Paradise Season 1 Review

​​This review contains full spoilers for Paradise Season 1.

Paradise was never going to be what you thought it was. That’s also what makes it so oddly fun. What starts as a family drama turns into a murder mystery and then a sci-fi conspiracy about the survivors of a world-ending catastrophe living underground in a massive city. And that’s only the first couple of episodes. Over the full run of season 1, it becomes an ouroboros of a show that consumes itself with joyous abandon – throwing in twist after twist and flashbacks galore, utterly unafraid to undercut everything it previously set up. That tendency reaches its pinnacle in the season’s penultimate episode, which captures a surprisingly relatable sense of existential dread as the world crumbles around secret service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) and President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). The cloying attempts to tug on the heartstrings – the show was created by This Is Us’ Dan Fogelman, after all – yield mixed results, but it’s in episodes like this where Paradise fully draws you in.

At the same time, just as Paradise can be deathly serious, it’s also unrelentingly silly. Fogelman’s hybrid of This Is Us and Lost boasts lines of dialogue so ridiculously overwrought and self-serious that they become comical. A character uses the cover of a steamy shower to say, with a completely straight face, “I have a message from the president.” A villain gives a monologue, then punctuates it by saying, in so many words, “maybe I am a monster actually.” Paradise doesn’t care for subtlety, though this is a feature, not a bug. The talented likes of Brown, Marsden, and Julianne Nicholson make the most of this pulpy material even when the story feels like it’s on the verge of collapse. While not fully triumphant television – it’s often visually bland, and a few stretches in the middle fall flat – it’s largely well-constructed, and bolstered by winning performances.

At the core of these eight episodes is the entertaining-enough mystery of who killed President Bradford. While investigating his boss’ death, Xavier discovers that shadowy leader Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Nicholson) – megarich architect of the show’s namesake bunker – lied to them. She’s trying to cover up that there are people alive on the surface: survivors of the volcano-tsunami-nuclear-armageddon chain reaction depicted in episode 7, “The Day.” Some of this is revealed earlier in the season, though seeing Xavier piece it together remains enjoyable because Brown brings a sense of gravitas and determination to his part.

There’s chaotic pleasure in seeing Paradise lay out a culprit and his motivation (and his previous assassination attempts) over the course of the season finale, but it’s also where the show is most creaky. Its thudding lines of exposition, while quite humorous, stack awkwardly on top of each other. Spelling everything out like this is tiresome. Sometimes, even for a ridiculous show like Paradise, less can actually be more. But the way it pulls this endgame off is so entertaining that I just went with it. It’s like Paradise is speedrunning through its greatest hits while trying, mostly successfully, to tie up loose threads. We get a hurried investigation, plenty more flashbacks, and a final confrontation where Xavier tries to bring the murderer to justice. There’s even something to chew on in the (admittedly hurried) gestures towards bigger ideas about how the underground society is just as broken as the one that preceded it. Through it all, Brown is a consistently compelling screen presence, shining through the ludicrous plotting by hitting some big emotional notes.

It’s hard to think of another show as enjoyably preposterous as Paradise. Yes, the twists feel telegraphed from a mile away and it’s way out of its depth when it ponders about the future of humanity. That just makes it all the more fun to watch Paradise careen through that stuff anyways. At every turn, I found myself shaking my head at just how silly things were getting and laughing along at Fogelman and company’s commitment to play it with a straight face. All the wild shifts between the different shows within Paradise make it the mashup for our moment of inert, stretched-thin streaming series. The first season blows through any and all conventions to become something whose crowd-pleasing free-for-all is oddly comforting. It ensures it never gets too bogged down, feeling like the type of must-see, kinda trashy TV we don’t often get any more. For all its many flaws it's a delightful, rejuvenating gem.