This article discusses the first three episodes of Paradise Season 2.
Watching the first season of Paradise was like riding one of those theme park rides designed to make you dizzy. The hit Hulu thriller’s plot alternately barreled forward and lurched backward in time, whipping around hairpin twists and regularly turning everything we thought we knew upside down. Good guys were really bad guys. A town that looked like your typical wealthy suburb was revealed, early on, to be an enormous underground bunker where elites and their enablers had taken refuge in the wake of a mass extinction event. No one could be trusted except our hero, Sterling K. Brown’s stoic Secret Service agent and father, Xavier Collins. By the end of the season, a bunch of ostensibly key characters were either dead or critically injured. Also: some 55 million Americans had survived the apocalypse, including Xavier’s wife.
As Xavier—who was, rather conveniently, a licensed pilot—guided a plane out of the Colorado bunker in a quest to find her in Atlanta, viewers staggered off the Paradise ride, too confused to tell if that queasiness in the pit of our stomachs was excitement or just motion sickness. A year later, creator Dan Fogelman, who previously applied this whiplash approach to storytelling to family drama with NBC’s This Is Us, returns with a second season that tries even harder to keep us guessing. A show that already had too many characters and timelines now has more. But Fogelman’s feints are so dependent on worn tropes that, in the three-part Season 2 premiere that is now streaming on Hulu, Paradise becomes not just predictable, but also kind of dull.
Comprising more than a third of the eight-episode season, this triptych exploits a basic strategy of thrillers: Never resolve a cliffhanger immediately when you can keep the suspense going by temporarily shifting attention elsewhere. Hence the full,…
