‘Paradise’ Boss on How Their End-of-the-World Research Sets Up Season 2

‘Paradise’ Boss on How Their End-of-the-World Research Sets Up Season 2

[This story contains spoilers from season one of Paradise.]

By now, everyone should be caught up on Paradise.

After becoming a runaway streaming hit when it launched on Hulu in early 2025, the Dan Fogelman-created post-apocalyptic drama then became a linear hit when ABC re-aired the season weekly in the spring. Now, for the trifecta, the Sterling K. Brown-starring saga just picked up four Emmy nominations this week, landing more nods in top categories than even awards experts predicted.

Safe to say, Paradise is a hit and people are watching. The Hollywood Reporter previously spoke with executive producer John Hoberg, who wrote the groundbreaking seventh episode, “The Day.” That penultimate episode of season one flashed back in time to reveal to viewers what exactly happened on the day of the extinction-level event that preceded the beginning of the series.

Paradise viewers had been imagining how the show’s world ended ever since the twisty premiere. But nothing prepared them for how current it would feel when it was revealed. Paradise opened in a post-apocalyptic world, where 25,000 people were saved from some sort of catastrophic climate event that nearly wiped out civilization. That event, we find out in episode seven, was from a super volcano erupting in the arctic, shattering the ice shelf, melting trillions of gallons of water and triggered a tsunami traveling 600 miles per hour with a wave as high as 300 feet. The coastal cities were wiped out first and global devastation followed. The president, played by James Marsden, and his hand-picked survivors were the only ones who escaped — to the underground bunker-society called Paradise.

“Imagine writing it, it destroyed me for a month,” Hoberg recalled to The Hollywood Reporter about his experience of penning the propulsive hour, which was directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa. Read our chat below on all the research that went into “The Day” and how it informs season two, which is now filming in Los Angeles.

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How did you get to be the lucky one to write this episode?

Well I’m an EP with Dan [Fogelman] so I’m in the room. I was either going to write the second-to-last or the last episode. I will tell you, it wasn’t my experience writing on Galavant [the 2015 musical series created by Fogelman] that made them think I should do the end-of-the-world episode (laughs). But it had a lot to do with White House and the Air Force, and those are my obsessions.

My wife and I have always written together until this show; she wanted to write a novel and so I took this job with Dan. We have a place up in Solvang and she’s like, “I’m going to take 10 days and dive all the way in there.” So basically, all I did for 10 straight days was just live in the feeling [of this episode]. It’s such a minute-by-minute episode. I’ve never written this way where I just completely submersed myself in the experience.

All season long, we had ideas about what happened, but it still didn’t prepare me for what I saw.

Good.

Why did you place this episode as the penultimate one of the season?

There are so many mysteries in Paradise, right? Always a new card turned over. We like to answer questions the whole time, because we don’t want to frustrate an audience. So we hint at what happened, but don’t say specifically. It’s why Xavier [Brown] was so angry at Cal [Masden]. The show at its core is the mystery, and then tied around that mystery is, “What happened out there? We know something cataclysmic happened, what is it?”

We knew for Xavier’s character that we wanted to hold that back, because you could tell he liked Cal. But something happened. If we had revealed much earlier [that Xavier blames Cal for his wife’s death in the event], then we’d be giving up that mystery as well as the mystery what happened to the world. So it kept drifting. There was talk about it being the fifth episode at one point, but then it felt right that it would be the one before the end. So you finally have that mystery resolved, before getting into the murder-mystery resolve.

Dan has spoken about all the experts you spoke to in order to research the end of the world, like the architect who designs cities who wrote you a 40-page dissertation, and experts on nuclear fallout and environmental catastrophe. He said you all were worried it might put you on government watch lists, because of what you were Googling.

As far as we know, that didn’t happen! Though I feel like my computer runs a little bit hotter than it needs to, so maybe they’re in there now. (Laughs.)

He did say that you are going to use a lot of that research in season two. How did you go about funneling all that into one hour of television, but also holding some of it back for season two?

Stephen Markley, who’s the novelist on the show, and Katie French, who was the story editor, were so helpful with the outline and helping to piece this whole thing together. It’s a collaborative process when you break it out in the room. We have cards on the board and we’re talking through everything. So by the time I was going to script, I felt very confident that I knew what the bigger pieces were.

