“You’ll still be scared shitless, but you will not believe the joy. You’ll be playing with your kid, watching them splash around in the bath or play soccer for the first time, and sometimes, Annie, I swear it feels like your heart will fuckin’ explode.”

“My dad used to say if you were lucky you got a few moments where you got to experience life at full volume. That’s how he put it: ‘life at full volume.’ Those moments when you’re completely present, and everything slows down, and all the textures and colors and sounds, they all go, like, hi-def.”

I’ve struggled to explain the power of Paradise. On the surface level (haha, no pun intended) it’s one of the goofiest shows I’ve ever seen, combining the basic premise of Fallout with the aesthetics of an NBC prime-time drama. Yet somehow, time and again, the goddamn thing hits me like a freight train. I like to think I’m not a sucker, a mark, a cheap date when it comes to drama. So what gives?

It’s simple, as it turns out: Paradise is a show about life at full volume. It’s a show about moments when it feels like your heart will fuckin’ explode. It’s a maximalist emotion machine, using both human interest and post-apocalyptic/survivalist/political-thriller/sci-fi genre tropes to blow the part of you that feels love and hope and grief to smithereens, as often as possible. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched anything quite like it. 

I reviewed today’s episode of Paradise for Decider.

The whole episode feels like a necessary course correction for some of the weaker elements of the story so far. Dr. Torabi spent Season 1 as a cypher; now we get to see how she really feels about being deceived by someone who was more than a client or a meal ticket to her, someone she considered a friend. It’s Shahi’s best work on the show to date.

Baines may be dead now, meanwhile, but his brief reign of terror is exactly what Paradise needed to stay current. The first season’s confidence that the American government would maintain some kind of continuity in the face of disaster, with a handsome young president in charge and a hypercompetent sphere of scientists, capitalists, politicians, and security forces keeping the wheels rolling indefinitely, simply couldn’t survive exposure to the actual Trump regime, which (among other things) has partially destroyed the actual White House building and taken a wrecking ball to scientific research. The norms aren’t intact now, let alone after a global tsunami. Having a loser like Baines run amok until someone gets fed up and kills him feels more like how things would actually work.

I’m sure that in the wake of the federal government’s assault on Minnesota, the show’s portrayal of a resistance movement will also seem outdated. But it’s admittedly inspiring watching the kids pass samizdata notes to each other through a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in a Free Little Library, and to see the son of an assassinated president ask a scientific genius to help him take the place down from within. 

I reviewed the third part of Paradise‘s three-episode premiere for Decider.

Watching Paradise feels like losing a match to a spectacularly talented professional wrestler. Sure, you may be skeptical of their abilities when you first step in the ring. But before you know it the chops are caving your chest in, the running knees are taking your head off, and the 450 splash off the top rope is putting you away for good. It’s hard to overstate how laser-targeted and powerful this show’s strikes against your heart can get. 

I reviewed the second episode of Paradise Season 2 for Decider.

Paradise, the hit post-apocalyptic thriller from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, stars Sterling K. Brown as Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent living in an underground bunker in Colorado, where the country’s richest and most powerful people work in secret to control the survivors. After the murder of his boss, the President (James Marsden), leads him to uncover the conspiracy’s leader, the billionaire known as Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), Xavier must set out to the surface world to rescue his still-living wife — 

Hang on, I’m receiving an update. [pause] Really? Interesting! Okay, I’ll start again.

Paradise, the hit post-apocalyptic thriller from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, stars Shailene Woodley as Annie, a Graceland tour guide living in Elvis’s old home, where a group of interloping do-gooders camp out before heading west for the Colorado bunker. They’re joining a larger group of people who hope to crack the bunker’s secret wide open — and kill someone named Alex, whoever that is. After Annie discovers she’s pregnant by one of the do-gooders, a man nickamed Link (Thomas Doherty), she heads out to a plane crash site expecting to find him returning for her. Instead, she finds Xavier Collins, who needs no further introduction.

I’m covering Paradise for Decider again this season, starting with my review of part one of the show’s three-episode premiere.

I’m not gonna sit here and tell you Paradise is one for the ages, or even for year-end best-ofs. But it’s competent, its three leads (Sterling K. Brown, James Marsden, and Julianne Nicholson) are extremely talented people who make a feast of everything they’re given, it got really nasty and scary when it needed to, and it solved its main mystery by using a killer librarian, like a half-forgotten slasher film set at a high school in the early ’80s. Like its knowingly ridiculous needle drops, the combination is fun almost despite itself. 

I reviewed the season finale of Paradise for Decider.

The best way to sum up “The Day,” Paradise’s genuinely harrowing seventh episode, is this: There’s no ironic slowcore ’80s hair-rock cover to close out the episode. Someone thought better of it, and I’m glad. The covers are so obviously goofy I refuse to believe creator Dan Fogelman is unaware; it stands to reason that when you’re depicting the end of the world, it’s better to enjoy the silence. 

I reviewed this week’s episode of Paradise for Decider.

