‘Paradise’ Review: Sterling K. Brown Investigates a Presidential Murder in Hulu’s Twist-Driven ‘This Is Us’ Reunion

‘Paradise’ Review: Sterling K. Brown Investigates a Presidential Murder in Hulu’s Twist-Driven ‘This Is Us’ Reunion

[Warning: Because this review cannot and will not spoil key twists from Hulu‘s new drama, Paradise, I will instead spoil key twists from Apple TV+’s Sugar. Skip the first paragraph if you don’t want Sugar spoiled for you.]

In Sugar, which premiered last April, Colin Farrell plays a movie-loving Los Angeles private investigator who is also — final spoiler warning — an alien. The twist, revealed in the sixth of eight episodes, isn’t a deviation from the established premise or a reversal of expectations — it’s the literal premise of the show, an enticing hook that becomes frustrating because the series spends six episodes teasing and hinting before revealing why you were supposed to be caring about what is otherwise a fairly perfunctory mystery.

I liked Farrell’s just-slightly-off-kilter performance, and the premise of the show, once revealed, was worthy of attention. But I’m looking forward to a second season in which Sugar can just be the show that it is, without being so annoyingly coy.

[End specific spoilers for Sugar.]

Reviewing Sugar was a pain because it required that critics participate in a long-game con being perpetrated on viewers, preventing us from discussing the actual premise of the show and its execution, for better or worse.

So it goes.

Hulu’s Paradise is another drama with a twist that’s the premise of the show and, like Sugar, it’s a show in which the twist is reasonably predictable. With Sugar, my notes included three possible solutions for the twist, one of which ended up being correct; with Paradise, I only made mention of two possible twists, one of which was correct.

To creator Dan Fogelman‘s credit, the twist in Paradise isn’t dragged out. From fairly early on, Paradise puts its cards on the table and, from there, isn’t really coy at all. It also isn’t really surprising at all, mind you; the twist introduces many of the elements that are most derivative, least exciting and guaranteed to make viewers go, “Oh. It’s…” listing any of five to 10 shows from the past handful of years that do the same thing.

Still, Paradise is a generally engaging show, carried a long way by stars Sterling K. Brown, James Marsden and Julianne Nicholson, plus some snappy, if slightly overwritten, dialogue.

What can I tell you about Paradise?

Brown plays Xavier Collins, head of the security detail for Cal Bradford (Marsden), a recent former president of the United States. Xavier, still apparently grieving his late wife, has a teenage daughter (Aliyah Mastin) and a somewhat younger son (Percy Daggs IV), and they all live in the cheery town of Paradise, a sunny suburb that splits the difference between Spielberg and Lynch.

Cal, a wealthy progressive Southern Democrat, enjoys drinking, making mixtapes (a detail that pays off in the series’ use of bad cover versions of most of his favorite ’80s and ’90s pop favorites), and bantering with Xavier about basketball.

Then, Xavier shows up at Cal’s mansion one morning and he’s concerned that his charge is up later than usual. He goes up to check on Cal and finds him on the floor of his bedroom. Dead. Very dead. Xavier, who has been presented as a stickler for rules, breaks with protocol and begins his investigation without contacting any other authorities. That looks suspicious when other people, including agent Nicole Robinson (Krys Marshall) and nebulous billionaire Samantha Redmond (Nicholson), find out. It gets even more suspicious when security tapes suggest Xavier was the last person to see Cal alive.

Very quickly, Xavier begins to believe the only person he can trust is scruffy colleague Billy (Jon Beavers) and possibly psychiatrist Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi).

Who killed Cal? Is somebody setting Xavier up? Is there a bigger conspiracy afoot?

These things matter, but these things are not really what Paradise is about.

And that’s all that I’ll obliquely say about that!

Fogelman likes to play around with time to create mysteries within otherwise straightforward narratives, and that’s how Paradise works, introducing little points of confusion and then filling in the backstory with flashbacks to flesh things out. A major advantage of this, obviously, is that even though Marsden’s character is dead by 10 or 15 minutes into the pilot, he’s able to remain a key piece of the series going forward, giving the Jury Duty star ample opportunities to tap into his simultaneously smarmy and likable Kennedy-esque mien.

Almost none of the withheld information is as obsession-worthy as Fogelman wanted some of his This Is Us reveals to be. Nor, after the first episode or two, are those twists as load-bearing as they often were on This Is Us. The flashbacks just add shading and tidbits of information until the seventh of eight episodes, the last sent to critics. That episode aims for a massive tonal swing, resulting in a powerful hour of TV that didn’t feel, for me, the least bit compatible with anything that came before.

Throughout, Paradise remains generally watchable and even emotionally convincing in large part due to the presence of Brown, whose gifts Fogelman is very familiar with and very good at accentuating. Brown takes a character who could have been sanctimonious and rigid — of all of Brown’s myriad attributes, it’s rarely discussed that he may have the best posture of any currently active actor — and provides just a little humor and a lot of that burbling-to-the-surface grief and rage he delivers so well. He and Marsden, as good as he’s ever been, banter together amusingly. The third central cast member, Nicholson, is generally underutilized playing a character who presents as ominously powerful and rarely becomes more interesting than that, though she has some flashbacks that let her dimensionalize the role a bit more.

The series is peppered with good supporting work.

Beavers, who apparently appeared in two episodes of the previously spoiled Sugar in a role I don’t remember at all, is especially good at being roguish in a way that could be evil or just edgy. This feels like it will be a breakout role for him. And speaking of actors whom Fogelman knows how to showcase to the best of their ability, Gerald McRaney has some terrific scenes as Cal’s father, a Joe Kennedy-esque oligarch who pushed to get his son into the White House. Glynn Turman appears in one episode and makes everything better, as is always the case. Marshall is fine, but watch For All Mankind if you want to see all of the weapons in her arsenal. As for Shahi, whom I generally like, I just don’t understand anything related to her character; none of those inconsistencies are performance-related.

Paradise is billed as a drama series, rather than a limited series, and once the initial mystery ceases to be the main thing the show is about, that opens up a lot of avenues for future seasons. Maybe when I review them, I’ll be able to describe more of what happens.