“Paradise,” starring James Marsden as the U.S. president and Sterling K. Brown as his Secret Service agent and right-hand man, is TV jungle juice in the best way, combining several premises, styles and tones into something so thrilling and potent you barely notice its incoherence. After eight episodes (only seven of which were made available for review), perhaps you will not feel so good, but man, what a wild night. Didn’t we used to do this all the time?
The show, from Hulu, bounces between two main timelines: the present, when our characters live in an eerily cheery gated community of sorts, and five years ago, when Marsden’s President Cal Bradford is about to reluctantly start his second term. What he really wants to do is retire and chill out. Relatable! Brown is Xavier Collins, a stoic father and dutiful wife-guy whose integrity and intelligence put him at the top of Cal’s to-hire list five years ago. Imagine Xavier’s horror and dismay in the present day, then, when someone murders Cal, despite the intensity of his security detail.
Marsden and Brown are mesmerizing together, and their performances fortify — rectify? — the show’s goofiness.
Because lo, this is not just a political thriller. It’s a political thriller with a twist at the end of its pilot. The show was created by Dan Fogelman, who also created “This Is Us,” and that show’s echoes ring out clearly here: The collage of timelines, the weeping over one’s family, Brown as leading man. The “twist” at the end of the pilot for “This Is Us” was that the characters played by Brown, Justin Hartley and Chrissy Metz were raised as triplets, and Mandy Moore and Milo Ventimiglia were their parents. This is also simply the premise of that show, and if you were describing it to a friend, that’s the part you might lead with. That’s the case here, too.
Spoiler alert. Again, I say: Spoiler alert, last chance to avert your eyes.
The twist is that this place where everyone lives, Paradise, is an elaborate underground bunker where about 25,000 people have fled after a vague cataclysm. Cal’s term has been extended here in the underworld, though he isn’t totally in charge. The real top of the food chain is the icy billionaire known as Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson, also excellent). How’d she build it? Why’d she build it? Whom’d she put in it? So are the days of our lives.
The show captures the modern fantasy to simply go live in a hole, especially one that is modeled on Stars Hollow. But we are what we save. In “Station Eleven,” that was maternal medicine and Shakespeare. In “Paradise,” it’s cop cars and oligarchs. Eh, maybe it’s OK to just let the sun melt you or whatever.
In its best scenes, “Paradise” happily recalls many other faves, especially “Lost” and “The West Wing,” and occasionally “For All Mankind.” In its worst scenes, an ill child sagely whispers: “Mom? Am I going to heaven?” while a morose cover of “We Built This City” wails away.
The show is filled with bummer covers of ’80s and ’90s songs and runners about “Die Hard” and “The Karate Kid,” which speak to its frustrating lack of specificity. “This middle-aged man likes ‘Die Hard’” is enough for picking out a secret Santa gift for a co-worker, but it doesn’t do much for character illumination.
I devoured “Paradise,” even when I was rolling my eyes so hard it was practically a workout. Episode 1 is available now on Hulu and Disney+, and Episodes 2 and 3 arrive on Tuesday but only on Hulu, with new installments appearing there weekly on Tuesdays after that. The show does feel like a network drama, so weekly airings feel appropriate, a chance to reconnect with those “24” cliffhangers that used to sustain us.
