Twenty years on from its premiere, The US Office remains hugely popular comedy comfort food – and this follow-up series, set around an Ohio newspaper, deserves to be just as big a hit.

What kind of child wanted to be Clark Kent instead of Superman? Ned Sampson, the new editor of an Ohio newspaper pointedly called The Toledo Truth Teller. That goal, he says, was "much more noble and much more achievable". Domhnall Gleeson makes Ned earnest and engaging as the centre of this charming, smart, thoroughly winning spin-off of the US version of The Office. The creators of The Paper – including Greg Daniels, who adapted the American Office from the British original – have found the magic formula for making an offshoot work. The new show is the same only different. It has the DNA, droll humour and sharp mock-documentary style of The Office. There is a similar ensemble of characters, down-to-earth enough to seem authentic and exaggerated enough to be comic. But it is also distinctly itself, reflecting how the world has changed in the 20 years since the US version began.

The Paper is built on the reality that journalism has morphed from the old print, fact-based days Ned romanticises, giving the show a more incisive, timelier focus than its predecessors. But it handles that theme lightly. And while the key to the US Office was how it softened the acerbic David Brent (Ricky Gervais), turning him into the bumbling but well-meaning Michael Scott (Steve Carell), Ned is more intelligent and less blundering than both. He gives the series an even warmer tone, so that, timely though it is, The Paper also functions as just the kind of soothing escapism today's fraught times might call for.

It turns out that the Dunder Mifflin paper company from The Office was sold to another paper company called Enervate. In one of the show's sly jabs at how print journalism is fading away, Enervate's products include toilet tissue and a newspaper. The old documentary crew returns to chronicle The Truth Teller. Once flourishing, it now shares a floor with the Softees bathroom supplies team. "I start work at the paper," Ned says, bright-eyed on his first day. "Which paper, news or toilet?" he's asked. He is determined to make his paper an actual news source again. But this idealist is also just gullible enough to have plenty of hapless moments.

Mare Pritti is the other character who is intelligent and relatively realistic, a well-matched colleague for Ned. Chelsea Frei makes her sincere and also exasperated. A veteran and former reporter for the US Army paper........

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