Two Tickets to "Paradise"
A review of Hulu's outstanding recent post-apocalyptic thriller
At their best, science-fiction and genre stories hold up a mirror to modern society and reflect our own concerns back to us. It’s never an exact correspondence, of course, nor should it be; these sorts of narratives can flip our perspectives or expose our prejudices or simply pose questions in unique and thought-provoking ways as well as obvious ones. Hulu’s recently concluded first season of post-apocalyptic thriller series Paradise stands squarely in this tradition, speaking to our present moment in ways that long-gestating blockbusters like Gladiator II and Captain America: Brave New World could have but ultimately did not.
Above all, Paradise works as a taut thriller that, unlike a number of other similar shows, resolves most if not all of the narrative mysteries it raises by the end of its eight-episode run. But its near-future, post-apocalyptic setting allows Paradise to explore issues that resonate in the real world, whether it’s the overweening power of tech oligarchs or the necessity of humanity and a sense of compassion in political leaders. The show also sets up an intriguing thematic debate between a callous, self-centered survivalism and our obligations toward our fellow human beings.
It's impossible to discuss Paradise in any meaningful way without revealing the show’s plot, so be forewarned: there will obviously be spoilers ahead.
First, the premise: Paradise takes place in an artificial underground suburban utopia—think The Truman Show—some three years after an Antarctic supervolcano blew and wiped out civilization. We see more and more of events before the disaster as the show proceeds, up to and including the day of the eruption itself. A select few—some 25,000 or so—survived the cataclysm thanks to the titular bunker, the construction of which was organized by the calculating tech oligarch known as Sinatra (played by Julianne Nicholson). She effectively runs Paradise, marginalizing the excellently cast James Marsden’s guilt-wracked, drink-soaked, Kennedy- and Clinton-esque U.S. President Cal Bradford.
When Bradford is murdered, Paradise protagonist Xavier Collins—a Secret Service agent superbly portrayed with an air of quiet dignity by series star Sterling K. Brown—finds himself caught in the tangle of a conspiracy, one that reveals there’s more hope for the outside world than Sinatra and the other powers that be in the bunker let on. It sets up the show’s fundamental thematic clash between basic decency and survival at any cost, a conflict embodied by Collins and Bradford on the one hand and Sinatra on the other.
It's clear that President Bradford wants to stand up for basic human decency despite feeling—and being—caught up in events and machinations beyond his own considerable power. His oil industry tycoon father forces him into a political career over his own wishes (he would have rather become a teacher), and he’s president when a world-ending catastrophe as the nation’s elite retreat into a mountain bunker and leave the rest of humanity to its fate. Early on, Bradford consistently gives the impression of a person who goes with the flow and accepts plans or decisions formulated by others.
But as the show progresses, Bradford’s own innate sense of decency comes into sharper relief. When viewers finally experience “The Day” in the season’s gut-wrenching penultimate episode, they witness Bradford leveling with the public about the imminent disaster they face rather than deliver a canned speech assuring them all will be well as he and other high-ranking officials jet off to their mountain hideaway. “People need to know what’s really happening,” he tells his White House staff, “They need a chance to say goodbye.” In his speech, Bradford expresses his belief that “despite all the ugliness in our world, despite our tendency to focus on the grotesque and the conflict, despite all of that, you—you—are inherently decent… I hope we can find that decency and that love now.”
Things don’t exactly work out the way Bradford might have hoped, with panic setting in even in the White House. As the scope of the catastrophe becomes clear and the world descends into nuclear war, however, he refuses to launch America’s nuclear weapons and instead deploys an orbital weapons system that disables all electronics—and all nuclear weapons. Sending the world back a few centuries, he tells Sinatra, is “better than the alternative… because it would give people a chance.”
He later sends out an exploratory party to check on conditions outside the bunker—and plans to reveal the truth that Sinatra had the party murdered when it found a survivor before he’s killed by another person for other reasons entirely.
For her part, Sinatra—real name Samantha Redmond—represents a survival-at-any-cost mentality that echoes Silicon Valley’s own real-world obsession with doomsday survivalism and messianism. While Bradford is clearly uncomfortable saving his own skin while the rest of humanity perishes, Sinatra has no apparent problem keeping a highly exclusive human remnant alive in her mountain bunker and will resort to murder to do so. Beyond countenancing the murder of the exploration team, she insists Bradford use America’s nuclear weapons to safeguard Paradise and holds Collins’ daughter hostage when he leads a revolt against her ruling clique.
Paradise does its best to cultivate some sympathy for Sinatra and imbue her with a semblance of humanity, showing in a flashback that she lost a child to disease before the end of the world. For all her monomaniacal ruthlessness and talk of saving humanity in the abstract, moreover, she lacks the sort of narcissistic megalomania that defines our actual, present-day tech oligarchs.
For series protagonist Collins, this conflict plays out on a smaller and more personal scale. Believing his wife to be dead, Collins holds a grudge against Bradford for giving him false hope that she could board an evacuation flight out of Atlanta. On the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews during the chaotic evacuation from Washington—aptly and ironically code-named Versailles—Collins berates the president for not telling the world the truth about the impending disaster until it actually struck. But because Bradford chose not to nuke the world, it’s revealed at the end of the season that Collins’ wife quite possibly survived—and in a clear set-up for the show’s second season, Collins heads out of the mountain in search of her based on information Bradford assembled before his murder.
Its main themes and preoccupations notwithstanding, Paradise isn’t exactly a tribute to the power of hope and compassion or an expression of undying faith in humanity. But it is a reminder of the necessity of both and the fact that mere survival is nowhere near enough to sustain our shared humanity even in the most dire of circumstances. When people lose their sense of basic decency, whether individually or collectively, they lose their humanity—no matter the situation.
And as a reflection of our own moment, Paradise’s depiction of a scheming tech oligarch effectively running the U.S. government (or what’s left of it) hits close to home. More damning of our own society, though, is the show’s portrayal of a president with actual compassion and concern for the people he’s been elected to lead. Indeed, it’s the one aspect of Paradise that stands out as much more fantastical than any other, at least in our present political circumstances.
It's all the more potent because Paradise works structurally as a single season of a television series. The show sets up mysteries and resolves most if not all of them, leaving few if any loose threads even as it teases new storylines to unravel for the next season—a rare “mystery box” series that actually provides satisfying answers to the core questions it poses at its beginning. Though we already have some promising leads, it'll be fascinating to see where Paradise goes both narratively and thematically in its next season.
But it will be hard for the show to top this first act, though. A great high-concept thriller in its own right, Paradise has emerged as the show for our time: a work of popular art and culture that speaks to our own concerns and preoccupations like few others today.