Paradise: TV thriller’s twist is a stark warning to all of us

On the surface, Paradise looks to be a political thriller, maybe with a healthy heaping of conspiracies.

The logline is this: A secret service agent, Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown), discovers his protectee dead on the floor, head bludgeoned, blood pooled around his body. The CCTV cameras conveniently went off online during the hours he was killed and Xavier was the last person known to have seen him alive.

Ominous. Oh, and the protectee is President Cal Bradford (James Marsden, giving Tony Goldwyn, George Clooney, Charlize Theron and D.B. Woodside a rival for the title of hottest fictional American president).

Surface is the key word here, and we’re going to spoil the twist ending of the first episode because, otherwise, there’s not really much to say about Paradise. You’re teased with one kind of show but the series is altogether something else – and that something else is the more interesting premise.

FINAL SPOILER WARNING

What is revealed at the end of that first ep is that Paradise, the Anytown USA neighbourhood in which everyone lives, with its white picket fences and colonial-style housing stock not what it seems.

Paradise is actually a giant, post-apocalyptic bunker built under a mountain in Colorado, complete with its own dome of artificial sky, a la The Truman Show. It houses 30,000 survivors, who were all specifically picked to escape the end of the world, ranging from scientists to diner cooks.

Also, a cabal of billionaires.

The series by This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman was commissioned in early 2023 and already then, the influence of American billionaires in the political realm was keenly felt.

Historically, the uber-rich has never been far from the seat of power as they used their considerable resources to buy clout to further enrich their bank accounts. But, as the photos from the 2025 presidential inauguration make clear, that has only been supercharged since.

It’s surely not a coincidence that Paradise’s Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), the one who masterminded the operation and leads a board of billionaires in making the real decisions in town, is a tech boss.

It’s all very nefarious, and drives the show’s plot momentum in terms of not just discovering who murdered Cal, but just what everyone’s agenda is, and what has been hidden from Xavier and the rest of Paradise’s citizens.

Beyond the pulpy thrills of scheming oligarchs, Paradise is trying to be a series about grief and collective trauma. What does it mean to be the last ones remaining after a global catastrophe?

Xavier is a widower with two kids and he’s never forgiven Cal for his wife’s death – why Xavier holds him responsible is explained in episode seven, which happens to be the highpoint of the show, a visceral flashback to the day the world ends.

One of the characters is a therapist (Sarah Shahi) and sometimes it feels as if the whole town is in some sanitised, toned-down Stanford Prison Experiment.

As a drama, Paradise has highs and lows and it is perhaps more thematically ambitious than its execution. There are unexplored, wider threads the series doesn’t pull, at least not yet, that could make for a deeper story about life after everyone else’s deaths.

It’s frequently distracted by competing subplots and vice versa.

But Brown is eminently watchable and a gifted actor who persuasively sells the roiling emotions inside Xavier.

If nothing else, that seventh episode, if you want to see a plausible scenario of how it all ends and the billionaire hands that did nothing except save themselves, Paradise serves as a stark warning to us all.

Paradise is on Disney+ with new episodes weekly