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This post contains spoilers for the first episode of Paradise, which Hulu released over the weekend.
When This Is Us debuted in the fall of 2016, its pilot episode concluded with a twist that recontextualized everything we had been watching to that point: Instead of telling the parallel, contemporaneous stories of three groups of people who were seemingly only linked by several of them sharing a birthday, all of them were part of the same nuclear family, and one of the stories was set in the past, showing how two of the characters became parents to the others. The twist —basically, the end of the Modern Family pilot, but now with multiple timelines involved —was surprising, but it didn’t fundamentally alter the kind of show people thought they were watching. This Is Us was a family drama from its opening minute.
Paradise, the new Hulu drama that reunites This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman with his Emmy-winning star Sterling K. Brown, also concludes its first episode with a twist that recontextualizes everything we’ve just seen. But it does so in a much more extreme way, shifting genres in the process and making it all but impossible to discuss in any substantive way without giving away what the show is actually about. Hence, this column is being published after Hulu released the first episode, rather than before. Read on at your peril …
The series begins with Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent played by Brown, whose job appears to be to protect Cal Bradford (James Marsden), a former commander in chief who now lives in an idyllic small town. (How idyllic? If the exterior scenes weren’t shot on the Warner Bros. backlot set that was used for the town of Stars Hollow on Gilmore Girls, then the production designer was a big fan of that show.) Reporting to a low-stress job on another unremarkable morning, Xavier is stunned to find Cal’s murdered body in a room in his McMansion.
From there, Fogelman quickly gets into his beloved fractured timelines, taking us back several years to show how the two men met, and to see Xavier save Cal (who was still president, sort of, at the time of his death) from a previous assassination attempt. For a while, it seems as if Fogelman has tweaked the This Is Us formula from “What if Parenthood were written by the guys from Lost?” to “What if The Diplomat were written by the guys from Lost?” We meet other notable characters in the aftermath of Cal’s murder: tech billionaire Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), esteemed therapist Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi), Cal’s powerful but dementia-afflicted father (Gerald McRaney), Xavier’s boss Nicole Robinson (Krys Marshall), his underling Billy Pace (Jon Beavers), Cal’s son Jeremy (Charlie Evans), and Xavier’s kids Presley (Aliyah Mastin) and James (Percy Daggs IV). And for a while, as we toggle back and forth between those early days of Cal and Xavier’s friendship and the murder investigation, it seems pretty clear what kind of show Paradise wants to be.
So of course, it’s actually about life after a climate-change apocalypse has wiped out the vast majority of humanity.The town is actually in an underground cave, with sophisticated imaging technology used to create the illusion of a sky, daylight turning into night, and so on. Inside, the people who work for Samantha(*) and the town’s other founders do their best to make all the locals feel as if things haven’t changed all that much since the before times.
(*) The show bends over backward to explain that the Sinatra nickname comes from Samantha’s frequent use of hats, even though Nicholson’s head is rarely covered. It’s weird.
It’s not that crazy a mashup of ideas —a year before This Is Us debuted, Fox had Wayward Pines, where Matt Dillon investigated crimes in a small town that was also eventually revealed to be a post-apocalyptic refuge — and credit to Fogelman for getting to it in the first hour, rather than trying to make like the creators of Sugar and waiting till near the end of the first season to tell viewers what the show is really about.
Still, when Paradise works best, it tends to be more from the performances of its actors than from the ways the show explores the murder mystery, the characters’ pasts, or exactly how this sanctuary works and how it feels to live there. After writing for him for six seasons, it’s unsurprising that Fogelman knows how best to spotlight the talent and charisma of Brown. Though Xavier has some family trauma to work through (including flashback appearances in one episode by the great Glynn Turman as Xavier’s airline pilot dad), it’s a more straightforward leading-man role than Randall on This Is Us; if this were a movie 20 or 30 years ago, Denzel Washington would be playing Xavier. As has been the case ever since Brown’s breakout as Christopher Darden in The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, he owns the screen. And he gives gravity to material that can at times be thin and/or overly familiar. Marsden, Nicholson, Shahi, McRaney (another This Is Us alum), and others all have strong moments at different points, in either the past or the present. But the stories themselves are on the bland and predictable side, whether as individual pieces or combined together across these multiple genres. (Of course Presley’s crush on Jeremy will create problems for Xavier’s investigation, for instance, because teenagers only exist on these shows to create obstacles for the grown-ups.)
The one exception is the seventh and final episode critics were given in advance, which is set primarily on the day the world as we know it came to an end, showing all of the impossible, at times monstrous, decisions that Cal, Xavier, and others had to make to ensure that some semblance of human civilization survived. It’s the one that leans most into what’s specific about this apocalypse, who these characters are, and what kind of a new mess they’ve gotten themselves into. The rest is middling and at times outright silly versions of things you’ve seen dozens of times before, well-paced and watchable throughout, and frequently elevated by its cast.
The end of the This Is Us pilot was so powerful that the series kept trying to re-create the impact of that first big twist. This eventually led to lots of unexpected journeys through space (episodes set in Vietnam), time (stories set in the year 2032), and genre (Randall improbably ran for public office in Philadelphia, despite living several hours away in another state). But no matter how big these later surprises were meant to be, it was hard to duplicate that original high, especially once the audience was conditioned to expect and even predict twists. The one at the end of the Paradise pilot is on such an exponentially greater scale than the one from This Is Us that it’s hard to imagine how much crazier the new series will have to get in order to keep topping itself. That’s not an ideal place to be, but it’s certainly better than living in a fake town inside a cave after billions of people have died.
The first three episodes of Paradise are now streaming on Hulu, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen the first seven.
