Paradise: Season 1 - Review 

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

IT’S always impressive when a TV show can consistently wrongfoot and surprise its viewers. The first season of Paradise offered something of a masterclass in doing so.

Created by Dan Fogelman (of This Is Us, Crazy Stupid Love fame), the show started off as a whodunnit revolving around the murder of the US President (James Marsden’s Cal Bradford). Leading the investigation is widowed Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K Brown), who seems to have a complicated relationship with the man he was chosen to protect.

But no sooner had the show’s very first episode settled into a semi investigative groove, complete with relationship building flashbacks, it drops its first twist: the present in which everyone is living is manufactured. The world has been destroyed and a select few are living in a cave buried inside a mountain.

Questions immediately abound: what caused the disaster outside? Was it man-made or nature induced? In relation to the murder and the relationship between Collins and Bradford, why was there animosity between them? Why did Collins go from taking a bullet for Bradford to declaring that he would only be able to sleep again once he was dead? Did it have something to do with the death of Collins’ wife, leaving him a grieving widow and single father?

There’s plenty to uncover, with Fogelman affording his cast ample room to deliver nuanced, complex characters.

Collins, for instance, is steadfastly loyal to Collins in spite of his personal feelings. But he’s clearly torn apart by grief and guilt. But what kind of guilt?

Bradford, meanwhile, is a direct talker, serial drinker and smoker and having an affair with his security chief (though separated from his wife). He’s also a product of the establishment - forced into the White House by his powerful father. Yet someone who could be so easy to dislike, who could be positioned as the show’s Trump-styled villain, offers room for so much more - an ideal of a man who could be a good leader, capable of the right kind of straight talking honesty.

Both Marsden and Brown are terrific in their respective roles, never more so than when they get to share the screen together. The arc of their relationship carries its own kind of tragedy.

And then there’s another of the show’s major players, Julianne Nicholson’s Sinatra, the potentially biggest villain of all - the puppet master extraordinaire, who will stop at nothing to keep Paradise’s secrets hidden. A master manipulator, she is nevertheless someone informed by her own tragedy - a back story explored with suitable emotional depth in an early episode.

It is one of this show’s many strengths that everyone seems to have a reason for behaving as they do - it deconstructs monsters as well as heroism and bravery.

And it’s audacious enough, at times, to play with some real hot button issues. The ultimate cause of Earth’s devastation leans into current concerns about both the environment and politics - and shows how both are intrinsically linked and could collide.

Episode 7, a largely flashback episode in which the cataclysmic events are replayed, is one of the most brilliantly compelling and emotionally devastating hours of TV you’re likely to see this year; the head rush spectacle and what if? of past ‘end of the world’ blockbusters such as The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 replaced by something more real and potentially imminent.

In this episode there’s room for the worst of humanity as well as the best of it, as well as some visually outstanding sequences that haunt rather than excite (none more so than the first and only view of the tsunami mega wave). It’s provocative stuff, complete with a really terrific showdown between Marsden and Brown.

Fogelman deserves credit, too, for the way in which he maintains the show’s momentum and incorporates so much, while remaining careful to answer most of the questions he poses - not least of which is the whodunnit (which does get resolved) as well as those questions concerning motivations. He does set things up for a second (newly commissioned) series. But he does so in a way that excites… positioning it to shapeshift again and head in a different direction.

There’s also plenty of room for the supporting cast to leave their mark, too, whether it’s Jon Beavers and Nicole Brydon Bloom, as two fellow agents on Sterling’s team; Sarah Shahi as a shrink with apparently shifting loyalties or Charlie Evans and Gerald McRaney, as respectively the president’s son and father.

Paradise made for compulsive, emotionally engaging and thought provoking TV. Unlike This Is Us, it was far less optimistic of humanity (despite dangling hope at several points) and a lot more sceptical, albeit capable of deconstructing the monsters it creates to see what makes them tick.

It was also that rare TV show that wasn’t afraid to make you wait for each episode (Disney+ released each new instalment weekly), leaving viewers with genuinely baited breath awaiting each new twist or revelation.

Season 2 can’t come soon enough.