“Paradise” is a gripping thriller once the secrets start to come out

“Paradise,” a new drama from “This Is Us” creator Dan Fogelman starring that show’s Sterling K. Brown, begins as a murder mystery. The show, which now has three episodes up on Hulu, stars Brown as Xavier Collins, the man charged with protecting President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). In the early moments of the series, he’s failed at exactly that; Bradford has been murdered in his home. But Collins’s reaction — he carefully examines the entire murder scene and the rest of the building before notifying anyone about what’s happened — immediately lets the viewer know something else is going on here.

In fact, quite a lot is going on here. The first episode has been out since this past weekend, but spoilers are ahead if you’d rather go into the series without learning the big secret revealed in the premiere (which you get your first glimpse of in that premiere). The idyllic town where they live is idyllic for a reason — it’s an entirely artificial community constructed underground. How and why the characters all got there is teased out over the course of the season, but very quickly it becomes clear that something catastrophic has occurred to drive them underground.

Fogelman, no stranger to jumping around between the past and the present during his “This Is Us” days, offers glimpses of all of these people at earlier times. Bradford and Collins are on strained terms at the time of his death, but we quickly learn that they were quite close in the past; the reasons for their break are gradually revealed. And while Bradford may be president, he’s grappling with a power behind the throne in the form of Julianne Nicholson’s tech impresario Samantha Redmond. She’s steely and sinister, but we soon learn she’s also battling a traumatic past.

The early episodes are slow going. Clues about the town’s origins are doled out sparingly, and the murder investigation stalls out once Collins is pulled off of it thanks to his strange behavior after finding the body. And while Brown is himself a tremendously compelling performer, his Collins fails to deepen beyond a couple of notes: He’s a grieving widower with cute kids, and a pure-of-heart lawman who’s determined to root out the corruption that’s led here. Nicholson, also a talented actor, inhabits a character who’s perpetually moments away from tapping her fingertips together villainously like Mr. Burns on “The Simpsons.”

It’s Marsden, somewhat surprisingly, who gets the meatiest role, despite being murdered in the pilot. His good looks help him craft a portrait of a callow man thrust into responsibility by his overbearing, wealthy father. In flashbacks, Bradford is revealed to be both complicated and shallow: a man who wants to do good but has never had much willpower to do so. He’s trapped in a life many people would want, but he hates it. He’s only there because of his own extraordinary privilege, and he knows it.

If those early episodes were where the show stayed throughout the season, I’d probably advise you to skip it. I wasn’t overly interested in learning more about the town, or following Collins’s oddly cheerful flirtation with a town therapist (Sarah Shahi), who maintains a concerningly close friendship with Redmond. These folks just aren’t quite compelling enough on their own to make the slow reveals worth your time.

But when the show finally starts giving some answers in the latter half of the season, I became so invested I didn’t even want to pause an episode. The answers themselves matter less than the excitement of watching the reveals; despite Fogelman’s past with emotional dramas, the best moments in “Paradise” are when the thriller aspect takes center stage.

The show’s emotional weight tends to be tied to how complicated it is for all of these people to live the way they do. What does it mean to survive? How could they possibly stay true to the people they were prior to all of this? How can they live with the choices they were forced to make in order to get here?

Until the show begins to open up into storytelling about its broader world, the paradisiacal town has to be the focus, and it simply lacks the excitement of similar idyllic-until-it-isn’t premises. The town is neither sinister enough nor hedonistic enough to be compelling. I kept waiting for some kind of menacing shoe to drop, so to speak, and it never quite does. I’ve seen “Pleasantville”; I know there’s abundant fun to be had with the idea that something that seems like heaven can very well be the opposite.

The upside to all of this, and the reason you may want to keep watching, is that the show doesn’t hold its cards that long, and a better and more confident show emerges over the course of the seven episodes.

PARADISE

Starring: Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, James Marsden. On Hulu.

Lisa Weidenfeld can be reached at lisa.weidenfeld@globe.com. Follow her on X @LisaWeidenfeld and Instagram @lisaweidenfeld.