The newspaper industry may be dying, but word hasn't yet reached the 50-person staff of The Circuit, the award-winning student newspaper (so we're told) of Florida's Cypress Bay High. MTV has picked The Circuit as the next laboratory in which to examine the condition of the socially marginalized, public-schooled American teenager; the resulting docu-series, The Paper, plays like a cross between The Hills and Election. Which is to say it's actually pretty compelling television.

Newly anointed editor-in-chief Amanda, who beat out a crop of her peers for the paper's top slot, and in the process made every single one of them hate her guts, is the loud, obnoxious narrator—and a made-for-TV character in her own right. (Yes, she knows it.) Amanda says things like "procrastination is a foe I have not yet met," often in verse, and typed out her application for EIC while the rest of her classmates were at a house party drinking warm beer out of Solo cups and making out.

She's lonely, of course—when one girl whom Amanda leapfrogged to become editor informs her that she hasn't exactly endeared herself to the rest of the newsroom, Amanda brushes it off, but the camera lingers on her face long enough to let you know she's clearly upset. But stepping on some toes is a small price to pay: "Being editor in chief of my high school newspaper is really going to help me get to where I need to be," she intones at the end of the first episode. We wouldn't go that far, but it's refreshing to see that some of our nation's youth have ambitions beyond the realm of, "I want to be a stylist."

A clip of Amanda being, well, Amanda is above. Girl is a lot of things, but lacking in individual quirk she is not.