Television
Paradise Is a Postapocalyptic Hit for the Elon Musk Age
The Hulu series began as a murder mystery and ended its first season as a tech-oligarch fantasy.
Hulu
It’s not hard to see why Paradise would be the first new TV show to hit big this year. Created by Dan Fogelman (This Is Us), the Hulu series, in the tradition of other genre-inflected shows like 24 or Battlestar Galactica, is keyed into the current moment, deliberately spinning very pressing modern anxieties—about the climate apocalypse, the renewed threat of nuclear war, and a crisis of faith in government—into a propulsive late-night drama.
In a decision that was probably wise, if annoying, Paradise doesn’t open with any of this. Instead, it presents itself as a murder mystery, in which Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) must determine who killed President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) while he was supposedly safe in his bedroom. Then comes the Episode 1 twist: This is all taking place in Paradise, an underground bunker resembling an idyllic American town after some kind of cataclysm makes the surface of the Earth uninhabitable.
The nature of this disaster is vague until Paradise’s penultimate episode, a tense hour that reveals that an ecological nightmare scenario ignited the chain reaction fueling the show’s mysteries, and its characters’ various resentments. Yet even in its careful obfuscation of whys and wherefores, there’s one thing chillingly clear throughout: The survival of what’s left of the United States is indebted to, and largely overseen by, a tech billionaire.
This is one of the more sly maneuvers in Paradise’s early episodes: In the immediate wake of Bradford’s murder, tech magnate Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) is so involved, so commanding, that it’s easy for the viewer to believe she’s the vice president to Bradford’s commander in chief. When the actual veep appears to be sworn in, he’s such a high-strung mess of nerves that it’s almost a joke; there isn’t a soul in Paradise who appears to take him seriously or looks to him for a decision. In the power vacuum left behind by the president’s death, Redmond’s is the clear hand at the till, as perhaps it always was.
In Paradise’s second episode, “Sinatra” (titled after Redmond’s nickname turned Secret Service code name), the series lays out how a tech baron came to be the savior of the U.S. government and some 25,000 lucky survivors. Following the loss of her son to an illness the world’s best doctors and cutting-edge treatments couldn’t cure, Samantha Redmond attends a conference that radicalizes her. At a sparsely attended talk, a grim climate scientist lays out in stark terms the certainty of an ecological catastrophe in the ensuing decade. Thinking of her remaining daughter, Redmond then decides to take seriously the scientist’s advice for survival: Dig the deepest hole you can,