All Shook Up: Streamer HULU wants you to come see the PARADISE (Season 2)…
Annie is a tour-guide at Elvis’ Graceland when the world goes to hell, driveninto hiding in the complex’s underground rooms and only emerging when she has to. As time passes – a day, a week, a month and then over a year, she learns the art of survival and buries a friend, yet the world outside remains dark, hostile and dangerous.
But even as the climate appears to return to normal, she’s faced with other dangers – a group decide to purloin equipment and tools and Annie’s presence is discovered. Do these newcomers represent a new start or new dangers… Annie doesn’t have long to decide.
Months later, Annie is faced with yet another choice when a plane crashes nearby. Xavier Collins, who escaped the secret ‘Paradise’ bunker in Colorado, is now looking for his wife and the truth about what really happened to the world.
However, Xavier and Annie’s priorities don’t quite align, which leads to confrontation… and back in ‘Paradise’ there are still plenty of snakes left to fear…
*spoilers*
Last year, Hulu series Paradise pulled a quite masterful bait-and-switch on its audience. In an era where pre-publicity often spoils the most interesting aspects of a new show, merely as a way to garner more attention ahead of time, it initially seemed that this was just another show with a conventional political lean and a murder most foul. It was nothing of the sort.
It wasn’t until the show debuted and we were seconds away from the closing credits of that first episode that the curtain was pulled back and we realised that though the flashbacks were happening in the real White House in the real Washington DC, much of what we were experiencing in the ‘now’ was not – our main cast of characters were actually in a massive subterranean bunker, built with the latest technology and with a convincing artificial sky. These were the survivors of a (then) undisclosed cataclysmic event that had apparently wrought devastation on the surface. Three years on from populating this sanctuary, President Cal Bradford (played by James Marsden) is murdered and it’s up to his estranged chief security officer Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) to establish who is behind it and why. Layers of conspiratorial details were shed with genuine surprises, twists and turns each week. Each character had an agenda and some of them were willing to kill to keep the status quo.
It was a shock-per-week format that mostly worked. Series creator Dan Fogelman had form for playing with the narrative – he pulled another surprise sleight of hand with his show This is Us, in which it was suddenly revealed that events were actually happening on a generational level over two time-periods…
Paradise was a critical and commercial success and a second season was quickly confirmed, but this is often a pivot point for successful shows – how do you expand out the original catnip of a premise while staying honest to the basic conceit? How far does a show-runner plan ahead when not even guaranteed a full season in these competitive times?
Like many shows (think Lost, The Last of Us) the answer for a sophomore year was to further shift focus and perspective, keeping the idea of slowly filling in blanks but dividing the narrative further and layering the mysteries and perspectives. If the first season solved some of its main mysteries (who was Cal’s killer?) by showing different points in the timeline with both genuine clues and smart misdirections, the new run adds a further twist: a geographical one. Its first episode introduces an all-new cast of characters facing that global catastrophe – with nary a sign of the bunker and the characters we’ve been following thus far. It’s a potentially perilous/brave shift – while viewers demand to be constantly entertained and surprised, they also grow loyal to the characters they’ve followed and it takes some time to open up to new characters that could prove friends or foes. It has to feel like an organic expansion not a wholesale reinvention or something entirely new.
In the first episode of the new run, ‘Graceland‘ we meet Annie (Shailene Woodley) whose childhood trials and tribulations lead her to dropping out of medical training. Aimless and searching for a new direction, she finds herself at the gates of Graceland. Her late mother’s obsession with the King of Rock made Annie a walking encyclopedia on Elvis and she’s offered a job as a tour guide. She’s there when the world changes, ensconced in the basement with a fellow guide. The days go by, then weeks, months and over a year…. and she’s finally left alone. Until the day she has company, people who will change her life. It’s a strong, interesting episode (though the pre-warning of explicit sexual content seems awry) if one that trades the sheer uniqueness of the first season for a more familiar after-the-fall-of-society remit that’s now all the rage across the schedules.
Eventually, the show’s mainstay Xavier (Sterling K. Brown) arrives – after escaping the Colorado bunker last season during a dramatic face off with the conniving Samantha Redmond aka ‘Sinatra’ (Julianne Nicholson in fine form)
The second episode (‘Mayday‘) is told from his perspective as he crashes his stolen cesna in Arkansas and encounters some unfriendly locals and some dubiously sticky-fingered kids. It’s also this episode that delves into the flashbacks of how he met his future wife (Enuka Okuma as Teri Collins) for whom he is now searching. The chemistry is there from the start with some playful and dramatic banter across the hospital beds where they are both having surgery. In many ways both the opener and the second episode could be switched around and the momentum wouldn’t be changed.
It’s not until episode three (‘Another Day in Paradise‘) that we’re back in more familiar territory, with the events in Memphis/Arkansas barely referenced as we switch our viewpoint back to the aftermath of the Season one finale back at the bunker. Much as though the ‘open world’ aspects should be interesting to explore, there’s something good about being back in the heart of the bunker’s machinations and watching the various powerplays. In flashback, we get to glimpse some of Sam/Sinatra’s early moves that hint at something beyond the already ambitious dream of a sanctuary-community and of something she believes will even more greatly affect the future of humanity. Of course, the show plays its cards close to its chest, but the fact that we leave the third episode on a real ‘What’s going to happen now?‘ point reminds us of why the first season worked so well.
It’s a combination of the first three episodes, the frequent mentions of an ‘Alex’ important to the future of the world and some existential questions about the fickle finger of fate that give suggestions on how the show is going to progress.
The ‘things are not what you think they are!‘ is a good dramatic tool but can blunted by over-use… audiences want to feel that they’re just ahead of the characters and have invested their time wisely. Series like LOST floundered after piling on the mysteries but rarely having consistent answers. However, Fogelman has stated that the plan in advance for Paradise was – and remains – a three season story, a refreshing set number in an era where too many shows are extended beyond their organic life.
Paradise remains catnip television, but it will be interesting to see if it can keep that conspiratorial core that worked so well. Will it be Paradise Found or Paradise Lost? And will it be the end to the world if it’s not what we hope. (And will we get songs and laments that are not just cover versions?) Only time and Hulu will tell…
Paradise: Season Two is now showing on Hulu on a weekly basis…