Paradise TV Review: Hulu’s Paradise Isn’t Worth Your Time
One of my biggest pet peeves with TV shows is when a B-tier show thinks it’s an A-tier show. Not every series needs to be a fantastic, next-level-type program. In fact, it’s sometimes the B-tier shows that are more enjoyable and bingeable. Something like The Last Kingdom or Turn: Washington Spies isn’t going to win any awards, but those sorts of shows are a lot of fun and a breeze to watch.
Paradise is a major offender of being the brand of B-tier show that believes itself to be fantastic television. One major clue that you’re watching a show that falls into this category is when there are performances that are meant to be super profound and dramatic, but they don’t quite nail it. Then a cover of a famous song starts playing to set the mood. It all ends up feeling melodramatic and a bit over-the-top.
That makes sense for Paradise when you realize the series was created by Dan Fogelman. Fogelman is best known for creating This Is Us, one of the most melodramatic shows ever made, as well as writing a slew of movies aimed at kids, like Bolt and Tangled. I’m not saying that media like that doesn’t deserve a place in the TV/movie landscape. But I don’t think the man behind those sorts of titles is the best candidate for pulling off what’s trying to be an elevated, A-tier type of show.
A lot of the dialogue in Paradise just feels off to me. Characters in movies and TV shows don’t talk the way that normal people do most of the time, and that’s fine, but for some reason, the dialogue/quirks that characters have on the show feel unbelievable even for a TV universe.
I gave up on Paradise after Episode 3, and during that episode there are a ton of examples of this. The way characters talk about cheese fries in a scene when they’re in a diner just feels so unnatural it almost seems like it’s been devised by AI and is how robots think humans interact and talk with one another.
Later in the episode, a character tells the protagonist that he’s there because she views him as her “Wild Card.” But the character she’s talking to is the definition of a boy scout, play-by-the-rules lead, and is the exact opposite of what a “Wild Card” would be. It’s the sort of lazy writing that feels like not very good writers trying to come up with what they think is clever dialogue.
I believe three episodes was a fair amount of time to give a TV show that doesn’t deliver at all on what it promises to be and is, quality-wise, aggressively mediocre. (*Episode 1 spoilers follow.*) Paradise sets itself up to be a thriller where we’re investigating the murder of who we believe is a former U.S. president, but this is far from what the show ends up being truly about.
Honestly, I don’t think it would’ve been such a bad idea if this initial setup really was the meat of the show. Sterling K. Brown, who play secret service agent Xavier Collins, is a solid actor and believable in his role. I think he could carry a series, and a well-mapped out show where he tracks down the murder of the man he was tasked with protecting could be compelling.
In reality though, it’s revealed at the end of Episode 1 that what we’re really watching is another post-apocalyptic show with survivors in a bunker. That’s right, Paradise is the third show within the past year, besides Silo and Fallout, centering on the “what will happen to these people in a bunker” concept. So, while the murder is a part of the show, we’re equal parts focused on figuring out what’s really going on in this massive shelter designed to look like an American small town that’s located somewhere in a Colorado mountain.
Much of these episodes focuses on the world’s richest woman, code named “Sinatra” (because that’s supposed to be cool), who runs the bunker. She has her ex-grief counselor (since her son died, which we see in some pre-bunker flashbacks) serving as her right-hand person. There are a bunch of other unbelievable secret service agent characters too. It’s all just very blah. Paradise really wants to be similar to something like The Leftovers, but it’s more like the worst seasons of Lost if those seasons were a little worse than they actually were.
Paradise isn’t an awful show. It is, however, an unnecessary one. It’s not original and brings nothing new to the table. I’m tired of investing my time in mediocre shows like this, especially when they’re lacking in a fun component. After three episodes, I’m fine giving up on Paradise and won’t be wasting my time with the remaining five episodes of the season.
Grade: (Episodes 1-3) 4/10