Review: Filled with narrative zigzags, ‘Paradise’ will keep viewers on the edge
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“Paradise,” now streaming on Hulu, begins as Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) goes for a morning run in his picture-perfect, neat and tidy neighborhood. It’s reminiscent of the new urbanism of the Disney-created Celebration or Seaside, Fla., where “The Truman Show” was filmed, or, indeed, a Hollywood backlot, with its old-fashioned “town square” recognizable from myriad movies and TV shows. It’s a place that speaks of the good life, where the nostalgia is so thick you could cut it with a knife and butter your Wonder Bread with it. Whatever your views on this sort of urban planning, in the context of fiction it smells fake and fishy, and indeed, as will be made clear by the end of the first episode, it is.
And the title is obviously ironic, as any title with the word “paradise” in it would be.
Xavier’s run takes him into what, on the evidence of a single house, is the rich people’s neighborhood — there is no poor people’s neighborhood — where he banters with Billy Pace (Jon Beavers), a man in black, whose superior Xavier is. After some morning conversation with his children — older, efficient Presley (Aliyah Mastin), who is concerned about her father’s health, and dreamy younger James (Percy Daggs IV), who wears character-defining glasses and is reading “James and the Giant Peach,” which momentarily disturbs Xavier — Xavier returns to the big house in a suit identical to Billy’s. The house and grounds are filled with other men and women in black, including Jane Driscoll (Nicole Brydon Bloom), which tells us that they are high-end security — though not secure enough, as Xavier discovers that the man they’re protecting is dead in his bedroom, his head stove in.
The actors star in Hulu’s “Paradise,” which reunites Brown with “This Is Us” creator Dan Fogelman and meditates on climate change and technology.
So this is a murder mystery. In flashbacks — there’ll be flashbacks aplenty across the series’ eight episodes — we learn that the victim is the president of the United States, Cal Bradford (James Marsden), and Xavier is, or was, his lead Secret Service agent. So this is possibly a conspiracy thriller. Bradford, once upon a time a charming politician with no identifiable politics but liked by the people and trusted by other leaders, has lately become a sad drunk who goes about all day in his bathrobe, and whose formerly chummy if professional relationship with Xavier has turned icy, if professional, much to the president’s dismay. Why that should be will be revealed, as will so many things, in due course.
But wait, there’s more! (Big twist coming, so stop reading now if you have an aversion to anything that might be called a spoiler, even if it’s actually the premise.) One notices that everyone in town wears a personalized bracelet that takes the place of money, unlocks car doors and school lockers and transmits civic announcements; an electronic sign reads “Dawn delayed by two hours,” for “routine maintenance.” And so, finally, we learn — last chance to leave — that this pretty little city is located under a big dome, under a cycloramic sky, beneath a big mountain in Colorado. So this is a science-fiction show. A sci-fi murder mystery conspiracy thriller.
They’re all there because of an “extinction-level” event up on the surface, the details of which are sort of hazy and not especially important. “Paradise” is not “about” climate collapse or nuclear weapons or a giant asteroid or an unstoppable virus, or any of the things that typically polish off the world in postapocalyptic fiction. This is an enclosed-space story, like “Silo” or “The Prisoner,” or “Wayward Pines,” or “From,” or “The Good Place” or “Murder at the End of the World,” anything set on a stranded spaceship, where the characters have nowhere else to go and no apparent way to leave. “Gilligan’s Island,” too, I suppose.
In another flashback we get to know Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), once a simple multibillionaire who did her own grocery shopping with her family. But something broke her — nearly every character here is broken, it’s a virtual trauma convention — and now she is the coldly efficient power behind what is meant to resemble a government. (Apart from the dead president, replaced by a useless vice president, there’s just a kind of boardroom filled with fat cats — nothing to do with the real world, I assure you.) As do most of the main characters, Nicholson gets a longish theatrical monologue to remind us that there’s a hurting person in there somewhere, and, really, she does a great job of it. (Not very Sinatra-like, though.)
There are a few romantic affairs and a (very) little sex to keep life lively, and a sweet coming-of-age friendship between Xavier’s daughter and the president’s floppy-haired son (Charlie Evans), of which I would have liked more. Sarah Shahi plays Gabriela Torabi, a grief counselor who, among other things, performs the practical service of getting other characters to talk. Gerald McRaney plays Bradford’s horrible father, a Joe Kennedy type, who has dementia, though just how much is hard to reckon; and Krys Marshall is Agent Robinson, who I believe is Xavier’s superior, or acts like it, anyway; she has a secret — from the other characters but not from you.
The actors are very fine. Brown somehow manages to turn his buttoned-up work self and at-ease home self into a single person, believable in either mode (though better company in the latter). As Billy, Beavers is quite touching in a role that wouldn’t ordinarily demand it. Marsden is a well-cast stand-in for whomever you ever voted for purely on the grounds of whether you’d have a beer with them or not, though in his case it likely would be whiskey. Nicholson is tasked with making herself unlikable, flashbacks excepted, and does, though one can regard her as tragic in a quasi-Shakespearean way.
As to the larger device, you will just have to find yourself a giant peg from which to suspend your disbelief. Besides the technical and human challenges of putting 25,000 people under an underground dome — that was another closed-environment series, “Under the Dome” — in a simulacrum city with goods and services, carnival rides and climate controls, even with 12 years of prep time and an ocean of private money on which to float the enterprise, the idea that this could happen secretly is, of course, ridiculous. But making sense is not a hill that such shows ever care to die on.
I would guess that creator Dan Fogelman (“This Is Us”) wants us to think a little about real-world inequality — in a flashback, Xavier’s daughter is seen getting in trouble for a class project using doughnuts to demonstrate how the world’s riches are unfairly divided — and in particular those billionaire boys with their giant island bunkers and plans to move to Mars when Earth is done. (It was wise, dramatically, to make Sinatra, who represents that class, a woman.) And maybe a bit about revolution. That is a worthy subject. But the greater purpose of the show, naturally — and one it largely fulfills — is to guide you from revelation to revelation, keeping you off-balance with ethical hypotheticals and narrative zigzags, so you never know just where things are headed.
Apart from a second season.
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