The president is dead? The Secret Service compromised? The idyllic town in which all hell is breaking loose isn’t what it seems? Excellent. Fantastic. Let’s go.
Hulu’s new series Paradise has all the trappings of an airport page-turner… Yep, that’s exactly it, without irony. In a mode that would delight Michael Crichton, This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman layers the ensemble-driven, flashback-heavy dramatic playbook from his NBC drama with political thrills and a grounded science fiction scenario.
Right off the bat, the first season feels like a formula perfected. Over the eight episodes of its first season, Paradise works in every one of its modes: as an absorbing, twist-filled romp; a sensitive character study; a perfect vehicle for This Is Us vet Sterling K. Brown to go full “Jack Bauer on 24”; and, most surprisingly, a searing indictment of ultra-wealthy opportunistic oligarchs who swoop in to grab power after cataclysmic disaster. (Ring any bells?) I was immediately hooked, especially after the Paradise premiere’s major reveal.
[Ed. note: This story contains major spoilers for episode 1 and giddy enthusiasm for future episodes.]
Early in Paradise’s first episode, lead Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Brown) discovers the bludgeoned body of President Cal Bradford (Westworld’s James Marsden). The assassination is both a fuse for a ticking-clock murder investigation and the show’s fulcrum as it dips into the past.
Threaded through the mystery are scenes from Xavier’s life at home, memories of hanging with his pilot father, and key moments in his ascent to the White House detail. In his arc, Marsden, perfectly cast, charts how Cal transformed from the bookish son of an oil magnate into an alcoholic W. Bush-esque dunderhead. In orbit of both men is Julianne Nicholson (Mare of Easttown, Janet Planet) as “Sinatra,” a billionaire with a tragic past who influences both Cal’s presidency and the murder investigation.
But even in the heat of the moment, as Xavier’s agents race to find answers, the past looms over everything. That’s because the world in which President Cal Bradford was murdered is far from normal: As revealed at the end of episode 1, Xavier and his fellow Americans actually live miles underground, in a picture-perfect suburban fallout shelter built to withstand an extinction-level event. An unthinkable crime has been committed in a would-be utopia.
The final moments of Paradise’s premiere almost feel like a hat on a hat on a hat. Was a presidential murder mystery so pedestrian that the world around it needed to be The Truman Show? In this economy?
But in episodes 2 and 3, Brown’s and Nicholson’s ferocious performances drew me deeper into Fogelman’s apocalyptic pitch. Brown, still glowing from his Academy Award-nominated work in American Fiction, seems capable of any performance mode — and it’s all on display. One second on Paradise he’s a compassionate TV dad who can turn on the waterworks; the next he’s a strategic operative moving into action at the sight of a threat. Lots of emotions are bubbling under Xavier’s surface, including resentment toward his dead boss, which cascades into the greater conspiracy. Executive producers John Requa and Glenn Ficarra (Crazy, Stupid, Love, Focus), who also directed three episodes together, trust Brown’s piercing eyes to tell 90% of Xavier’s story.
Nicholson is another naturalistic performer who elevates Paradise’s dangerously silly material into high-tension drama. Episode 2 lays out Sinatra’s story, revealing how a tech breakthrough — and a few billion dollars — can warp even the most romantic soul. In the present, Sinatra is one of the key people maintaining (or enforcing?) order in the artificial biome, but as the Paradise writers carefully piece together, even her most autocratic decisions stem from personal loss incurred years before.
In the wake of Lost’s success in the mid-2000s, every network scrambled to replicate the creators’ mystery-box approach without actually unlocking what was so special about the show: the ebb and flow of character. Everyone on the island felt like a real person, capable of doing good and bad. Paradise is pulpier than Lost, but it’s the rare high-concept show from the last 20 years where I was as gripped by the flashbacks as the immediate whodunit. Subsequent episodes reveal more about Bradford’s political rise and explore the past of one of Xavier’s shadier cohorts, all of whom made their way to the protected state when millions of others clearly did not. The why is not just plot — it is part of their daily lives.
The other Lost trick is knowing when to get serious. Often, Paradise is not. The writers pepper each episode with over-the-top espionage sequences and faux-Glengarry Glen Ross monologues that Nicholson can chew to bits. The broadly lit, ABC-drama sheen makes it go down easy, though on Hulu, Fogelman can splash a little blood or add a little steam with a sex scene to rival his TV-MA competition. Each episode even ends with an on-the-nose, trailercore cover song. (Episode 1 is Phil Collins’ “Another Day in Paradise,” of course!) That needle-drop trend marks the series’ worst This Is Us-ism, which I am sure many people enjoyed, considering that the series ran for six seasons.
But Paradise does get serious. The big surprise is that Fogelman and his team are fully committed to spilling the secrets at the right time, and walloping the audience when called for. It is not a show that will take three seasons to divulge what is really going on, and Xavier is not a clueless protagonist. In just a few episodes, he’s on the offensive, and a vacuum-sealed human habitat is sent spiraling. In episode 7, we get the full story of what went down and why, and it’s one of the most deeply unsettling hours of TV drama I have seen in ages.
Paradise arrives just as the writers of Severance prove that their polished, character-driven series was not a one-off fluke, but an enigmatic story on the road to somewhere interesting. Fogelman’s series feels just as sturdy, in a non-prestige-TV way. By the end of seven episodes (Hulu held off providing the finale for critics), there feels like both closure and runway for the future. A Paradise season 2 could be absolutely terrifying — which, twist, is a huge relief for those of us trying to find weekly TV worth investing in.
The first three episodes of Paradise are now streaming on Hulu. New episodes premiere each Tuesday.