Tag: Trick

This post contains spoilers for “Wildcat Is Down,” Episode 1 of Paradise.

When it comes to a television show, what’s the difference between a twist and a trick? Misdirection or deception? An effective mystery or a cheap one? Paradise, the new Hulu show from Dan Fogelman, might have you asking some of these questions. Fogelman is, after all, the creator of This Is Us, the 2016 series that became a smash hit by turning a family drama into a goddamn Rubik’s Cube.

Once it settles into its groove, Paradise—which released its first episode on Sunday, followed by two additional episodes today—is less at war with itself than This Is Us, with a natural, organic reason for there to be a twisty mystery alongside quieter drama. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) has been killed, and Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) has reason to believe that something is off with the investigation. Along the way, we learn about the ways all of the affected parties are connected, for a bit of This Is Us–esque family drama. It’s kind of a funny juxtaposition, but not an unsatisfying one, as it toys with the audience’s sympathies in a way that just makes the whole mystery juicier. But there’s a catch, and like Paradise, I’ve withheld it from you: I’m skipping most of what happens in the first episode. Isn’t that annoying?

It’s kind of impressive, the layered bait-and-switch that Paradise pulls. I would call its central mystery of “Who killed the president?” the good kind of TV mystery, one that will draw viewers to Paradise week after week. (And thankfully, after its staggered premiere, Paradise is getting the weekly treatment.) However, “Who killed Cal Bradford?” is not the question anyone will have after watching the premiere, “Wildcat Is Down.” Instead, they’ll want to talk about the episode’s final twist, which suggests a very different show than what Paradise ultimately is, and it does so in the most annoying way possible.

Over and over again, Episode 1 cuts away from a scene just before some foundational secret is revealed: the contents of a high-tech lockbox described as “the most important box in the world,” several mentions of the events in “Colorado,” and multiple cryptic comments about wives and kids. As anyone who has seen “Wildcat Is Down” knows by now, much of this is to preserve a secondary mystery: that the show is set in an underground shelter modeled to look and feel like Anytown, U.S.A., after some kind of terrible disaster.

This reveal is handled in the most smug manner imaginable. The morning run Xavier takes at the start of the episode is inverted with a panicked race home at the end, the idyllic neighborhood around him revealed to be an engineered one: The empty streets are now full of people using wristbands to do everything; just up the block from an ice cream stand is a shop for getting your wristband serviced; and once static signs are revealed to be smart screens updated with real-time information. Oh, and those ducks you thought were real? They were in fact little floating drones, placed there by municipal workers. You fool!

Part of the reason why this first-episode twist grates so much is that it comes alongside some well-deployed obfuscation that does a lot to deepen Paradise’s central characters while also ratcheting up its big mystery. The way “Wildcat Is Down” slowly unspools, and then complicates, Xavier’s relationship with President Bradford via flashbacks is compelling, inviting the viewer to reconsider their assumptions about their otherwise stalwart protagonist—something the show will continue to get mileage out of as it works its way through its bench of characters in the investigation’s orbit.

What we’re really talking about here is the difference between a show’s writers directly withholding information from the viewer and a show’s characters withholding information from each other. Both are viable storytelling techniques, but the latter is always going to be more satisfying for the way that it invites the audience to participate. If a puzzle-box show starts to feel like it has too strong of an authorial hand that turns one side of the box away just as the audience expects to solve it, then that’s not an effective mystery. It is, however, a great way to piss people off.

This is worth keeping in mind as puzzle-box shows run amok on streamers. Some do this well enough—Severance and Silo are series about characters with a limited understanding of their world, and at the shows’ best, each new discovery the characters make cranks up the tension considerably, deepening the drama. On the other hand, you have shows like Yellowjackets—about to return after a disappointing second season—which is running out of ways to plausibly have its characters talk around its central mystery.

Nothing about this TV mystery dilemma is new. Television is an open-ended medium, and shows can run indefinitely, while mysteries demand closure. It’s a problem as old as Twin Peaks, and the dance between resolution and perpetual uncertainty for the sake of more time spent with a cast of characters is part of the fun. The streaming era adds new wrinkles—writers have received notes from executives about making streaming shows friendlier to those who aren’t paying attention, which could conceivably result in a world where the only way to get a viewer invested in a mystery is by tricking them, and playing a little unfairly.

Which, I suppose, is how you get a show like Paradise, a pretty compelling drama about the people chosen to survive the end of the world. But would you have watched it if that was the show you thought you were watching?