I watch a lot of television. Considering that my job is “television critic,” my options on that front are limited. However, there’s been so much television being made for so long that even in the post-peak era of Peak TV, you can’t catch everything. So despite the popularity and cultural cachet of his twisty family drama This Is Us and his star-studded mystery series Only Murders in the Building, I’ve never watched a Dan Fogelman show before.
However, I have watched shows about post-apocalyptic human communities before. Fallout. The Last of Us. Silo. Station Eleven. This is to say nothing of less far-flung dystopias like Squid Game or Severance, or more far-flung dystopias like Andor and Foundation. If there’s one thing that doesn’t surprise me, it’s discovering a TV show is about the world collapsing.
So I found the climactic twist of the series premiere of Paradise — in essence, the entire Secret Service political thriller you think you’ve been watching has been taking place in an underground city engineered to preserve the human race from extinction in an as-yet unspecified global catastrophe — less ludicrous, less of a sharp left turn, than many viewers seem to be. Does it feel sudden? Oh, for sure! But considering TV’s fixation with life after armageddon, not to mention the state of the world outside the four edges of your screen, this viewer, at least, rolled with it pretty easily.
Sterling K. Brown, as compelling a screen presence as ever, stars as Xavier Collins, a high-ranking agent with the Secret Service. He’s in charge of security for the big man himself, President Cal Bradford — a hard-drinking, tough-talking, more or less openly ignorant, allegedly progressive Southern politician just elected to his second term. The implication is that it’s his personal charm that got him reelected rather than any particular policies. A guy getting elected because people find him entertaining rather than particularly good at the job — imagine that!
It’s not an easy gig. Collins and Bradford get along despite their differences, one of which is skin color. (Bradford openly gives Collins the job in part because his race makes for better optics. Presidents caring about optics is part of the show’s science-fiction aspect, perhaps.) But Bradford’s tenure in office has made him many enemies, particularly over something ominous going on in Colorado. When a would-be assassin tries to plug the president over this, Collins catches the bullet meant for Bradford. In their subsequent heart-to-heart, both men seem appropriately awed and humbled by the events that have transpired, a moment of human connection that’s important to remember for the story moving forward.
Indeed, it seems likely that this display of loyalty is what earns Xavier (just plain X to his friends) a seat at the table with the major players in the country’s government. Bradford grants him the highest level of security clearance so that he and the other muckety-mucks can clue Collins in on the big secret about Colorado: They’re building an underground city to withstand an extinction-level event happening sooner rather than later.
Since all of this is revealed in flashback in bits and pieces throughout the episode, this final revelation makes many things click into place. For one thing, it explains why the President lives in a Curb Your Enthusiasm-looking mansion on a residential block instead of the White House. (I’d assumed they said he was on vacation and I just missed it.) But more importantly, it explains the schism between Bradford and Collins that we’ve seen in their tense recent moments together — prior to the president’s successful assassination by unknown parties, right within the presidential residence.
Collins spends the episode taking control of the scene. Using Jane (Nicole Brydon Bloom), a young agent, to lock down the premises, he calls in his trusted friend Billy (Jon Beavers), whose digestive complaint is a running gag, to investigate. Meanwhile, he boxes out some of his colleagues — including a high-ranking intelligence official codenamed “Sinatra” (Julianne Nicholson) present at the briefing, and a rival Secret Security agent named Robinson (Krys Marshall) who’s been having an affair with the prez and could be a suspect in his murder. The information about his life and backstory emerge from the intermittent flashbacks, and from his adorable interactions with his kids, Presley (Aliyah Mastin) and James (Percy Daggs IV), before school in the morning. So it’s not long before we figure out that Collins’s beloved wife is dead.
And once we find out the truth about Colorado, we can figure out why. In the Strangelovian scramble for slots in Carnival, the name given to the post-apocalyptic suburbian utopia with an artificial sun constructed beneath the Rockies for Bradford to preside over, you can’t fit everyone. Clearly, Bradford’s decisions led to the exclusion of X’s wife; begging Collins’s forgiveness is the last thing Bradford does before the two never see each other again. Meanwhile, Billy’s careless dozing on the job and a gap in the security-cam footage mean just about anyone could have come in and killed the president, but I’d imagine losing his wife places Agent Collins, the last known person to see him alive, near the top of the suspect list.
Did I mention this is all taking place in gigantic impregnable bunker with a lamp in the sky where the sun should be? I did? Okay, as long as that’s clear.
Even after just one episode (out of three debuting simultaneously), the strengths of Paradise are obvious — and they have nothing to do with the twist, or even with the simple murder mystery. If anyone’s gonna care about any of that at all, they owe it to Fogelman’s knack for writing engaging, real-feeling friendly banter, and the casting of the deeply charming (and good-looking, which doesn’t hurt) actors Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden to deliver much of it. Whether Xavier is allowing his kids to gently bust his chops, or whether he’s doing the same thing to his buddy Billy, or whether he’s navigating his complicated relationship with President Bradford, the conversations are lively and hard to predict from one beat to the next. It’s a gift to write that kind of scene, and I feel I can assume without looking that this is what drove This Is Us at least as much as the twists and turns.
I also assume we’ll get a whole lot more of those in the episodes to come. When you drop “oh by the way, this is science fiction” on the audience at the end of your pilot, it’s hard to imagine there are no further tricks up your sleeve. That’s putting aside the fact that Fogelman made his bones off creating an engaging sense of mystery and surprise for his viewers. The subject matter feels weird in the present moment, that’s for certain — for one thing, it presupposes the continued existence of the federal government, which seems like an open question at this point. Many of the creative choices — the pedestrian teal-and-apricot color grading, a breathy ominous cover version of a pop hit to close the episode out. But “What will they do next?” is a decent hook, especially with actors like Brown, Marsden, and Nicholson dangling from it. Sure, I’ll bite.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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