Yahoo Lifestyle Paradise Review: Sterling K. Brown’s Wildly Ambitious Hulu Thriller Grabs Us, Even Before the Big Twist
Watching Hulu’s new thriller Paradise is a bit like eating a hot fudge sundae served on top of a chocolate cake: It’s a little messy and almost too much at times… but it’s hard to deny that it’s pretty damn delicious, too.
Sterling K. Brown reteams with This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman for an intricately crafted, compellingly told puzzle-box mystery packed with twists… including a big one that changes everything. The pieces of the puzzle don’t always fit together perfectly, and there’s always the fear that a show like this will fall apart before delivering on its promise. (We’ve been burned before.) But based on the first three episodes I’ve seen — premiering this Tuesday on Hulu — it’s solid enough to keep us onboard, at least long enough to see where it’s going.
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Brown stars as Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent who lives in an upscale neighborhood that’s so pristine, it almost seems too good to be true. He’s protecting a former U.S. President, the cocksure Cal Bradford, played by James Marsden. But as the pilot opens, Collins finds Cal dead, and we’re left to puzzle over who did it, and why. Now that would be plenty of story for most TV shows to chew on, but not enough for this one, apparently: The pilot ends with an absolute gob-smacker of a twist that both narrows the playing field and opens up intriguing new storytelling lanes.
The mystery starts right away, with unexplained wounds, mysterious numbers and cryptic messages peppered in for us to decipher. (Fogelman loved to keep us guessing and theorizing on This Is Us, and he’s back in his mad-scientist laboratory here.) As for the big twist, it’s so big that we have to admire Fogelman’s willingness to swing for the fences here. But will we get answers? Or will we just get strung along, like so many shows have done to us in the past? Thankfully, Paradise manages to generate real tension even before the big twist hits, with multiple layers of conspiracies and cover-ups.
At first, Paradise feels like a hard pivot away from the heart-tugging family drama of This Is Us, and doesn’t seem to have nearly the same level of emotional heft. But a series of flashbacks (another Fogelman staple) provide the backstory we need to connect with these characters, filling in those blanks while the murder mystery chugs right along in the present. The cast helps add emotional depth, too. Marsden is slyly charming as Cal, a good-time guy with shades of George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and Emmy winner Julianne Nicholson (Mare of Easttown) is exceptional as an enigmatic tech billionaire who holds a strange sway over everyone in her orbit.
For those of us who know Brown well from his days as This Is Us’ Randall Pearson, Collins is similar in a lot of ways: an upstanding guy who does everything by the book and keeps his emotions inside. Collins is hard to read at first, but Paradise does give Brown some chances later on to open up and show us what’s behind his tough outer shell.
This is a wildly ambitious concoction Fogelman has cooked up here, and we can see the seams at times: Each episode mechanically ends with a cliffhanger like clockwork — in what seems to be a firm dictate from the streaming overlords these days — and the soundtrack relies a little too heavily on moody covers of retro pop hits. Still, it’s exciting to see a show shoot for the stars like this and be willing to land smack down on its face… and so far, we’re really not sure which way it’s going to end up.
THE TVLINE BOTTOM LINE: Hulu’s wildly ambitious Paradise might bite off more than it can chew, but it’s an entertaining thriller with serious emotional heft.
And now that the first episode dropped early on Hulu, we want to know what you think: Give the premiere a grade in our poll, and hit the comments to share your thoughts.
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