Better Late Than Never* Paradise

 

Like his peers among the great actors in television such as Jon Hamm and Matthew Rhys Sterling K. Brown spent more than a decade in small roles on relatively inconsequential series in the first half of his career. Then in 2016 he broke through with a one-two punch all but unheard of even in the era of Peak TV.

First he astonished the world with his work as DA Christopher Darden, charged with prosecuting O.J. Simpson in the landmark first season of American Crime Story. In the year that brought forth the era of Peak Limited Series Brown took the Emmy for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited Series/TV Movie. Within weeks of winning his Emmy he landed his second role of a lifetime as Randall on This Is Us one of the greatest television series of all time. The following year he became the first African-American actor in nineteen years to win Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama.

From that point forward everyone has seen the brilliance of Brown in almost every place imaginable. He has been nominated for an Emmy in almost every category an actor can be, Best Guest Actor in a Comedy for his stint in Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy for his one season stint on Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. He has won Emmys for Outstanding Narrator and has been nominated for his voiceovers in Invincible. And when Aaron Sorkin needed someone to take on the role of the late John Spencer in a reunion episode of The West Wing, Brown took up the role of Leo McGarey and fit right in. The silver screen has also been witness to his brilliance: he earned award chatter for his role in Waves and picked up an Oscar nomination for his exceptional work in American Fiction last year. There seems to be literally nothing he can’t play.

So when it was announced than Brown was reuniting with Dan Fogelman, who had created the role of Randal for This is Us for a new series for Hulu called Paradise, it quickly became one of the most anticipated events of 2025. The trailers from the series showed Brown playing a character that appeared light-years removed from Randall Pierson. Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent who had been tasked with guarding an ex-President and who had been brought in for interrogation when he was murdered. The trailers gave hints that there was something darker beneath the surface but even those of us who knew the enormity of the kind of twists that Fogelman was fond of giving the viewer from the pilot of This is Us on could not have prepared the viewer for what we would see her. By now the series has finished and has been renewed for a second season so the truth, as they say, is out there. For the purpose of this review I will stick only to the first two episodes of the series:

SPOILER WARNING AHEAD

Even though I was aware of the dark secret behind the pilot I was still impressed how Fogelman chose to reveal it in ‘Wildcat is Down’. In the direction and the performances we can see that Collins’s is clearly having trouble sleeping, is dealing with some kind of PTSD and is having trouble putting together coherent sentences. We see Collins due his daily jog, exchange banter with his partner in Secret Service, go back to his home and have breakfast with his teenage daughter Presley and his son, James. He seems upset to learn that ‘Cal’ gave a copy of James and the Giant Peach to him. Then he goes back to the luxurious townhouse where Cal Packard lives and we start seeing flashbacks between President Packard and Collins when he asked him to his detail. As the episode progresses we see an assassin try to kill Packard and Collins takes a bullet for him, though we don’t know why. We also know that Cal has a troubled relationship with his wife – “She voted for the other guy,” he tells Collins after getting drunk – but we’re not sure of the coldness.

Then when Collins goes to the bedroom he knocks on the door. After no response he goes in and sees that Packard is dead, clearly the victim of a crime of violence. Instead of calling it in he spends the next half-hour only calling in one agent, having them search the grounds and looking through the security tape all without telling anyone why. Eventually it becomes clear that on that day Cal got very drunk and had a visitor that night, and while doing so the lead agent fell asleep and the security footage was frozen for an hour and a half. He searches the bedroom, sees the safe is open and something important has been taken. Finally he calls it in.

We see a gathering of people, none of them looking like typical law enforcement, a lot of people in suits and a prominent woman who everyone defers too. A new agent takes authority – the woman Packard was having a late-night rendezvous with. Then we hear Packard and Collins’ last conversation in which Collins makes it clear that he will never be able to forgive the President for what he did. It’s only in the final minute of the episode that we finally realize where the town, which has been called Paradise, truly is. It is not a gated community but an artificial one – and one located who knows how far underground.

Now I will tell you who some of the other cast members are because they too would be enough to draw in the viewer even if Brown’s presence alone couldn’t. Cal, the youngest ex-President, is played by that virtuoso James Marsden, who has spent the last decade having his own career recognition playing an automaton on Westworld, twins on Dead to Me and himself on Jury Duty. Sinatra, the woman who we will soon learn is the creator of Paradise (and it’s left unsaid that this makes her God) is played by Julianne Nicholson who for more than twenty years has been wowing the world of television with her understated performances before finally getting an Emmy for her work on Mare of Easttown. (I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Marsden and Nicholson’s first series role of any significance was on Ally McBeal where they played former lovers.) Sarah Shahi, known for playing the emotionless Agent Shaw on Person of Interest and one of the many LA lesbians on The L Word, plays Sinatra’s therapist and perhaps most trusted confidante. Other actors of prominence surround us, including Gerald McRaney, who This is Us fans know, played the doctor who was a confidante of Milo Ventimiglia and Mandy Moore throughout the series.

