Paradise

The Plastic Ducks of the Apocalypse

There is a ridiculous moment late in the first season of Hulu's *Paradise* when a slowed-down piano cover of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger" starts playing over a scene of collapsing political tension. I groaned. Then I kept watching. That, in miniature, is the whole show: absurd, overripe, and somehow still sticky. It should slide right off you. Instead it keeps finding ways to hook a claw in.



Dan Fogelman brought his flashback instincts from *This Is Us* straight into a post-apocalyptic thriller, which is either maddening or perversely effective depending on the week. *Paradise* opens like a glossy political mystery. President Cal Bradford is dead in an immaculate neighborhood, and Secret Service agent Xavier Collins looks like the obvious suspect. Then the pilot yanks the rug: the neighborhood is inside a mountain, the sky is fake, and the world beyond the walls is dead. It is not subtle. But the show benefits from not pretending to be subtler than it is.

Vulture had the right read when it suggested the series is not some delicate puzzle box but a show willing to shout that the ducks are plastic. That bluntness becomes part of the fun. The bunker logistics do not really survive close inspection, and Fogelman is far more interested in betrayal, class resentment, and emotional damage than he is in the mechanics of underground civilization. Fortunately, the cast knows the assignment.



Sterling K. Brown carries the whole thing with sheer control. After years of watching him talk through feeling as Randall Pearson, it is striking to see him go tight and withholding. Xavier walks the fake streets like a man who knows every molecule of air has already been processed by somebody richer than him. James Marsden is equally well used as President Cal in flashbacks, leaning into the vanity and shallowness that make a doomed leader interesting rather than noble. Julianne Nicholson, as billionaire Samantha "Sinatra" Redmond, goes even further. She plays power like a stiff-backed administrative habit, which somehow makes her more frightening.

The problem is that the show cannot stop explaining itself. Everyone gets trauma. Everyone gets a backstory. Every secret arrives with a built-in recap. That habit is manageable inside the bunker, where the artificial neighborhood gives the melodrama a queasy, claustrophobic frame.



With Season 2 arriving this week, the series is already straining. RogerEbert.com's Clint Worthington wrote that the first season's "batshit, silly charm" is giving way to episodes that are "lurching... into the same old, same old survivalist-porn trappings," and I am inclined to agree. The minute Xavier steps out into the wasteland, the show's strongest idea weakens. Still, I cannot quite quit it. *Paradise* is overbuilt and underdisciplined, but it has that pulpy old-network skill of making you need the next answer even when you know the show is absolutely capable of giving you a dumb one.