More than just Amazon's answer to Stranger Things: 8 shows like Paper Girls

When it was first announced, Amazon’s Paper Girls drew immediate comparisons to Netflix’s own 80s-kids-on-bikes fantasy series Stranger Things. The show is certainly more than that, and now that it has premiered, you may be looking for more shows like Paper Girls. We’ve got you covered.

Based on the comic book series by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, Paper Girls follows a group of newspaper delivery girls in 1988. The morning after Halloween, they find themselves caught in a war between time travellers, eventually pulled into the future where they meet their older selves and work to find a way home as they contemplate the life choices they have yet to make.

Read on for a list of eight shows like Paper Girls to watch next. And if you haven’t watched Paper Girls yet, you can check it out on Amazon Prime Video by hitting the link below.

Shows like Paper Girls

Shining Girls

Using time travel to maintain power is a key aspect of Paper Girls, and on that level, Shining Girls is very much a show like Paper Girls. The Apple original series sees a newspaper archivist whose grasp on reality keeps shifting as details of her life change unexpectedly. She slowly starts making sense of her struggles when she realizes that a man who attacked her years earlier has shocking abilities to change historical events and uses his gifts to prey on women.

Stranger Things

While Paper Girls carves out its own path, it would be disingenuous to suggest it has no overlaps with Netflix’s flagship series Stranger Things. The two fantastical 80s-set shows about kids (often on bikes) certainly complement one another. The series sees a group of youngsters in Indiana fighting evil forces that attack from a mysterious parallel dimension, all with mysterious ties to one girl with special abilities.

Outlander

A British army nurse working on the battlefields of World War II finds herself transported back in time to 1743. There, she has to think fast to survive and maybe eventually find her way home. On her journey, she falls for and marries a Scottish warrior with a mysterious past, taking to the high seas in this swashbuckling adventure.

The Wilds

If you like watching teen girls work together against an unknown threat, there’s another great Prime Video show like Paper Girls: The Wilds. When a group of teen girls from all different backgrounds crash lands on a desert island, they have to work together to survive, all while slowly realizing that they may not have found themselves stranded together by accident.

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A Discovery of Witches

Watch a young woman discover a whole hidden world beyond her imagining in A Discovery of Witches. And if you stick with it, you’ll even see some time travel in this Sundance Now and Shudder co-production. When a historian dicovers manuscripts about magic and witches, she forms an unlikely alliance with a vampire as she explores her own arcane gifts.

Loki

The MCU’s Loki is certainly a show like Paper Girls in its focus on the multiverse, time travel, and the responsibilities that come with a malleable cosmic timeline. In it, a version of Loki jumps through the multiverse, upsetting the “sacred timeline.” Rather than erase him altogether, though, the “Time Variance Authority” recruits him to help stop yet another version (or variant) of himself. It’s a wonderfully pulpy adventure through time and space, with the god of mischief learning how to responsibly use his great power.

The OA

Paper Girls’ eerie tone and story of people displaced in time bring to mind Netflix’s The OA. When a young woman miraculously returns home after seven years missing, her hometown is shocked to learn that she is no longer blind. As she readjusts to her life, she recruits a chosen few to help her break through the known barriers of reality, slowly revealing what happened to her.

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Orphan Black

The premise of meeting different versions of yourself is full of possibilities. The Canadian sci-fi series Orphan Black takes a slightly different approach, dropping the time travel and multiverse tropes of Paper Girls and Loki. When a woman witnesses her perfect doppelganger’s death, she assumes the stranger’s identity, but soon she finds that the two women have more in common than just looks. Rather, they were both part of a cloning program, and there are many more duplicates out there.

Those are just a few shows like Paper Girls. Check them out if you’ve watched the Amazon original series and want to find your next streaming obsession.

What did you think of Paper Girls? Will you be checking out any of these titles? Let us know in the comments.