In the last episode we met Sinatra and Nicholson got to give another one of her powerhouse performances. A tech-billionaire who has used every resource she has to create Paradise she is clearly the most influential person in the world right now. She has made it clear that the cover story is going to be that Cal died of natural causes and panic cannot be allowed. We know that Cal and Sinatra were old friends when he was still in the Senate and there’s an excellent she arranged for his election to the White House as a contingency plan. We also know that she lost her son of a mysterious illness and that left her horribly traumatized. She attended a summit where she and Cal were the few attendees of a lecture which made it clear a global catastrophe was eminent in the next decade. Asked what she could do to protect her child, she was told: “Find a very deep hole and start digging.” We now know that is exactly what she has done – and it’s clear that Paradise is modeled on what she thought the afterlife should be for her dying son.

 It’s worth noting that Cal Packard assumed the role of President when civilization collapsed to Paradise and as we saw never truly recovered from that burden. We know that an extinction level event led to everyone being brought to this town in what very likely was a mad rush, we also know that it left the rest of civilization to die out (or so every resident at this point) and we know that Cal knew something about the outside world that he was trying to pass on to Xavier before he died. There is a code Collins is trying to translate during the episode and while he doesn’t know what it is, we have a pretty good hint.

Two episodes in, it’s still unclear what Paradise the civilization is for its residents. It seems to be a type of utopian community and on the surface everyone seems to be functioning, but its pretty clear that’s just on the surface. If the two people we’ve seen so far in private Collins and Packard are any indication, neither was dealing with it very well and it’s not clear yet if Sinatra has even processed in it beyond knowing her daughter is safe. That said one of the ironies of the title is the fact that this ‘Paradise’ has been dug very deep in the earth and according to most religions that gets us closer to hell than heaven.

This is a cast of exceptional actors mostly cast against the type they play. Xavier Collins is a working father but he’s cold and guarded as opposed to the figure of warmth Randall Pierson was. Marsden has spent his career on TV playing characters (even the version of himself on Jury Duty) that were far darker below the surface than on appearance and we see that in his flashbacks with Cal. Nicholson has spent her career playing working class women struggling for acceptability in a man’s world, here Sinatra is clearly has more power than the President and can play chess with white men at will. All of them give them the kind of work that is worthy of Emmy consideration down the road.

Not to state the obvious but Paradise is a much different series than This is Us. The latter was famously about how our family shapes us, about how joy is always mixed with tragedy and for all its tears, was one of the more optimistic shows in a decade of pessimism and melancholy. Paradise clearly has a better handle on the nature of mankind and indeed I suspect may very well be the first kind of new dystopian series we see in the future as the kind of crises become far more likely in the decades to come.

Fogelman never struck me as the kind of writer who could deal with so many shifts in tone the way that such masters as Vince Gilligan and Howard Gordon have been able to. But in Paradise he and his writers have mixed several. It’s clear we’re watching a post-apocalyptic story but we’re also watching a murder mystery, a domestic drama and even a show about growing up. It also asks a question that by and large most post-apocalyptic series such as The Walking Dead have avoided: what’s life like when civilization has collapsed and you’re in one of the few places that are guaranteed to be safe from outside forces? And more importantly, how do you prepare for a future when the planet you live on no longer has one?

There’s also the darkly satiric subtext that a post-apocalyptic civilization basically looks exactly like the real one, only more expensive. Everyone goes to school, lives in fancy houses with swimming pools and gardens, you don’t need money in the traditional sense, you still open your locker with technology, kids still play hooky from official meetings and a bunch of powerful rich, white people are still controlling what everybody says and does. Even after the apocalypse we’re still acting like everything is perfectly normal. Cal’s death upsets the natural order of things and the powers-that-be are more concerned with image that the loss of the President. And people are still pissed if you smoke in the privacy of your home.

It's probably not a coincidence that Paradise has debuted on the same service that brought us The Handmaid’s Tale which will air its final season this month. Dystopian visions for television were all the rage even while Obama was Presidency and I suspect the demand will accelerate now. The reason I far prefer this vision is that though both series have dark visions of the future Paradise used subtlety where Handmaid’s never stops hitting you over the head every single moment. While Handmaid’s shows how much the world might change, Paradise makes it clear it probably won’t and that it is only the actions of a few good people who can make a difference. And that even when there is nothing left, you have to be persistent and fight. I don’t know what the outside world looks like in Paradise yet. But I know as long as there are men like Xavier Collins still around there is still hope.

*The reason there is an asterisk before my Better Late Than Never headline is that in the past two weeks ABC, one of the corporate partners of Hulu has been rebroadcasting the series on Mondays at 10. I suspect there has been some censorship – most likely with language – but I also think that the bulk of what makes the show work is still present. I also approve the series now being rated TV-14 as I suspect, as with such masterpieces as The Crown and The Gilded Age, the TV-MA rating was inexplicable. It is a fitting show for mature teenagers.

My Score: 4.75 stars.