‘Paradise’ Season 2 Review: There Goes the Neighborhood [B-]

As our world gets more chaotic, TV shows about post-apocalyptic survivors are sometimes strangely comforting and cathartic. There are zombie stories like The Walking Dead and The Last of Us; alien invasions in Falling Skies and Colony; weather catastrophes in Snowpiercer and Revolution; nuclear fallout in Fallout, Jericho, Into the Badlands, and The 100. There are pandemic stories, plane crashes and shipwrecks, and more. Regardless of the event that brings about the world’s end, they are stories about the people who made it, who are trying to carry on in a world where everyone and everything they know is gone. 

Last year, Dan Fogelman’s (This Is Us) latest series, Paradise, became a hit on Hulu, with praise from critics and general audiences. Beginning as a murder mystery when secret service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) found himself investigating the assassination of the U.S. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden), a first episode surprise revealed that the U.S. had been reduced to a small colony living inside a bunker in the Colorado mountains after an extinction-level event — an Antarctic volcano which vaporized the polar ice caps — left the surface uninhabitable. But the twisty series quickly unveiled more revelations about billionaire savior “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) and her secret plans, the political unrest creeping into the community, and, to Xavier’s astonishment, the possibility that his wife Teri (Enuka Okuma) might have survived above ground. 

While season 2 does pick up Xavier’s story shortly after he left Colorado in a Cessna heading east, the premiere introduces new character Annie (Shailene Woodley), a med school dropout who was a tour guide in Memphis on The Day. Annie’s medical background and general good instincts helped her survive for years on her own as the planet went cold. Within the first few minutes of Annie’s story, Woodley, an Emmy nominee for Big Little Lies, provides a grounded, emotionally rich and complex look at one survivor whose experience could not be further removed from life in the pristine sanctuary where the lucky few have lived out the worst, most unsurvivable years. Woodley invites us into this quiet, forgotten place and embodies the tragedy of Annie’s story, as well as her empathy and resilience. After the propulsive finale last year, opening the new season with a new character and her contrasted experience deepens the tragedy and inhumanity of scarce resources and the way Sinatra and others cast aside many people who deserved a chance at life.

The second season spends a great deal of time above ground and away from Colorado, proving everyone in the bunker wrong. The world didn’t die on The Day. There are survivors everywhere. Pockets of neighborhoods holed up together, orphaned children creating their own family, gamers cobbling together the exact right combination of skills and talents to ensure that society could go on. Everywhere in season two there are stories of survival, found family, humans working together to move forward. It is a story about the determination of people to keep moving, to work together, to survive. 

Of course, there are conflicts. Fights over power, disagreements over sharing resources, misplaced trust. Life inside the bunker is hardly the paradise it was intended to be. Sinatra, who was shot at the end of the first season, is not about to be pushed aside on her own project. But she has internal conflicts too, balancing how she sees herself with who others (her daughter, her followers, her friends) think she is. Elsewhere, Vice President Baines (Matt Malloy) is now the president and he is drunk with authority but leading a government full of personalities with their own ideas about how to suppress conflict and enforce peace amid secret activist groups and their various forms of civil disobedience. 

Surprisingly, one of the characters we spend the least time with this season is Xavier. While still the lead and with a major mission to rescue Teri and bring her home, Xavier is absent for long stretches as other parts of the story expand. Brown is great every time he’s on screen and it’s odd how little we see him. On the other hand, we learn a lot more about Sinatra and her life before and inside the bunker. Nicholson is another steady presence and in Sinatra she clearly holds everything in, never cracking or wavering. It’s impossible to know what she’s thinking, feeling, or plotting and Nicholson never betrays the poker-faced keeper of the secrets. But when Xavier was our main entry into the story and remains in many ways the emotional core, pushing him aside to focus on stoic Sinatra and others leaves the season often feeling disconnected and meandering. We know it’s going somewhere, but it’s really unclear where, and whether we should really care that it gets there. 

Paradise season two is fun enough to keep watching, but Dan Fogelman relies on some of his best and worst instincts. His focus on people, on the humans living through a disaster, invokes empathy, sweetness, humor, frustration, rage. Through survivors on both sides of the bunker doors, there are bright and hopeful examples of how good people can be, and how horrible. But in focusing on some individuals and trying to create specific emotional beats, other characters are left behind while the central plot is both overly complicated and frequently neglected, like it’s trying to maintain an air of mystery but spreading itself too thin and running out of intriguing twists to keep the audience interested. 

Grade: B-

The eight-episode second season of Paradise returns Monday, February 23 with three episodes, followed by new episodes weekly on Hulu.