‘Paradise’ Creator Dan Fogelman On The Twist In The Pilot & Why He Kept The Show’s Plot Under Wraps For So Long

Lynette Rice
·9-min read

SPOILER ALERT: This story contains plot points from the first three episodes of Paradise on Hulu.

After dropping the first episode of Paradise on Sunday, Hulu has made episodes 2 and 3 of the thriller available to audiences that should have provided a bit more context to that mysterious twist at the end of the pilot.

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Here, creator Dan Fogelman talks about what inspired him to write the thriller starring Sterling K. Brown, James Marsden and Julianne Nicholson and why we had to wait until the premiere to finally learn what he’s been working on since wrapping his NBC drama This Is Us in 2022.

DEADLINE: Before we get into Paradise, I want to start at the moment after This is Us. Did you wonder if you developed a reputation as a creator of triple-hanky family dramas?

DAN FOGELMAN: I was pretty exhausted. It had been a long six years of making a lot of television. The last couple of years had been fraught with the pandemic, and I’ve always done really this different stuff. A couple of them hit really big and then some of them have bombed really badly, but they’ve always kind of been different. I’ve always gotten the feeling like when one hit big, people would ask that question. I did Cars and Crazy Stupid Love, but This Is Us kind of swallowed those whole, at least for me personally. I didn’t actively say I don’t want to write another family drama that has tears in it. It wasn’t something I was consciously thinking of, but I do think that well was a little dry for me. So when I started thinking about what I was doing next, I wasn’t consciously going, “I could get pigeonholed.”

I’ve had the kernel of this idea for a very long time, well over a decade. I had this idea of the people in the world who have great power and the people whose profession it is to take care of them and how that might be encapsulated by a Secret Service agent and a President of the United States. I had the big idea for the show and what was going to happen in the show for a while. I’d considered writing it before I had done This Is Us, and I wound up writing This is Us. So after This is Us, I took a little break. I was producing Only Murders in the Building in New York and I was thinking about what my next show might be, and that kernel of the idea had stuck with me. One day I sat down and just started writing it.

DEADLINE: When did you pull in Sterling?

FOGELMAN: I wrote the script and I was like, “Oh, I really like this, but I’m not exactly sure where I’m going with it yet,” which is not normally my M.O. I was actually afraid to give it to anybody because I was worried somebody might want to make it before I really knew what it was. So I sat with two of my writers on the show, John Hoberg and Scott Weinger, and my producing partner. We batted it around for a couple of weeks, talked to a lot of experts in a lot of different fields. And then I felt like I had it and at that point I sent it to my studio, Disney and Hulu, and they wanted to make it. Everybody started asking, ‘Sterling must be so excited. Is Sterling excited to play a part?’ I was like, no, I haven’t given it to Sterling. I didn’t know that my brain was even there. More and more people were saying it. Then I realized, “God, I have been picturing Sterling the entire time.” But there was no way Sterling was going to want to do another TV show with me. So I had this moment where I was like, “Oh, if I send it to Sterling and he passes or isn’t able to do it, I might just not do it.” But then Sterling read it in less than four hours and called me and he said, “I’m in.” So we were off to the races.

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DEADLINE: You mentioned doing a lot of research.

FOGELMAN: We did deep research about everything from political conspiracies to, if you were hypothetically drawing a government up from scratch, how would you hypothetically govern itmost effectively to keep the people peaceful and happy? We had sociologists write papers for us. We did a lot of research on architecture. Our directors went everywhere. They got a special tour of the sphere in Las Vegas. A tremendous amount of thought went into it.

DEADLINE: I guess the cool part of TV is that you don’t really need to explain how you dug up a mountain underneath Colorado to create a new community.

FOGELMAN: In this particular case we just said it would be next to impossible unless you had unimaginable amount of wealth and resources that this group of people had. That’s kind of how we did it. The science behind it is that they potentially found a seam inside of a mountain that granted them access to this kind of cave. I don’t know if I should be talking about that. I dunno how to talk about this television show yet!

DEADLINE: Why the shroud of secrecy when you were first pitching the show? There was no logline released when it was sold to Hulu.

FOGELMAN: There are two mysteries in the show. There’s the mystery behind the greater conspiracy of what’s going on in the world and what has happened in the world. And then there’s the mystery of who killed the President. So there’s two different mysteries and I think it’s a complicated thing. When This Is Us started, there was a twist at the end of the pilot and it was a different era with the internet and how spoilers are now put in headlines. I’m a big Survivor fan. I still watch Survivor and it drives me crazy when on one of my timelines, I’m going to check my phone and they put the picture up of the person who got voted out before I’ve been able to see the episode. There’s a shot of secrecy whenever you have twists and turns. You want the audience to experience it fresh and not have to close their eyes every time they see something about the show that a great journalist is writing. It’s a complicated dance where you kind just have to close your eyes these days and hope for the best. The days of being able to go see The Sixth Sense four weeks after it came out and not know what the secret is are sadly over unless you are actively playing defense against spoilers. So the big shroud of secrecy was because there was a big twist obviously at the end of the pilot, and I wanted as many people as possible to experience it fresh the way that the early viewers would.

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DEADLINE: You seem to like twists at the end of pilots. Is that your signature move now?

FOGELMAN: I don’t think so. I swear I’m not thinking about twists or whatnot. I do love storytelling that turns things on its head, whether it’s in the middle of the episode, the end of a first episode or halfway through a series. I think part of the fun of television in this model of streaming is being able to click on the next episode or have to wait for the next episode. And so I do like when at the end of episodes you’re sent in a new direction. With that first episode I had the opportunity to do that. I’ve only done a couple of real twists in my life. This Is Us was one of the craziest. I’ve had one kind of in the middle, but it’s certainly not something I’m actively chasing, but clearly it’s something I really like. It’s fun to surprise an audience, especially if it’s hopefully well baked in and it’s like, “Oh sh*t.” I think television can be fun and propulsive.

DEADLINE: As a show creator, do you feel like it’s your responsibility or is it important to consider the political climate before creating a show like this?

FOGELMAN: Ironically, even though it’s about a president and a Secret Service agent, there’s really not any politics in it at all. I’ve done other shows that aren’t about presidents that have more politics in them. And again, I don’t know that it was a conscious choice, it’s just not what it’s about. There are other things that lay dormant and eventually not dormant at the bottom of this show that are going on in the world. When I wrote This Is Us, I wrote a lot about my family and especially about my mom, who I lost. But it wasn’t like I sat down to write, “Oh, I’m going to go write something about my mom.” I just kind of wrote what was on my mind. I think that’s similar here. There’s some timely stuff in here, but it wasn’t an active choice. I’m not a politician nor a politico. I’m not trying to say something. It’s just this is what’s in the ether right now.

When I was writing it, we stopped during the midst of the writers strike. We were in a very different political climate now than we were when it started shooting. The world is moving at warp speed right now. So to try and say something with the amount of time it takes to make something is nearly impossible. So I just tried to write a good story that had some things that I felt like were timely, but I didn’t want it to be a homework assignment for anyone to watch it.

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DEADLINE: You have some really unique cover music in the show.

FOGELMAN: Correct. It’s very much explained in the eighth episode, the soundtrack to our season. It’s part of the larger mystery. But it’s fair to say James Marsden’s character had a great love of ’80s and early-’90s rock, and it’s the music that kind of was the soundtrack of my early years. These songs don’t necessarily sit on the tops of the Mt. Rushmores of songs, but they’re meaningful and fun to me. So we thought of getting covers of them made that go the opposite way.

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