Then it was a matter of, “What do you get rid of? What do you keep? How do you take something that might be a page of research and make it into a line, but sell it so that the audience feels it without having to be told what it is?” You really prepare with a nice bunch of information and a plan before you even get in there.

I understand you listened to recordings of similar doomsday situations, like former President George W. Bush after 9/11 when he was on Air Force One, and after the Cuban Missile Crisis. How did all of that help inform the real-time reaction we saw in Paradise with President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) as the global tsunami was building?

I have a grandfather who was an advisor to the Joint Chiefs of Staff who was there during the Cuban Missile Crisis. So as a kid, I was growing up around this Air Force colonel and a lot of his officer friends would come over for dinner parties. When they tell stories, you wouldn’t hear national secrets, but you would hear about the tension and how personal issues that have nothing to do with the topics can get in the way of things. I tried to sprinkle some of that in, like when [in Paradise] the general is giving a briefing and the CIA guy keeps interrupting him; you can tell he’s annoyed because clearly this guy does this all the time. Some of that was like a lifetime of research from being around an Air Force colonel that helped me feel the rhythms of what was going on, from hearing his stories about the Cuban Missile Crisis era.

You filmed this episode with a propulsive pace, and without a lot of cuts. What were the longest scenes you filmed?

It was so fun. John and Glenn, the directors, sat down and we talked about filming this almost as a play. Usually, you’ll do a rehearsal and then people feel their blocking. If you think of the scene where Xavier’s in the hallway and the secretary comes over to say, “What do you know? What’s going on?” Then suddenly, the vice president comes through and trips and stands up and you’re in the room, and we go around the table. We shot that entire scene as a oner. We had it to keep that energy up. Let’s make all these scenes so that we shoot them once without cutting, and then we’ll do our coverage so we can pick stuff up.

If you go back and watch that, there’s 70 people involved! We actually let the studio know, “You’re going to see we’re not rolling camera for a couple hours and that’s because we’re doing this process.” It was a ton of rehearsal and then the shooting of it was really fast, because everybody had it down. It was brilliant. It was their idea, and it was 100 percent right.

Where was your White House set?

We had the Oval office set, which I think was from 24. Sometimes you’ll see evidence of where a set has been before. I worked on comedies a lot and every now and then there’d be an ancient room from I Love Lucy or Happy Days.

So we had the Oval office and the area outside the Oval where the secretary sat. We built that next-door Oval office, the cabinet room, the hallway outside the cabinet room, and the hallways that went the other way around the Oval. That was all on a sound stage.

Then we went to a country club in Thousand Oaks that matched the feeling. It feels so grand, where Cal talks to the janitor in the big marble hallway. Then we shot the basement somewhere downtown. So it was all pieced together, which was a challenge of how you keep up that same energy. The key is, you can’t have the energy at a 10 in the first act. You have to have it build so when you’re jumping all over the city to film, you can check in and keep up that intensity level.

Xavier has this painful goodbye on the phone with his wife, Teri (Enuka Okuma), who he believes died in the event, and then he blows up at Cal over it in this flashback episode. Any notes or conversations with your main actors for those scenes?

I was a mess writing that goodbye scene. You can’t help but think about [your family]. The fact that my wife was up in Solvang and I’m down home thinking, “What if I got a call right now and this was it, and I knew it was it?” I remember adding that he could see the screen as the missile hit, and thinking, “Fuck, he’s going to have to watch his wife die while he’s talking to her.” I was super emotional writing that.

The other scene that was super emotional was Cal and Xavier fighting on the [airport] tarmac, where Cal is like, “You know what to do” and Xavier is like, “I don’t know what to do.” Xavier, who always seems to know what to do, this is the only time he’s ever said that, and you really get into his head.

We shot that scene at Long Beach Airport; there’s planes flying around and it’s loud and chaotic, and there were so many extras. Everyone who wasn’t on camera just stopped to watch, because it was that intense in person. The actors know they have it when they’re looking over at me and John and Glenn at village and our eyes are glassy. It’s like, “Okay, they got it!”

Let’s talk about the nuclear football. How much of what Marsden explains was true… there’s a nuclear fail safe that can set the world’s technology back 500 years?

