A twist, however seismic, can only take a story so far. Thankfully for Paradise, Hulu’s new sci-fi thriller in which a presidential assassination is only the tip of a Lost-esque iceberg, great performances and more interesting questions lie on the other side of revelations.
While episode 1 offers a big surprise — the cast is actually living in an underground bunker built under a mountain in Colorado! — episode 2 focuses on “Sinatra” (Julianne Nicholson), a tech billionaire pulling the strings on the post-apocalyptic operation. Early in the series, we see Sinatra hovering in the background as Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) investigates the murder in the present and President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) prepares for the worst in the flashbacks.
According to Paradise writer Katie French, creator Dan Fogelman and the team debated if having Nicholson appear without much explanation in everywhere from the White House to the streets of the unnamed suburban sanctuary would strike the audience as odd.
“We really thought that flashback scene in the pilot was going to be weird if there was just this random billionaire in the Oval Office,” French tells Polygon. “And now it’s like… Oh God, all too prescient.”
Photo: Ser Baffo/Disney
While Elon Musk’s haunting presence in the second Trump administration aligns all too perfectly with Paradise’s setup, Sinatra already seems more complicated than her real-life tech-bro counterpart (or at least more watchable). As we learn in the second episode, Sinatra was, at least at one point in her life, a warm, human businessperson. We see her flirt at a bar, strike up conversation with her future husband, then propel into the future, where an app has made her a titan of business, while the birth of her child has made her a dedicated mother. The Sinatra of the present, seen interrogating Xavier over Cal’s death and maintaining order in the underground utopia, could not be further from her past self. But episode 2 offers an inflection point: the death of Sinatra’s son, and the grief she carries from that moment forward.
“We knew that we wanted a really strong foil to Xavier — we wanted her to be this incredibly powerful woman,” French says. “I remember early on, Dan asked the room if she should be more of this hardass tough lady, or when we were still casting, should we go a little bit older, a little bit warmer? And I was like: ‘Let’s do the mommy version of this. Let her be a mother.’”
Paradise was pitched as a throwback to ’90s and 2000s action thrillers of the Tony Scott mold. French says from the outset Fogelman was talking about movies like Crimson Tide and Man on Fire, full of power players and ticking-clock action. The structure gave the team the ability to probe what different types of individuals at various levels of power would do to protect their families.
“We gravitated, especially Dan, toward the question,” French says. “But that can also be a little bit creepy for [Sinatra]. We wanted it to be humanizing. We wanted her to have this story if she has everything in the world that you could possibly want. But there are some things that are outside of your control and that can still crush you.”
Despite possessing bottomless pockets and the drive of a disruptor, the Sinatra of the past can’t save her child from terminal illness. It’s an impossible situation, and Paradise charts the aftermath in challenging scenes between the billionaire and her therapist. French says the arc only works because of Nicholson. In present-day scenes, Sinatra could easily be “very mustache-twirly,” but the writer says Nicholson’s performance really made everything they have cooked up for future episodes possible.
“We really needed [episode 2] to ground us in her humanity and her empathy and the loss that she is going through. I remember sitting next to Dan during some of these scenes on set and going, ‘I think that she could do anything after this episode and people might still be OK.’ […] I think we push her very far in this season and we needed this springboard to take us there.”
French stresses that the Paradise team did not set out to let billionaires off the hook for diabolical behavior. Future episodes make it clear that Sinatra, however sympathetic, has careened off the moral cliff in her effort to preserve the bunker. It’s unclear if she had a hand in killing the president — we’ll have to wait until the finale for any clarity on that front — but at some point between losing her son and hiring engineers to build a cataclysm-safe neighborhood for 20,000 people, she broke bad. Resemblance to Elon Musk is not coincidental, but it’s not a one-for-one either.
“She’s playing god on a totally different level,” French says of where Sinatra’s going in season 1. “She’s kind of this multidimensional character who’s living and breathing with us and making decisions that I think surprise her.”
Three episodes of Paradise are now streaming on Hulu. New episodes drop every Wednesday.
