Paper Girls

With no shortage of excitement, thrills and big-ticket sci-fi moments — gigantic mecha-robot fights, tame dinosaurs, apocalyptic time-rifts open in the sky — the show manages to balance these whizz-bang scenes with rich and fulsome character development that would be at home in any top-tier drama.

When it comes to a show as crafty and good as “Paper Girls,” you can survive without a large emphasis on its broad science. ... It's more about getting to know these girls and the surprise paths they take, decades away from their paper delivery gigs or the people that they thought they would become.

Emotional performances ground the sci-fi epic in the recognizable details of growing up. As girls from the ’80s grapple with the uncomfortable realities of futures they’re just starting to build, the show expands—without ever getting tangled in too many story lines—to imagine how the future of humanity might be shaped by decisions we make today. Overstuffed with plot but bereft of substance, Stranger Things wishes it had so much left to say.

It is tremendous fun. It has great Stranger Things energy (or should that be The Goonies and Stand By Me meta-energy?) but everything feels fresh.

"Girls" is eerie, heartfelt, complex (and sometimes just complicated). It starts off with a great deal of panache and excitement but falters slightly in the final few episodes of the eight-episode season due to some poor pacing and exposition. ... "Girls" is more than just a "Stranger" knockoff.

At its core, Paper Girls is a coming-of-age story that anybody can see themselves in. It is a story about family, perseverance, confronting our insecurities, and embracing what makes each person different all in the middle of an at times overly ambitious story of time travel.

This first season doesn't always strike the perfect balance between personal drama and sci-fi action (and who exactly the players from the future are and what they want still remains a bit obscure by season's end). But it's a promising start helped by a cast whose strengths extend beyond its four appealing leads.

Paper Girls is not an exciting series. After the premiere, it’s low on set pieces, and when visual effects are necessary, they’re mediocre. But especially in the middle of the season, it’s an astonishingly sweet and carefully emotional series. ... The series loves and respects its characters so much and prioritizes them over the plot so totally that when the finale decides it needs to establish momentum for a second season, it’s a letdown.

There’s no denying that these episodes, which focus on the personal over the political implications of the overarching narrative, lose out on some of the series’ more potentially unique approach and aesthetics. But creating the connective tissue that binds the paper girls together is also crucial to laying the groundwork for what they go through, how they cope, and what’s to come.

Paper Girls viewers may require a bit more time to accept what this show is doing. But once they embrace the reality in front of them, they’ll likely enjoy it a lot.

Paper Girls walks the line between riveting and derivative, smart and simplistic, profound and hokey. (The clunky special effects, alas, aren’t doing the show any favors.) But in the end, it’s a highly bingeable slice of summer TV fare that, like its heroes, is going through some early growing pains.

“Paper Girls” has its moments of authentic emotion and a few nifty twists, but it could have benefitted from tighter editing and a more cohesive storyline.

The issue with Paper Girls is how it drip-feeds exposition in an attempt to create mystery, a method that often leaves you confused. ... More casual viewers might not have the patience for Paper Girls’ somewhat chaotic narrative. Those who do stick around, however, will be rewarded with characters that have more heart than those tweens in Hawkins, Indiana.

Before the final scene of Paper Girls, we were going to give this show a big old thumbs down. But that final scene set the stage for a show that has the potential to be a fun ride, or at the very least something that’s a little different than what we’ve seen before.

No adaptation can be perfect, but Paper Girls really doesn’t hit the mark. The fun of the comic is lost, the pacing goes from a thousand miles an hour to a slow crawl and back again in inconsistent waves, and there are times where the show seems like it’s meant for an audience around the age of its main characters.

"Paper Girls" possesses a "Stranger Things"-wannabe vibe, blending coming-of-age elements, time travel, nostalgia and science fiction. The result makes for a semi-watchable Amazon series that feels a little too convoluted to satisfactorily deliver.

Its coming-of-age elements never really integrated into its sci-fi saga. It feels more reminiscent of teenage adventure films from the early aughts like Clockstoppers and Agent Cody Banks than the Wes Craven-esque vision of the ‘80s that its creators intend it to be.

Filled with cheap emotions, faux progressivism, and a story that is somehow both alarmingly thin and endlessly complicated, “Paper Girls” is full of wasted potential.