Paradise Season 1 Retrospective

 

 

Note: While by necessity this review will contain spoilers, I will do my best to make them thematic rather than deal with the overarching plot of the first season of Paradise. As a result, the central story of Season 1 – the murder of former President Cal Bradford – will remain fundamentally unremarked on here. Because that revelation deserves to be learned by the viewer, I will speak only in the vaguest of terms about who the actual killer is.

 

The only way the final revelations of the first season of Paradise could be any more on the nose would be if we learned that the majority of the workers who died for an apocalyptic refuge were almost entire illegal immigrants. Dan Fogelman and his writers suggest that in the teaser but they leave the viewer to work out the implications. It wouldn’t come as a final twist of the knife because in hindsight it’s very clear that the narrative of Paradise is basically the idea that American exceptionalism must remain intact even if America is fundamentally destroyed an extinction level event.

There were, in hindsight, countless clues mostly subtle ones about the title society that we spent the first season in that nothing changes in America even with the end of the world. Jeremy Bradford made it clear that his father (James Marsden) had basically built a bunker for ‘the gazillionaires to run things’ and by that point we basically know that’s true. The few times we see the council of elders it is clear that they are all white, mostly old and with the notable exception of Sinatra who is the apparent leader, mostly male. There are apparently a lot of minorities to keep the future running but the most prominent ones, Collins and Robinson, as well as most of their associates are all there essentially as protection for the white oligarchy. No one is allowed to have access to guns but the white oligarchy has them and the people assigned to protect them have not be told they exist. The minorities are no doubt the ones who will be the first line of defense – cannon fodder – if things go south while the rich and powerful gather behind closed doors.

There’s no money in this society and everything is free but its also clear there’s still a hierarchy and the elders control it. Sinatra has clearly been engaging in surveillance of everyone’s homes twenty four hours a day and she has no problem doing so with her own therapist, Dr. Satrapi (Sarah Shahi). Similarly its implied that the higher-up have better technology and that they don’t have to share it. This is made clear when we learn from Billy that he and the other security forces turned off the camera on a regular basis to play the President’s video games. The implication is that similar perks are available for the elite and the masses just take the crumbs they are given.

The elite are also determined to keep up the image that this is an ideal society even in the face of the murder of Cal. Sinatra basically orders that the yearly carnival go on as scheduled and makes it clear that Cal’s death be ruled a heart attack, rather than a murder. This is pretty close to giving the plebs bread and circuses.

And all of this became very clear in the final two episodes. ‘The Day’ is mostly a flashback that tells what happened the day the world ended. One of the glaciers finally fell apart and a three hundred foot tsunami formed, overtaking the rest of the world. During this period it is clear that the President and a few select people, all of them in America, had been running simulations based on the possibility of this happening but none of them expected that it would unfold as quickly as it did – they thought they’d have weeks to prepare; they had hours.

It is during this episode and the flashbacks of the one that follows that we realize the true nature of the evil that Sinatra, the Bradfords and her select followers did. They suspected an extinction level event was coming but did nothing to prepare the rest of the world or even the citizens of America about what was going to happen. What it seems they did so was spend all of their money and time making sure that it was completely covered up, almost certainly by buying or forcing all media sources to keep the news secret. And it is equally clear that they did nothing to make sure the rest of the countries of the world could prepare for it themselves. What they focused on was saving their own skin and keeping the cover in place until the last possible minute.

But when it happened Bradford wasn’t completely willing to go along with it. He recorded a message that was essentially a propaganda piece but when he saw the real life consequences he convinced the networks to go with a live piece to tell America that the world was about to end. This doesn’t make him that much better than the rest of the people who ended up in Paradise – he makes it clear that even the people who were with him at the White House were going to be left to die – but he didn’t want to destroy the entire planet as a result.

Sinatra was aware that there was going to be a nuclear war as a result and its very clear she was fine with the rest of civilization dying that way. Cal wasn’t and we see for the first time that he publicly resisted her idea and was willing to give humanity a chance to survive. Sinatra clearly didn’t want this but when Cal made it very clear he was going to do it – and if she put up a fight he was willing to kill her – she backed down.

The kindest thing you can say about Sinatra is that she has some realization in the season finale of how much of a monster she has been in what she’s done. She will be around for Season 2 (that much was clear in the final minutes) but I don’t see redemption in her future, nor do I believe she deserves it. We can’t forget her idea of saving humanity came at the lowest psychological point of her entire life and even then it was to save her daughter. I suspect if she could have just saved her family she would have but she didn’t have sufficient money and she managed to convince the Bradford family to get her the resources she needed. In a series where so much of the story is about the characters and their relationships with their families both in the past and the present, it’s telling that there are only two scenes where Sinatra is with her husband or daughter and the latter is with them standing over hospital bed. One could argue that she feels so guilty about what she did that she can’t look at them any more than she has to but a more cynical explanation is that she’s been using them as a justification for everything she’s done and as a story she wants to wheel out to make her seem like a human being.

Paradise may have seemed like an odd follow-up for Dan Fogelman to do after the masterpiece, This is Us but there are common themes between them. There is the use of the flashback to fill in parallels between the past and the present and more importantly there is the idea of family which is just as critical among the Collins’s and the Bradfords as it is what with the Pearson.

