A kooky, twisty trip to Paradise

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This article was published 01/02/2025 (420 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The official description of Paradise, a new series on Disney+, seems a bit vague, a little coy. The story is “set in a serene community inhabited by some of the world’s most prominent individuals.”

Um, OK.

The eight-part series — the first three instalments premièred this week, with new episodes dropping Tuesdays — begins like a straight-up political thriller. By-the-book Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) is tasked with protecting charming, mercurial U.S. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden).

Xavier’s closet contains nothing but black suits, white shirts and black ties. He speaks tersely into one of those little mics. He drives in a long, snaking line of shiny black SUVs. He uses a lot of acronyms and code names.

Then President Bradford is found murdered, a safe containing state secrets emptied out. Xavier is viewed as the prime suspect, and he’ll need to solve the crime to clear his name.

That sudden, brutal death might be unexpected. But the ending of the first episode goes beyond unexpected to absolutely kooky. Suddenly, Paradise is like In the Line of Fire crossed with The West Wing crossed with Lost.

Viewers who wanted just the tough, urgent Secret Service stuff might tune out at this point, and I get that.

For viewers who keep going, though, Paradise’s expansive, unpredictable, genre-blending ambitions could prove compulsively watchable.

Show creator Dan Fogelman, the man behind This is Us, is returning with some of his signature televisual moves. There’s the nonlinear, time-jumping story structure. There’s the gradual unwrapping of characters by circling back to pivotal events. There’s the unpacking of intergenerational trauma that releases teary waves of grief and guilt and joy.

In Paradise, Fogelman is applying these tricks both to the small details of everyday family life and the vast sweep of world-historic events. He’s mixing up prestige TV and high-concept entertainment, big ideas and even bigger emotions.

There’s melodrama here and speculative fiction, action sequences and paranoid conspiracies, buddy comedy and teen romance. An unbearably tense seventh episode plays like a super-compressed disaster movie.

This mash-up of tones and modes doesn’t sound like it should work. (And, in trying to go spoiler-free, I’m actually leaving out some of the dorkier stuff.) But it does work, at least mostly.

This is partly down to strong writing. The dialogue is snappy, emotionally intelligent and frequently funny. The change-up pacing alternates between the breakneck plotting of big events and the quiet lulls of the characters’ daily rounds as they deal with teenage children or aging parents.

There’s the setting — the rows of gracious houses, the picturesque town square, the lagoon with ducks — which seems perfect but is somehow off.

Then there are the performances. Brown (a This is Us alum) has charisma for days, and his steady presence helps ground the plot’s goofier gambits. Marsden is doing career-best work: His character seems at first to be just another politician caught between genuine political ideals and deep personal failings, but as we dive into flashbacks, we realize it’s more complicated than that.

Julianne Nicholson is fascinating as Samantha Redmond, a brittle tech billionaire who seems to hold a sinister amount of power over the president. (Topical!!!). She says, “I’m not a monster” so often we know she is, in fact, a monster. Though, again, flashbacks will reveal she has her reasons, as monsters often do.

With so much going on, it’s hard to describe the show’s weird effectiveness. But as those end-of-episode cliffhangers keep coming, it’s easy to feel it. Paradise isn’t perfect — paradises never are, even when they have lagoons with ducks — but it is compelling.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca