Sterling K. Brown’s ‘Paradise’ Will Be Your Next TV Obsession

Paradise is a science-fiction thriller that taps into contemporary fears from an indirect angle, and that shrewdness ultimately lends it much of its underlying power. Reuniting him with his This is Us star Sterling K. Brown, showrunner Dan Fogelman’s Hulu series, premiering Jan. 28, is a tale about government duplicity, authoritarian villainy, and traumatic isolation that blends the realistic and the fantastical to moving and unnerving effect.

Balancing large-scale government conspiracies with nuanced character drama, it’s a long-form affair that improves with each chapter, peaking near the end of its maiden season with a heart-stopping episode that elevates it to must-see TV status.

Paradise has kept its premise secret in advance of its premiere, but it drops its bombshell in its opener and ultimately can’t be discussed without revealing it—so consider yourself warned.

(Again, warning: spoilers ahead.)

In a quiet sunshiny suburban community, Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Brown) keeps watch over President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), who drinks too much and uses smiles and jokes to mask his misery. Cal’s wife (Cassidy Freeman) is ready for a divorce, his son (Charlie Evans) thinks he’s a failure, and his dad (Gerald McRaney) looks down on him for being a wimp who needed his powerful father’s help to be shepherded, every step of the way, to the White House.

If those weren’t enough problems, Xavier appears to hold a massive grudge against his boss, no matter that he’s intensely committed to protecting him. All in all, the commander-in-chief has it tough, so it’s almost fitting that on a bright, normal morning, Xavier finds him dead of a fatal bludgeoning in his bedroom.

Xavier is shocked by this discovery, and amidst Paradise repeatedly jumping backwards to detail his initial meeting with Cal, he bucks protocol by locking down the scene for 30 minutes before reporting the situation to his superiors. Complicating this homicide is the fact that Cal’s safe is empty, meaning the perpetrator has stolen a tablet that contains the administration’s most highly classified information.

This is an outright crisis, and Xavier’s investigation soon turns up puzzling details, such as the fact that the house’s security cameras were turned off at the same moment that his fellow agent Billy (Jon Beavers) took a nap on the couch. Xavier also recalls spying an earlier tense conversation between Cal and his billionaire advisor Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), aka “Sinatra,” who effectively runs this enclave. With no clear suspect, motive, murder weapon, or DNA evidence (which is pending), he finds himself staring down a mystery full of dead ends.

(Spoilers follow.)

Compounding matters is the fact that Xavier and his fellow citizens aren’t living in a normal neighborhood—they’re actually in a giant mountainside cave in Colorado, where the U.S. government built a monumental free-standing community shelter for those selected to survive the apocalypse. The ducks in the pond are fake, the sky is a high-tech digital screen, the liquor supplies are finite, and Xavier is still fuming over the fact that his wife Teri, their daughter Presley (Aliyah Mastin), and son James (Percy Daggs IV) aren’t with him.

He’s additionally not happy, if unsurprised, about the fact that his conduct on the day of Cal’s demise puts him in the crosshairs of Samantha, whom Nicholson plays as a titan with a measure of arrogance—born from talent, intellect, and power—that’s downright chilly, especially when she’s casually smirking her way through a conversation with an underling.

The series’ early going is fixated on Xavier’s attempts to figure out who assassinated Cal, and that quest entangles him with a variety of key players, including head of security Robinson (For All Mankind’s Krys Marshall), who was having an affair with the president, and Gabrielle (Sarah Shahi), a therapist who helped design this haven.

Like Silo, Paradise is a sci-fi saga about quarantine, and yet Fogelman never once makes overt reference to, or parallels with, our recent COVID-19 nightmare, instead suggesting such links through a plot that eventually roots itself in similarly timely ideas about climate disaster and international warfare. Marrying pandemic and doomsday fears while telling a whodunit filled with complex characters, it delivers the best of all worlds.

Helmed by a group of talented directors (including Bad Santa’s Glenn Ficarra and John Requa), Paradise treats its players not as narrative pawns but as three-dimensional people, thereby elevating the stakes of its action, and if it’s a tad too eager to off some of its more captivating personalities, its willingness to kill further amplifies its suspense.

Every one of its cast members does excellent work, led by a fantastic Brown and Marsden, who imbue Xavier and Cal with conflicted emotional, psychological, and ethical layers. Regular flashbacks flesh out their messy backstories and the root causes of their current choices and predicament. That also goes for Nicholson’s Samantha, a Machiavellian manipulator whose curt, sharp nastiness, often delivered with an eye-rollingly sarcastic smile, is thrilling. Nicholson has never been better, often turning the proceedings into a personal showcase.

Fogelman’s one misstep is embellishing virtually every installment with a sad cover of a famous pop song (“Another Day in Paradise,” “We Built This City,” “Eye of the Tiger”)—a groan-worthy device that doesn’t work the first time, much less the fifth.

That aggravating affectation aside, though, the series gains steam as Xavier uncovers details about Cal’s execution and, with it, the secrets that he and his bigwig ilk were hiding from the rest of the survivors. It then explodes with pulse-pounding terror and anguish in its penultimate episode, which largely focuses on the day of the catastrophe that sent these men, women, and children underground, and expertly melds believable disasters and dilemmas with an out-there twist that keeps the material firmly embedded in genre-y terrain.

Paradise may hinge, at outset, on the disclosure of its central conceit, but what’s impressive about Fogelman’s venture is its ability to develop its overarching premise, and particular story, in consistently intriguing, moving, and harrowing ways. Without having seen its season finale, it’s difficult to know if Hulu’s latest sticks the landing while setting up tantalizing future threads. Nonetheless, even without that knowledge, it feels an awful lot like television’s Next Big Thing.