double should do it,’ because they hired an amazing stunt double, and they were like, ‘We really want to see your face.’” So Rahill did it himself. “I’m glad that I did it,” he says of the mechanics, which found four men pulling on his body. “It was crazy. I’ve never done anything like that before. And it was painful. It’s a harness lifting you by your body.” But not every joke this season required a harness or some casual people-watching at the gym. Alex Edelman, who plays the oblivious and endlessly naive Adam, reveals that the joke about his scar (and the vasectomy he very clearly did not have) was actually written while they were already shooting the episode. “That was a joke that was written whilst the episode was being shot,” Edelman says, adding that “lots of things are surprises to Adam.” Then again, as he puts it, “Gravity is probably a surprise to Adam.” But Edelman doesn’t think Adam is necessarily alone in that department. When Collider likened his character to an alien who had just landed on Earth, trying to figure out how everything worked, the comedian was quick to make one edit: “I feel like a lot of our characters are aliens who have just come to Earth. It’s a whole bullpen of aliens.” The Paper is now streaming on Peacock. The Paper Release Date September 4, 2025 Network Peacock Cast Sabrina Impacciatore Esmeralda Grand