Colin Mathews

Colin Mathews works the school paper's news desk with more enthusiasm than reliability, chasing stories, angles, and quick money with equal energy. He is quick-witted, prone to exaggeration, and never quite as slick as he thinks he is, forever landing himself in scrapes he then has to talk his way out of.

Paul Reynolds plays him as a lovable schemer whose confidence always slightly outpaces his competence, which makes his failures funnier than his successes. The writing uses him as comic pressure valve against the show's sharper, more serious characters, but never lets him become a pure joke — there's real nerve and heart underneath the bluster.