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Early in the pilot of Paradise, Hulu’s new dystopian political thriller, a man played by Sterling K. Brown lies alone in bed, restless and wary. His eyes are wide open. A watercolor wash of blue light washes over his face. He blinks slightly and looks around his room, then strokes the unused pillow next to him. The man—we soon learn that he is a highly trained and strictly moral Secret Service agent named Xavier Collins—is clearly unhappy, and the color of the light coming through the window is a metaphor of sorts. Xavier is depressed.
As it turns out, he’s about to have a bigger problem than his obvious grief: his protégé, US President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), is found dead – bloody, face-scarred, no doubt murdered – in his luxurious bedroom shortly after the episode begins. A tablet containing sensitive national security secrets has been stolen from President Bradford’s safe. Xavier orders his men to hold off on reporting the murder until he can safely inspect the scene. He instinctively knows that the justice system that will be tasked with uncovering the truth cannot be trusted. The delay briefly makes him a suspect. Oh, and – small touch – the surface of the Earth has apparently been completely obliterated by a climate cataclysmic event and nuclear war, and all the survivors are living in a bunker that their billionaire masters have decorated to look like perpetual, temperate American suburbia.
The questions keep coming: Who killed the president? What are the oligarchs, led by an increasingly suspicious tech entrepreneur nicknamed Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), hiding about what really happened above ground? What does the vegan nut cheese melted on the fries at the town’s only diner taste like? Everyone who tries it grimaces and claims to like it, but let’s be real. Perhaps the most important question: Who in this underworld can Xavier trust? Like Plato’s allegorical cave dwellers, he can only understand his situation through blurs and hints, shadows and whispers. To truly understand, he’ll have to climb out.
“Paradise” does a gripping and sometimes moving job of managing so much plot and making its scenarios feel grimly plausible given the real-life crises that steadily threaten its viewers these days. But having watched all eight episodes of the show’s first season (a second is in the works), I still think about those quiet opening seconds, and its silent depiction of grief. The sad Xavier is a widower. That one pillow, obviously, belongs to his wife, Teri. (Here’s Dr. Teri Rogers-Collins for you: She was resilient, and Xavier never misses an opportunity to point that out.) She couldn’t get to the cave in time—she was away on business, that ancient wrecker of marriage—and now Xavier is forced to serve the interests of a political order that couldn’t be bothered to save her life. He has two children, a boy and a girl, for whom, even as he pursues his deep investigation, he cares with particular intensity. He cannot bear to lose one more thing, one more face.
To the extent that Teri’s fate inspires Xavier—giving him courage and constructive anger, but also a hint of a nihilistic willingness to die in pursuit of truth—he is not alone in contemporary television. In the hit show Severance, for example, a former college professor named Mark Scout is so shaken by the death of his wife Gemma (in a car crash, we are told) that he decides to undergo a procedure that splits his consciousness into leisure and work. At night, he is still alone, bleary-eyed, witty, and clearly haunted by memories of Gemma. But when he takes the elevator down to work, his memory clears, and he becomes a new, sprightly being known as Mark S.—working with a team of other “insides,” detached from reality, on a project whose meaning remains a mystery.
Severance is now in its second season, and it's only gotten stranger as it goes on. Where the first season was fueled by the energy of a detective-style investigation—increasingly radical “insiders” become curious about their highly controlling employers at Lumon, eventually figuring out how to briefly circumvent the system and take over the bodies of the “outsiders” who have condemned them to corporate purgatory—the second is an experiment conducted largely at the level of dreamlike imagery. Behind one door at Lumon is an inexplicably pastoral setting, rolling hills and goats cooing under fluorescent lighting. There's an episode that suddenly opens in a vast, snowy forest outdoors, a rare foray into sunlight for the show: it's usually night or the electric eternity of the office. Spoiler alert: We learn that Gemma is actually
Sourse: newyorker.com
