Author: Cory Stockwell

Absorption: On “The Paper” Cory Stockwell cory.stockwell@tutanota.com The first thing you notice about “The Paper,” the Croatian political drama currently available on Netflix (season three is slated to be released in the coming months), is its grayness: from the clothing worn by the main characters, many of them journalists working for the newspaper that gives the show its name, through the interiors – offices, homes, and also the smoke-filled bar where the journalists spend far too much of their time – that always seem just a tad too dark, to the stately, off-white Hapsburg-era buildings and concrete docks of Rijeka, the coastal city where the show takes place, everything is strangely muted, and there never seems to be quite enough light to make things out clearly. This is all the stranger, to my mind at least, given The Paper’s setting: this part of the Adriatic coast is known for its many beaches, to which tourists from all over Europe flock every summer, and as I binge-watched the first two seasons, I kept expecting to be dazzled by the light of this region that is just a short distance from Italy. But the summer in which this light might appear never arrives. The series seems trapped inside an endless, rainy winter, even in the establishing shots with which every episode begins, generally bird’s-eye panoramas of the city and the sea...