Domhnall Gleeson has had a strange career and one even more unusual than that of his father Brendan, who went from playing Michael Collins and William Wallace’s right-hand man in Braveheart to plucking a comedy mandolin on Saturday Night Live.In the case of Domhnall, the peripatetic winds of fate have carried him from an early incarnation as a romcom staple (Richard Curtis’ About Time) to a Star Wars baddy, and now to a star of so-so American TV. He did his best in the underwhelming HBO romance/thriller Run and has the difficult task of bringing order to the uneven cringe-comedy of The Paper, which now returns for a second season (Sky One, Thursday, 9pm).The Paper is a spin-off of the American version of The Office. But unlike its predecessor, it has a crisis of confidence that is essentially existential. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be an uproarious satire of the American workplace or a love letter to the dying institution of local news reporting in the US.[ Domhnall Gleeson: ‘My life in Ireland means too much to me. It’s no sacrifice to live here’Opens in new window ]Those contradictions are baked into Gleeson’s character of Ned Sampson. He’s a gosh-darn, gee-whiz type who, decades ago, might have been played by James Stewart but whom the Dublin actor has his work cut out getting a handle on. The problem is that Ned – editor of the ailing Toledo Truth Teller – is both the straight man and the punch bag. Imagine if the UK version of The Office decided Ricky Gervais’ David Brent and Martin Freeman’s Tim were the same person.That’s a lot for Gleeson to juggle. There is the added complication of Ned’s romance with his star reporter Mare (Chelsea Frei) – a strait-laced audience insert whose job is to roll her eyes at The Paper’s assemblage of ridiculous characters. These include not only Gleeson’s Ned but also Sabrina Impacciatore as Esmeralda Grand, editor of the Truth Teller’s clickbait hellscape of a website, who is appalled at Ned’s commitment to actual journalism.The whole thing is held together by Gleeson, who is flailing and incompetent one moment, a romcom hunk the next. In particular, it never scans that Mare thinks of her boyfriend as both a bit of a joke and as someone she wants to be with. You have to credit Gleeson with doing his best, and his American accent is serviceable in the sense that it is not actively distracting. But he’s up against it in a comedy that, while it delivers wry chuckles at a steady clip, is caught between the urge to be sincere and the obligation to be uproarious. In the end, it achieves neither.