Paper Girls lets its teens actually confront — and live with — death

polygon.com:

Amazon’s adaptation of the Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang comic series, much like the source material, is a show about death. Paper Girls’ time-traveling tale is about many other things, sure: the tensions between who we wanted to be and who we wind up being, generational divide and trauma, plus a time war. What hit me, though, was that a bunch of its uniformly brilliant cast play characters who learn of their own ends long in advance of it coming, leaving them to confront head-on the one thing none of us can escape: dying. It’s a gnawing, knotty feeling that’s difficult for just about anyone to unpack. Except most of these characters are having to do it at 12 years old.

[Ed. note: This post contains spoilers for the first season of Paper Girls.]

You can see it best in the story of Mac Coyle, played perfectly by Sofia Rosinsky, who has to shoulder some of the show’s darkest themes. She’s the group’s brash, loud, swearing kid who’s had a truly shitty hand dealt to her. Her upbringing has been tumultuous, with absentee parents and violence, leaving her the most cynical of the four titular paper girls. You learn quickly how bad she’s got it and it leaves all her barbs feeling fragile, concealing a lot of hurt she’s not yet old enough to begin dealing with. Hell, she isn’t even really able to acknowledge it. This is all she’s known and she has to survive it first. So when their trip to the bright, glamorous future of 2019 results in her learning not of an unexpected adulthood like the other girls, but of a shocking death at the age of 16 to cancer, it hits you like a freight train. It’s cruel and unfair. And the show doesn’t pretend otherwise.

One major change the show introduces is the presence of an older brother for