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Hulu’s “Paradise” is a political thriller with vintage charm. Hasn’t Hollywood’s obsession with the presidency spawned dramas like this before? You have a handsome white head of state, President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), who rose to his position thanks to the manipulation of his emotionally abusive baron father. And then there’s his black enforcer, Agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown), a no-nonsense Secret Service agent who’s the other half of the show’s central couple, “Driving Miss Daisy.” Agent Collins’s boundless devotion to the president, and by extension, his country—a devotion that would lead him to take a bullet meant for his white charge—makes him a worthy son, a former Tuskegee Airman, so proud that the normally reserved elder Collins loses his cool. These are familiar characters. Still, “Paradise” uses its retro background to its advantage. This is hardly surprising, given that the creator is Dan Fogelman, the writer-director who held network television in the twenties with This Is Us, a show that my colleague Emily Nussbaum memorably described as a “family whiner.” Paradise, Fogelman’s latest project, is more restrained and minimalist. The family structure is secondary to power and control.
At the beginning of the first episode, we are introduced to the rituals of Agent Collins, a sad and disciplined man. We see that he has difficulty sleeping; the other side of the bed is empty. His children, a teenage daughter and a younger son, sense his melancholy and try not to upset him too much. They live in a suburb also called “Paradise.”
Collins, President Bradford’s top security agent, is on his way to work. But he’s not going to the White House; instead, we see him enter a beige mansion just a few minutes’ walk from his own home. There, he discovers the president, lifeless, lying on his bedroom floor in a pool of blood. While this event—the apparent assassination of the president—may seem like a big plot twist, the real revelation comes later, when the pilot confidently reveals what’s so strange about our so-called paradise. It turns out that a massive climate event has rendered the world uninhabitable. “Paradise” is actually a bunker, a simulacrum of society, built under a mountain in Colorado by a group of billionaires. Humanity has been reduced to twenty-five thousand people.
The twist is a blessing in disguise at this point. Elon Musk’s voracity as he watches his plan to seize power come to fruition is a clear inspiration for the drama. The show’s jangly didacticism is deeply satisfying: the plot mix includes climate catastrophe, nuclear war and, perhaps most poignantly, the rise of the billionaire class in politics. Flashbacks show how Bradford, with his old-school money, became president of the United States and then president of a bunker, effectively becoming a puppet with a drinking problem and surrounded by the trees of the criminal underworld. Julianne Nicholson plays Samantha Redmond, an app developer who prides herself on being “the richest self-made woman in the world.” She has been hardened by the grief of losing her son, who died years before the apocalypse from a mysterious illness. On his deathbed, the boy asked his mother what heaven was like. “Heaven has everything you want,” she replied. He imagined a place full of coin-operated horses. And so, in the Paradise that Redmond and her allies will eventually build, there is a symbolic toy horse. At the top, an angry scientist, a prophet of sorts, has attracted the attention of Redmond, who conspires with Bradford and a group of undifferentiated billionaires to create a bunker in anticipation of disaster. In the bunker, Redmond becomes the leader; her Secret Service code name is Sinatra.
“Paradise” is about grief and deception. In “Before Time,” Sinatra, tormented by the death of his son, turns to world-class therapist Dr. Gabriela Torabi, played by Sarah Shahi. In the bunker, Dr. Torabi confides in Collins about her role in creating Paradise, revealing that she personally chose every member of the artificial society, meaning she also decided who would be left behind. (“Paradise,” eight episodes in all, provides a lot of information about its characters.) Other brilliant minds willingly contributed to the project’s success. The message is grim. People with resources and scientists will prioritize their own survival over the total collapse of society, and they will see that decision as justified, even moral. In the world of the show, they are the architects of genocide, saving humanity by destroying it.
Much of Paradise is overwrought as hell, seeking to simultaneously capture the carnal intrigue of Scandal and the spiritual reckoning of The Leftovers. The soundtrack leans on a tired tune, dark remixes of 1980s hard metal hits
Sourse: newyorker.com