I don’t know! I do know that my grandfather was at the Air Force when they were developing the football, and he had something to do with the football, and I will say that he would not divulge national secrets to me, but what he did say is the chilling thing that that thing can unilaterally launch a nuclear war. We did our research into what it is. And there’s all this speculation, because really nobody knows — there are people who know, but it’s not us. He was not awed by a lot. He fought in two wars and still had shrapnel that popped out of the top of his head every now and then. And he talked about that thing in a way that was like, “There’s something going on there that’s bigger than I could possibly imagine.”

While we were shooting this, there was a question about if some foreign government was testing an EMP [electromagnetic pulse] device in space. There’s all this research that that was one of the early things they discovered and that there are EMP weapons, but the danger with EMP is that if you light one off in Los Angeles, there are physical wires connecting things all around the world and you don’t know where it’s going. So it’s a very dangerous thing and that got us to this idea of like, “Well, if this is the last chance of survival, you wouldn’t worry about what it might destroy.” But the answer is, I don’t know.

The flashback ends, and then we heard Sinatra’s (Julianne Nicholson) version of what happened: That they avoided a nuclear holocaust, but their Paradise bunker still had the tech they needed. How much are we meant to believe Sinatra’s version?

Well, that’s going to be a question for season two. Did it work? There seems to be some real evidence it worked, with this audio recording of Terry and other survivors. We’ve done a lot of research about what happens with EMP, what it destroys. It basically can destroy most electronic things, but the most rudimentary things can be brought back. Like shortwave radio would probably be one of the first things that started to come back. Diesel engines are based on compression versus a spark. So people would know how to start to rebuild, and it seems there’s evidence that people with know-how are starting to try to rebuild.

If I had to guess based on what Sinatra said, not any knowledge I have, she said it seems that it worked at least partially. We witnessed a nuclear bomb go off and there seemed to be others that were hitting around the globe. But the question is: Did they all hit or was one of them averted, or a handful of them averted?

Well, this explains why there’s no communication with the outside world, right?

When they sent those four people out there, they didn’t know anything. They didn’t get their shortwave communications until they sent them out there and put up their own short wave to communicate with them. Then that’s why Sinatra started hearing these radio signals.

It seems like Cal should have been more suspicious of Sinatra earlier because he pushed that button on the nuclear football, which shut down every nuclear weapon in flight.

Right. There’s a power dynamic difference in episode seven when they’re on the plane and he says to shoot Sinatra. Clearly between then and when we’ve met him [in present day], it shifted and he’s lost that sense of power. So I think there were a lot of emotional things that went on between those people and everybody else in the time from when he pushed that button to when we meet up with him in Paradise world.

Sinatra put Xavier in this ultimate blackmail situation, when she informed him that his wife is actually alive. How does this change him going into season two?

On set, that was a scene where Sterling [as Xavier] had to put his weapon away, and he was wrestling with that. He was like, “I would just fire the gun..” But John, our director, was like, “You’re Sterling K. Brown. Show us that on your face.” He told Sterling, “Live in that, because that’s what we’ve put you in. This impossible situation.” That to me was one of the most impressive moments of acting in the show, because you could feel him wrestle with that and then put his gun away. What happens when you’ve just tried to overthrow the government and you’ve succeeded, and now you have to back down?

Dan told me about his three-season plan and that the end of season one would reveal enough to shift course so each season can be its own thing, but with the same characters. So, obviously the season one ending is setting up some great exploration in the world above for season two. Would you say the finale raised a whole new set of questions to explore?

One of the goals early on was that we wanted to make the viewing experience satisfying. That we’re not just dangling things and then not answering them until the end of the season, or not answering at all. So you’re going to get answers to what you want and then there are new questions raised. We were in a room breaking out [season two since before the official renewal] with this anticipation of, “If goes well, you never know,” but we know where season two [ends].

Is there a reason you named the billionaire bunker project “Versailles”?

You always have a temporary name for something in the room. The librarian at one point, I made a joke that we should get Trent Reznor to play that, so that became a reference name. With Versailles, it sounded like a far away place where the rich would go, and there was a little bit of irony in that, so it sort of stuck. That it was a retreat for the billionaires, but also there’s violence there, too.

There were strange real-world parallels as the season was airing. Like how after President Donald Trump announced he wanted to declassify the JFK assassination files, Paradise had in an episode a line from James Marsden that the second he took office, he asked about the secrets: Bigfoot, JFK and aliens.

