Paradise: Season 1

It’s almost impossible to talk about Paradise without talking about the reveal at the end of episode one. A reveal that I admittedly did not see coming and was a little shocked by. Not in the same what-the-shit-this-is-stupid way I was with the reveal in episode six of Sugar. No, this one was like, “Ok, you got me, let’s see where this goes!” And that’s where expectations are built. Is this going to be the next coming of Lost? Or The Leftovers. Are we doing a Truman Show thing here? Are we going to go dark techno future a la Black Mirror? Or even cleave close to a recent swing at dystopian twistiness with Don’t Worry Darling? Point is, this show had so many directions to go — even beyond the many examples of this type of thing that is out there in the mediasphere. I forgot, however, that this series was not created by J.J. Abrams or Damon Lindelof. No, it was created by the guy who came up with This is Us.

And, look, I’ve never seen an episode of that very popular show. Though, for some completely unknown and probably very unfair reason, I’ve always equated it with Crash. A movie that has aged like warm buttermilk. My biases aside, I wanted this series to take a weirder bent than it eventually does. Don’t get me wrong, the show is bonkers, but not weird. I’m going to spoil the reveal now. The inhabitants of the world — or at least the ones we’re aware of — have been reduced down to a society living inside a simulated idealistic town inside a mountain in Colorado. So, yes, it is exactly The Truman Show physically, but instead of a set, we have the same arrangement inside a cave. And now the president of said society, Cal “Wildcat” Bradford (James Marsden), has been murdered! This sets up the dual mystery for the audience. First, how did the world come to be housed in this mountain? What the hell happened to get us here? And, second, who the heck killed the president? The characters now living in Paradise know the answer to the first question, of course. They lived through it. The second question is in the hands of Cal’s number one secret service agent, Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown). Thing is, the first mystery is cool and interesting conceptually. The second one? Not at all. There have been middling episodes of Law & Order with more intrigue.

As I opined, the series didn’t turn out to be weird like any of the aforementioned examples. There is no mysticism. There is no techo-horror, really. There’s no Alfred Hitchcock twist, sense of dread or gut punch. It’s more like a slightly amped-up season of 24. With logic and plot holes you could drive a ballistic missile through. As well as some incongruent moments of sentimentality that belie the series’ otherwise thriller bent. Moments that feel awkwardly… network television. As if the writers needed to give a character they felt was tipping over into mania or irredeemability some redemption by making him take interest in and speak kindly to an old janitor in the middle of a world-ending event. Or save a puppy from a tree. Only one of those things actually happened, of course. There were just some clunkers in there that made you wonder if they had a full handle on what they were doing. The thing is, the show is bookended by relatively strong episodes. Watchers will point to the penultimate episode in particular, I’m sure. The one that fills in all the holes of the first mystery I mentioned above: what the hell happened to get us here? It’s the The Day After Tomorrow episode. To some extent it’s also a mixture of two bizarrely timed “locked-in” series in Fallout and Silo. But, really, this series is Wayward Pines. Which is all to say that it is not, in and of itself, an original story. It’s a mash-up of a post-apocalyptic mystery cop show and a disaster movie.

But it’s not until episode seven until we really get to solving that first mystery. And, yes, it’s bonkers. A flashback episode that finally reveals to us how and why they ended up in this mountain. But, honestly, it’s not that crazy. It’s not that great. It’s just after five episodes of watching Sterling K. Brown clench his jaw, dead James Marsden drink and be charming and Julianne Nicholson seemingly wonder what the hell show she’s on (and me looking at her and intermittently confusing her with Jessie Buckley and wondering how she aged so much since the last movie I saw her in) that something of note actually happens. No, seriously, there is so little going on between the first episode and the seventh that I think what people were feeling was less thrill than relief that they hadn’t wasted five hours of their lives watching a few people run around the same sets over and over again doing absolutely stupid shit. Illogical and Imbecilic shit. The funniest part is that they blow their wad so hard on episode seven solving the first mystery for us that when they reveal the second mystery of who killed the president, it’s so underwhelming and so shoulder-shrugging that even the show’s writers are like, “Yeah, nobody suspected this dude because we didn’t really figure this out until we were under the gun to pin it on someone.” They may think they nailed it and somehow pulled out of the dive and made some sort of awesome 12 Monkeys save, but it’s real lame. Did you even see episode seven, bro!? This show was and will be popular mostly for the early-on twist and this one disaster episode. Otherwise it feels like a high-concept show that has the potential to go horribly wrong in season two like the absolute crashout, Manifest, once it wears out its initial concept and has to basically unleash Sterling K. Brown, super-cop, on the dying planet.

End note: There were so many things that bothered me in this show and I can’t even enumerate them. For instance, there’s this whole plot line about the cave diner’s awesome cashew cheese fries. You know what’s hard to grow — especially in a fucking cave? Cashews! You’d be better off having cows and using real milk. Speaking of, our main character is eating a steak at one point. What is that made of? There are about 200 other examples of these types of nonsensical choices and oversights in the series — this probably being the least egregious. But if you started to dig even an inch deep on most everything here, you could expose flaws and illogic. Fast and loose, man. Fast and loose.