“Paradise” is a gripping thriller when the secrets start coming out

“Paradise”, a new drama from “This is US” creator Dan Fogelman starring in Show’s Sterling K. Brown, begins as a murder mystery. The show, which now has three episodes at Hulu, stars Brown as Xavier Collins, the man accused of protecting President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). In the early moments of the series he failed exactly with it; Bradford has been murdered in his home. But Collin’s reaction – he carefully examines the entire murder scene and the rest of the building before notifying anyone of what has happened – immediately lets the viewer know that something else is going on here.

In fact, a great deal is going on here. The first episode has been out since this last weekend, but spoilers are ahead if you would rather go into the series without learning the big secret that was revealed in the premiere (which you get your first glimpse of this premiere). The idyllic city where they live is idyllic for a reason – it is a completely artificial society constructed underground. How and why the characters all came that have been teased during the season, but very quickly it becomes clear that something disastrous has happened to drive them underground.

Fogelman, no stranger to jumping around between the past and the present during his “this is us” days, offers glimpses of all these people at past times. Bradford and Collins are on strained conditions at the time he died, but we quickly learn that they were quite close in the past; The reasons for their break are gradually revealed. And although Bradford may be president, he struggles with a power behind the throne in the form of Julianne Nicholson’s tech impresario Samantha Redmond. She is steely and creepy, but we will soon learn that she is also fighting for a traumatic past.

The early episodes are slow. The clues of the city’s origins are sparing out and the murder examination stops when Collins is pulled out of it thanks to his strange behavior after finding the body. And although Brown himself is a hugely convincing artist, Hans Collins fails to elaborate on a few notes: He is a grieving widower with sweet children, and a pure-heart attorney who is determined to eradicate the corruption that has been led here. Nicholson, also a talented actor, inhabiting a character that is forever moments away from tapping her fingertips crooking like Mr. Burns on “The Simpsons.”

It is Marsden, somewhat surprising that gets the fleshest role, despite being murdered in the pilot. His good looks help him create a portrait of a Callow man who is pressed into the responsibility of his overbearing, wealthy father. In Flashbacks, Bradford is revealed to be both complicated and shallow: a man who will do well but has never had much willpower to do so. He is trapped in a life that many people want, but he hates it. He is only there because of his own extraordinary privilege and he knows.

If the early episodes were where the show remained during the season I would probably advise you to skip it. I wasn’t too interested in learning more about the city or following Collins’s strangely cheerful flirt with a city therapist (Sarah Shahi) who maintains a carefully close friendship with Redmond. These people just aren’t quite convincing enough on their own to make the slow revelations worth your time.

But when the show finally starts giving some answers in the last half of the season, I was so invested that I wouldn’t even pause an episode. The answers themselves mean less than the excitement by seeing the revelations; Despite Fogel’s past with emotional dramas, the best moments in “Paradise” are when the thriller aspect takes the center.

The emotional weight of the show tends to be tied to how complicated it is for all these people to live the way they do. What does it mean to survive? How could they possibly stay true to the people they were before all this? How can they live with the choices they were forced to make to get hit?

Until the show begins to open up storytelling about its wider world, the paradise city must be the focus, and it simply lacks the tension over similar idyllic-to-it-not-rooms. The city is neither creepy enough nor hedonistic enough to be convincing. I was still waiting for some kind of threatening shoe to fall, so to speak, and it never quite. I have seen “Pleasantville”; I know that there is plenty of fun to be with the idea that something that looks like heaven may very well be the opposite.

Upside for all this, and the reason you might want to keep an eye on is that the show doesn’t hold its cards for so long, and a better and more confident show appears during the seven episodes.

PARADISE

Starring: Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, James Marsden. At Hulu.

Lisa Weidenfeld can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on x @Lisaweidenfeld and Instagram @lisaweidenfeld.