It keeps happening on this show. When we first started talking about it, it was probably two and a half years ago. I remember feeling like, “Are people going to buy that they’re in a cave and there’s a sky that looks real?” And then The Sphere [in Las Vegas] comes out and we talked to The Sphere people who said [Paradise] is based on 100 percent true science and you could do this.

There were a bunch of things that keep mirroring reality. But for that particular one, I remember as a kid saying I want to run for president just so I can find out the secrets. That to me is the number one thing I would want day one as the president. Tell me everything.

I spoke with John Beavers about how post-apocalyptic shows are usually in the far future, with zombies or something. But this show feels too close to tomorrow. Did it feel that way when filming?

Yes. One of the things that was important for all of us is that the disaster wasn’t one thing. It’s a cascading series of events. This wave is going to kill all these people on the coasts, which is where a large percentage of the population is. But then it’s going to black out the sky, and we did a lot of research into Krakatoa, which was a big explosive earthquake [in 1883]. That volcano actually had a sound wave that circled the globe eight times or something like that, a pressure wave. It was important for us that what happened in the show was real, but then also it’s the human reaction and governmental reaction.

So if the sky is blotted out, then one country would take a run for another country’s resources to try to ensure their safety and before you know it, with all of our treaties, it would probably end in some kind of nuclear or regional war. That feels as real as it could possibly be, because the show is not just what happened. It’s about how people react to what happened. That’s where it gets messy. There are things that are going to happen naturally on the planet, but it’s how we react to it that’s so frightening.

Amid global warming and climate change, this show tells us that the rich and the elite can survive. Paradise had a line about how the West Wing is stocked to feed those it could save for eternity. It highlights who gets saved and who doesn’t, which is interesting in this current moment in time.

My grandfather had a tour in the Greenbrier Inn in West Virginia. You can now go tour it if you want, but it was the bunker to keep the government going in a nuclear war. The plan was that the government would all get on trains —  all of Congress — but then you go in there and it’s a bunker. They had a press room and hid the doors to close it off in plain sight. These bank vault doors. And my grandpa’s job for a little was that he would be the person in charge of operations to get everybody in and out. But his job was then to close the door — and be on the other side of it. I visited that place and I’ve always thought about that. Who’s in and who’s out?

He would have been like that guy who Xavier shoots on the side of the helicopter.

Exactly! That realization of, “Oh, you don’t get to come in.” And he was fully aware of it. He said it was great during drills, because he wasn’t in the bunker, he would get to stay at this fancy hotel. That part was nice. In reality, it wouldn’t be nice. I grew up hearing this and my mom said when she was a teenager that he had the weight of the world on his shoulders because he was aware how real all this is. There are people who were doing everything to protect, and you can’t protect everybody. The line has to go somewhere, and that’s the crazy thing.

Well, President Cal does the right thing in the end. He tells the truth. It creates chaos, but he tells the truth. We’ve been talking a lot lately about television capturing our current post-truth era. What do you hope people take away from President Bradford?

I like that moment where he says that people are inherently decent. That’s what he’s seen, and he’s speaking to all of us as like, “Let’s lean on our best version of ourselves.” You like to think that every president is going to wrestle with and tell the truth. Sometimes my guess is it’s too dangerous to tell 100 percent of the truth. You have to hope that humanity comes through. Cal is playing someone who’s got a big heart and really is trying to do the right thing, and even he got sucked into it. It took that interaction with that janitor to be like, “This isn’t right. I can’t do this” to snap out of it. With any administration, it’s like, when does the humanity of it make you make the decisions that are in the best interest of people?

This is a fictional president. You don’t even know what his party is, and we’re trying to not make it about that. It’s really about the people and the decisions being in power, what do you what do you do? And the weight of power. But also, Xavier’s wrestling with the same thing when he’s lying to that secretary about being able to help her. It’s healthy to explore that. It’s easy to look at the people up above making selfish decisions. But then we put Xavier in that position, too. He’s not telling 100 percent of the truth either. We wanted it to feel real and messy.

What can you say about the murder-mystery reveal and how the season ended to set up season two?

Having worked in comedies for so long, you don’t have to worry about the mystery of it all. When I was first talking about this show with Dan, because this show has a little bit of This is Us in it, with its real heart, but also that apocalyptic thing like The Last of Us, my joke was that I started calling this show This Is the Last of Us.

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Paradise is now streaming on Hulu. Catch up on THR’s season one coverage.