Tag: Hulus

This post contains spoilers for the first three episodes of the Hulu series Paradise.

There’s no way to talk about Hulu’s new drama thriller Paradise without talking about the twist at the end of episode one. That’s a familiar place to be for a show made by Dan Fogelman, a writer previously known for “there’s no good way to talk about the NBC family drama This Is Us without talking about the twist at the end of episode one,” and also “there’s no good way to talk about the Fox baseball drama Pitch without talking about the twist at the end of episode one.” Those two other series, although distinct from each other in plot, aren’t far apart in terms of tone and scope. They’re interpersonal dramas about desire, ambition, intimacy, and hope set in a recognizable contemporary world. Their twists are surprising but mostly structural. You thought these people were different, but they’re the same characters! You thought he was hard on her about her career, but he was a hallucination the whole time!

Paradise is a different variety of Fogelman twist. It has just as much of a topsy-turvy rug-pulled-out-from-under-you impact, but it has a different kind of relationship to the broader show and puts Paradise into an increasingly crowded collection of television shows all meditating on the same general idea.

All right, enough: Here’s the premise and then the twist. Sterling K. Brown (a This Is Us alum), is Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent assigned to protect Callum Bradford (played by James Marsden), the former president of the United States. Bradford is now living in a pristine, highly controlled gated community, so although Collins is carefully doing his duty and trying to stay intently vigilant, no one else seems all that concerned about the challenge of protecting President Bradford. This makes it particularly surprising when, at the beginning of the first episode, Collins shows up for his morning shift and discovers that President Bradford has been murdered.

This is not the twist, it’s the rough setup — something odd is happening in this small community, but Paradise creates the larger impression that this will be a show about a violent rupture in a community that was built to be completely and utterly safe. Who did the murder? Why does Collins seem not at all sad about the president’s death? Why are we skipping back to flashback scenes about how Collins was first assigned to the president’s detail? The twist finally comes into focus in the final minutes of the episode. This is not just a gated community; it’s an underground bunker built inside a mountain in Colorado. These are not just wealthy people who’ve opted into this exclusive town; they are the last people alive in the United States, having fled into this bunker because a global disaster destroyed the rest of humanity. President Bradford is not just the former president; he’s the current president of this bunker town, and he’s the guy who oversaw the end of the U.S. and fled to this bunker to save himself. Collins hates President Bradford, because although Collins’s two children made it into the bunker, Bradford did not help save Collins’s wife.

Yes, Paradise is yet another show about creating or living in a bunker of apocalypse survivors. In the last two years alone, it joins Silo (underground silos to protect humanity from the wasteland above), Fallout (same, but fallout shelters), and Murder at the End of the World (Arctic Circle five-star hotel bunker situated near an underground energy plant/AI server). Further back, there’s also Snowpiercer (apocalypse bunker, but it’s a train) and American Horror Story: Apocalypse (apocalypse bunkers, but there’s magic). I could get into it, but one doesn’t have to peel back that many layers to imagine why current television might have a preoccupation with surviving the apocalypse.

Where Pitch and This Is Us use twists to reorient how characters relate to one another, Paradise deploys the classic science-fiction-style revelation that the world is not what it originally seems. It’s helpful that Paradise’s twist is about world-building rather than how the show works, and the whole thing feels less boxed in by its own cleverness. Where This Is Us had to continually find new, unexpected ways to reveal information about these characters’ lives, Paradise can slip into a thriller mode where things happen in a straightforward, chronological way. Even when Paradise pulls a classic Fogel-move, like circling back to a minor character to reveal a bucketful of backstory that connects to the main plot in surprising! ways!, there’s so much momentum carried by the murder mystery and apocalypse questions that the later twists don’t have to carry the entire emotional load.

Does that mean Paradise is perfect? Absolutely not. It is frequently silly, weighed down by both its own hyperseriousness and its constant reliance on needle drops of Gen-X anthems timed precisely so that a character says something vital and shocking a split second before a crooner wails some on-the-nose lyric. (Collins’s teen daughter and Bradford’s teen son listen to “We Built This City,” and guys … they built this city. Not on rock ’n’ roll, no, but inside a rock.) Most of them aren’t by their original performers, either; they trend heavily toward either sad emo covers or sad techno-inflected covers, and the songs combined with the unimaginative, dour visuals make Paradise feel chintzier than the other streaming bunker shows, which invest in more high-gloss aesthetics.

Somehow, though, Paradise is often more fun than most of the other bunker shows. It’s big and broad, with snappy pacing, continually shifting goalposts, and an innate sense that if it doesn’t keep offering up new surprises, it will instantly lose the audience’s attention. Paradise’s is a real smooth-brained apocalypse, and that’s not meant to be derogatory. Some shows respect their audiences by demanding patience and careful close reading; some shows respect their audiences by grabbing their faces and yelling, “The ducks in the pond are fake!! They’re plastic ducks!” Paradise is the latter. They built this city, and the president’s dead, and the ducks are pretend, and nothing is as it seems. Cue the overwrought cover of “Eye of the Tiger” and let it wash over you.