Xavier Collins is determined to be a good father and a good son, much the same way that Randall Pearson was. Xavier is one of the only characters we meet who has a moral code and a sense of right and wrong that is basically the same in the present and the past. Much of this seems to be imbued in his sense of family. This is clear in an episode that deals with the relationship with his father (Glynn Turman) who was a pilot who hoped Xavier would follow in his footsteps but is still proud that his son became a Secret Service agent. That moral code led to Xavier forcing his father to retire when Parkinson’s became an issue and its not clear if they ever spoke again.

Xavier is also, as we see in the flashbacks a devoted husband and father. Given the position to save his family he does everything he can to do so. Throughout the penultimate episode he clearly has more advance knowledge of what’s coming then the rest of the staff and goes out of his way to try and save his wife. We also see the chink in Xavier’s armor here: he’s known for a while he’s one of the privileged few who will get to live in whatever world comes next and that so many of the people he’s known and served with are going to die. But his only concern is for his family, not anyone else’s. Stone-faced he lies to all the other staffers, tells one of his colleagues on the Secret Service he’s not coming and while he’s upset that Robinson shoots him, the fact remains all he was going to do was prolong his life by a few hours. It’s only when he learns his wife is going to die that he turns on Cal for not doing enough. He will this grudge until the President is killed – and only once it’s too late realize just how much he was trying to do.

Cal in flashbacks comes across as a tragic character. We see that his entire life was manipulated by his father (Gerald McRaney in another masterful portrayal) who could only see his son as a reflection of himself. In the last conversation they have before he dies his father, who is clearly suffering from dementia, has a period of lucidity. Cal expects death is coming because of what he’s uncovered and he wants to know if his father was ever proud of him. His father tells him: “You never did anything I didn’t give to you” which are the last words from him he ever says. That his father later expresses something resembling remorse (again, after his son is dead) doesn’t change the fact that he probably did treat him this way his entire life, and that’s just another burden he’s had to bear as well as the world ending on his watch, which has to be tremendous enough.

And the greatest irony is that none of the larger forces end up leading to Cal’s death but one that was completely unaware of the larger conflict. I won’t reveal who that killer was, save to say it is another satiric dig at how this society works. The killer has been hiding in plain sight the entire series and that means they’ve been there for ten years and no one noticed until now. And once you learn the truth it makes a certain sense. Just as in the real world, no one looks at the working class in Paradise either.

This is a dark version of society but there’s hope in it and it comes from the next generation. Presley, Xavier’s daughter has always been supportive even in the darkest times and has always been willing to help the people she thinks need it. When Cal Bradford is killed, the first person she tries to seek out is Jeremy who she doesn’t really know but who she thinks she can sympathize with because she lost a parent too. Even as her father attempts to bring Sinatra and the others to heel, her first instinct is to go to Jeremy, mainly because she wants to know if there’s information about her mother being alive.

And as we learn in the final episode Cal’s actions were done primarily so that he could look his son in the eyes again. He thought it was likely he’d die so he recorded one last mix tape for him – and more importantly a message saying how proud he was of him. “If you don’t like the world as it is, fix it,” he tells his son.

And there are signs that whatever happens in Season 2, the opposition will end up around Jeremy. Once he finds out what’s in the tablet, the first thing he does when the sky falls is climb on a car and tell everybody the truth about what happened: the expedition that the President ordered did bring back survivors, the air is breathable and Sinatra ordered all of them killed. Even as order was ostensibly being restored Jeremy was still talking to an interested crowd and given the final image we see of him that genie can’t simply be put back in the bottle.

Paradise is a dystopian series unlike any other I’ve seen or heard about in the past decade. I’d argue that it’s a far more effective one that so many of the post-apocalyptic series we’ve gotten over the 2010s from The Walking Dead and its many spinoffs and The Handmaid’s Tale, which will be coming to a conclusion within a few days on Hulu. I responded to it on a much greater level because unlike the world of Daryl Dixon or Gilead, which made it clear from the start that this was not our world and kept hitting you in the face with it, Paradise chooses to do what The Walking Dead never did and concentrated on world building. And while Handmaid’s Tale never stopped hitting you in the face with the parallels to today’s society, the ones in Paradise are initially less important to the action that the viewer – like myself – might not realize it until we’re done.

Only The Last of Us is Paradise’s equal in this genre and that’s because both shows deal far more with the human connection and world building than the apocalyptic threats behind every corner. In my opinion both series deserve to be considered among the best television of 2025 and major contenders for Emmy nominations in major categories.

Last week’s 2025 Astra TV nominations give a sign that voters may think that way. Paradise was nominated for best Streaming ensemble while Sterling K. Brown; James Marsden and Julianne Nicholson were all nominated for acting awards. Brown will almost certainly return to the Best Actor in a Drama field. Marsden and Nicholson will face a more crowded one in the Supporting category – most of it from The White Lotus and Severance – but I do believe they are viable contenders for nominations.

On a final note I saw all of the series when ABC aired this past April after it first aired on Hulu. No doubt there was a certain amount of editing (almost certainly in regard to language) but I suspect that’s the only real reason Paradise couldn’t have aired on network television had Fogelman made some mild edits. There might have cuts for some sex scenes or violence but aside from the third episode I couldn’t tell and when it comes to the nature of the overarching suspense and mood, it was non-existent. Your teenage children may want to watch the second season of Last of Us even without supervision but if they stream the series on Hulu, they’ll get the same post-apocalyptic sense and you would probably be okay leaving them unsupervised. In a weird way, this series is more emotionally uplifting than so much of Last of Us, even though both shows are equal on every other front that matters a critic.

My score: 5 stars.