Paradise (2025)

In sticking with what makes a good show great, it’s these moments that outpace the shortcomings and make “Paradise” something worth sticking with to see what other tricks it hides up its sleeve, and with nary an actor to be found delivering anything less than their absolute best, there’s more than enough here for audiences to wish for what some might consider their own form of paradise: a second season.

Fogelman and the writers blend genres to present a poignant, nail-biting tale that might just become your next TV obsession.

It is frequently silly, weighed down by both its own hyperseriousness and its constant reliance on needle drops of Gen-X anthems. .... Somehow, though, Paradise is often more fun than most of the other bunker shows. It’s big and broad, with snappy pacing, continually shifting goalposts, and an innate sense that if it doesn’t keep offering up new surprises, it will instantly lose the audience’s attention.

The actors are very fine. .... But making sense is not a hill that such shows ever care to die on. .... The greater purpose of the show, naturally — and one it largely fulfills — is to guide you from revelation to revelation, keeping you off-balance with ethical hypotheticals and narrative zigzags, so you never know just where things are headed. Apart from a second season.

Marsden and Brown are mesmerizing together, and their performances fortify — rectify? — the show’s goofiness.

The early episodes are slow going. .... But when the show finally starts giving some answers in the latter half of the season, I became so invested I didn’t even want to pause an episode.

Paradise is a precision-tooled thriller with wit and heart. You could hardly ask for more.

If you can avoid spoilers, it’s worth allowing yourself to be won over – just don’t overthink the details.

The big reward is episode seven’s full-blown, hyper-tense depiction of something terrible and terrifying. It’s one of the most exciting hours of TV in months, and by which point you’ll entirely sympathise with President Bradford’s ten bourbons-a-day habit.

Feels an awful lot like television’s Next Big Thing.

As the eight-episode season goes on, “Paradise” has no choice other than to up the stakes and urgency. Critics were not provided with the finale, but headed into that last chapter, the series has acquired enough narrative momentum to propel this viewer’s interest through the conclusion and into a presumed second season.

As both a sociopolitical thriller and an exhumation of the human condition, and among all the other series vying for audiences' attention in the new year, Paradise is well worth your time.

“Paradise” marries the genres in a fairly satisfying way. Most of the qualities that add up to bingeable — good acting, interesting characters, suspenseful plotting, tone (overserious, considering the show’s fundamental absurdity, but right for dramatic impact) and world-building (metaphorically astute, at least) — are here in addictive doses.

Hulu’s wildly ambitious Paradise might bite off more than it can chew, but it’s an entertaining thriller with serious emotional heft.

The reliably superb Sterling K. Brown stars in this uneven but bingeable limited series about a Secret Service agent knocked off course when James Marsden’s POTUS is murdered on his watch in an alternate universe that leads to global chaos

It’s a consistently easy watch, only feeling hollow in retrospect. It moves quickly enough that you don’t really notice it’s not nutritionally satisfying. Sometimes that doesn’t matter.

Let’s just say timeline-jumping isn’t the only storytelling method Fogelman borrowed from his most successful series. It certainly sets up some intriguing possibilities, but let’s hope that it’s not the main driver of the story Fogleman and company want to tell. They’ve done a good job of setting up the personal relationships at the center of Paradise, as well as the timeline, and that’s where they should concentrate things.

Paradise is a generally engaging show, carried a long way by stars Sterling K. Brown, James Marsden and Julianne Nicholson, plus some snappy, if slightly overwritten, dialogue.

I can tell you that it is a good show, intermittently rising to compelling, and that Sterling K. Brown is quite good as Xavier Collins, the Secret Service agent personally assigned to former President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). Marsden is also good.

“Paradise” isn’t a brilliant brainteaser or a mind-blowing science-fiction story — far from it — but Fogelman’s latest serialized endeavor is a sturdy combination on a number of levels: It’s a satisfying mystery (most of the time) and a moving melodrama (some of the time). It’s absurd in its galaxy-brained plotting and searingly intimate when it dials in on its characters.

While the penultimate episode doesn’t make up for all the series’ shortcomings, it confirmed that Fogelman has an intriguing story to tell — one that probably didn’t need to contort itself with so many narrative gymnastics. Twists can be fun, but sometimes simplicity is heaven.

Fundamentally, “Paradise” falls into the narrative rut that befalls most sci-fi shows predicated on a populace existing long-term somewhere else, where the powerful have a vested interest in maintaining lies and manipulating perceptions. There are only so many ways to tell that story, but I give “Paradise” credit for finding a unique way into it.

Not everything Paradise does works, but the “The West Wing at the End of the World” hook of the show is reasonably compelling, and easily propelled by the charisma of its two leads.

"Paradise" is what TV executives used to call "high concept," except that any Fogelman show (or movie, like "Crazy, Stupid, Love") usually gets around to what he's really interested in — human relationships, romantic entanglements, tragic loss. There's a lot going on in "Paradise," but if this big swing of a series connects — a medium-size if — it'll be for that reason.

That’s the frustrating thing about “Paradise”: It toggles between compelling moments, mostly featuring Brown and/or the cataclysmic event, and people spouting uninspired TV dialogue that renders the characters one-dimensional.

“Paradise” is still worth tuning into for solid performances by the lead cast and occasional high concept thrills. But it’s hardly distinguishing itself from a relatively mid selection of shows being offered to us in the genre.

Cheesy lines and predictable turns will not be the death of the show. It looks great and has a lot to offer, and as long as your expectations aren’t too high, it will get the job done.

While Paradise is intriguing, you could get whiplash as the show veers from poignant meditation on end-of-the-world loss to harrowing action sequences and contrived cliffhangers. It's a lot, but could be more. [10 Feb - 2 Mar 2025, p.4]

Thus far, I find Paradise guilty of weird outbursts of soapiness, but with enough else (anger, mysteries, unease) to keep it interesting.

[Brown] gives gravity to material that can at times be thin and/or overly familiar. Marsden, Nicholson, Shahi, McRaney (another This Is Us alum) and others all have strong moments at different points, in either the past or the present. But the stories themselves are on the bland and predictable side, whether as individual pieces or combined together across these multiple genres. The one exception is the seventh and final episode critics were given in advance, which is set primarily on the day the world as we know it came to an end, showing all of the impossible, at times monstrous, decisions that Cal, Xavier, and others had to make.

A moreish if preposterous murder-mystery wrapped up in a swing-for-the-fences premise. If you think you know what to expect going in, think twice — it’s far more than just another day in paradise.

The series’ main plot conceit is indeed a mirage, a fake-out trick that crumbles upon closer inspection and isn’t developed enough. It’s hard to get behind this show and equally difficult to get beyond it.

Perhaps in the finale "Paradise" could pull it all together into a satisfying conclusion that makes me forgive the dreary middle episodes. But unfortunately the quality of the series is on as downward of a trajectory as the doomed lives of its characters.

On a scene-to-scene basis, the series can be gripping. But the disconnect between its lofty themes and the shallowness of its characters and world-building undermines its grand ambitions. What might have been an insightful commentary on the fate of the human race becomes merely big, twisty, and in some cases extremely silly entertainment.