Last things first: You know how every episode of Paradise ends with some preposterous slowed-down moody spooky breathy cover of a huge ‘80s/‘90s radio rock hit? This week’s is actually quite good! It’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by RAIGN, a frequently selected sync for big emotional TV moments. Since the Guns n’ Roses version the show is riffing on was already a cover, of a song by not only one of the best but also the most coverable songwriter in rock history, this cover works quite well. It’s a whole lot better than hearing someone doing “We Built This City” and singing phrases like “knee deep in the hoopla” in the exact tones of Mozart’s “Requiem.” And it really helps this show when it doesn’t end with a music cue that makes you laugh out loud at the screen.

I reviewed the most recent episode of Paradise for Decider.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Using a populist ignoramus who inherited everything from his daddy as a catspaw, the richest person alive takes over the federal government. Paradise is the show that dares to wonder what would happen if this far-out, science-fictional, dystopian scenario were ever to come to pass. Fortunately, It Can’t Happen Here, right?

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

Acting is the engine that drives Paradise. Not the plot, which you’ve seen before on better shows (watch Silo! watch Fallout!); not the dialogue, which is a wildly mixed bag of astute and cartoonish. Sterling K. Brown, Julianne Nicholson, James Marsden: These are the load-bearing components of what creator Dan Fogelman has built down in that bunker.

To that number we can safely add Jon Beavers, who plays — or played — Agent Billy Pace, the character who gave this episode its title. Via a series of flashbacks, we learn how he became the man he is — or was — today, and it’s a very different man than what we’ve seen from him so far. But Beavers is so endearing in the role and so deft with his bantering dialogue that he almost singlehandedly makes the contradiction make sense.

I reviewed this week’s Paradise for Decider.

It may be an espionage thriller, but no one’s gonna mistake Paradise for Michael Clayton or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy anytime soon. Information about the assassination of President Cal Bradford and the compromising positions of virtually everyone involved in the case isn’t unearthed or deduced — it’s delivered in great gobs of personal exposition, the confessor standing face to face with the interrogator. The casework seems to amount to a series authority figures asking people “Did you do it?” and backing down when the person says “No.” I’ve seen more compelling detective work in episodes of DuckTales. 

Okay, so creating a thrilling murder mystery is not Paradise’s strong suit. What it relies on instead is using the strength of its cast to turbo-charge its tearjerking tales of their pasts. Even when the material is kind of underbaked, simply involving Sterling K. Brown means you’ll get something edible.

I reviewed episode three of Paradise for Decider.

I single out these two moments for a reason: Man oh man do they make creator/co-writer Dan Fogelman’s strengths crystal clear. Working with co-writer Katie French, he just sort of casually tosses off two enormously endearing moments, from two very different spheres of human interaction. The flirtation is fun and genuinely sexy. The family bonding is warm and sincere. None of it feels particularly like something from a television show — or if it does, it feels like it’s from a good television show. You know, the kind of television show that doesn’t immediately give young Dylan a terminal illness to wring out extra sympathy points for his mother, who in the present day is a calculating man-behind-the-throne figure straight out of billionaire reality. 

But Paradise is that kind of show, too! Paradise is the kind of show that has the son beg Julianne Nicholson to tell him if he’s going to Heaven and what it will be like — it’s going to have more horsey rides! — over a breathy cover version of, I swear to god, “We Built This City” by Starship. This is a level of tasteless, mawkish sentimentality that feels like it comes from a whole different universe than that bit about her lying in hopes of picking that dude up. It’s so much broader, too, than everything this beautifully observed moment outside the supermarket on the horse with the ice cream had been right up until that point. 

From a strictly mercenary perspective, I get it: People like having their heartstrings tugged. But the show had already proven it could do so without resorting to crass, poorly soundtracked emotional manipulation. Why settle for a single when you’re a home-run hitter?

I reviewed episode two of Paradise for Decider.

Even after just one episode (out of three debuting simultaneously), the strengths of Paradise are obvious — and they have nothing to do with the twist, or even with the simple murder mystery. If anyone’s gonna care about any of that at all, they owe it to Fogelman’s knack for writing engaging, real-feeling friendly banter, and the casting of the deeply charming (and good-looking, which doesn’t hurt) actors Sterling K. Brown and James Marsden to deliver much of it. Whether Xavier is allowing his kids to gently bust his chops, or whether he’s doing the same thing to his buddy Billy, or whether he’s navigating his complicated relationship with President Bradford, the conversations are lively and hard to predict from one beat to the next. It’s a gift to write that kind of scene, and I feel I can assume without looking that this is what drove This Is Us at least as much as the twists and turns.

I also assume we’ll get a whole lot more of those in the episodes to come. When you drop “oh by the way, this is science fiction” on the audience at the end of your pilot, it’s hard to imagine there are no further tricks up your sleeve. That’s putting aside the fact that Fogelman made his bones off creating an engaging sense of mystery and surprise for his viewers. The subject matter feels weird in the present moment, that’s for certain — for one thing, it presupposes the continued existence of the federal government, which seems like an open question at this point. Many of the creative choices — the pedestrian teal-and-apricot color grading, a breathy ominous cover version of a pop hit to close the episode out — fall flat the same way they do when pretty much any show tries them. (Remember True Detective Season 4?) But “What will they do next?” is a decent hook, especially with actors like Brown, Marsden, and Nicholson dangling from it. Sure, I’ll bite.

I’m covering Paradise, the new show from the creator of This Is Us and Only Murders in the Building, for Decider