Just over a year ago, I wrote in my review for the first season of Paradise that the show was a throwback to a different era of television, when high-concept network dramas like 24 and The X-Files dominated the cultural consciousness. Things have changed quite a bit in recent years, and the freshman year of Paradise had to settle for being a major streaming hit for Hulu as opposed to a 20-million a week ratings boon for ABC. The Disney machine as a whole seemed to recognize that universally entertaining quality in the show, even giving it a run on traditional TV during the dead zone of summer programming.
These kinds of ambitious conceived shows often need to reinvent and expand to survive long-term. Season 1 of Paradise didn’t even reveal the big bunker twist in its marketing, using that surprise and its unconventional, non-linear storytelling as a driving force for the rest of the season’s escalating tension. Now the cat is well out of the bag, and that specific mystery (who killed James Marsden’s Cal Bradford) is now solved. Season 2 of Dan Fogelman’s show faces a new challenge. The bunker could only contain this post-apocalyptic story for so long, and as Sterling K. Brown’s Xavier Collins embarks on a search for his lost, previously presumed dead wife, Paradise scatters its characters across a more sprawling narrative, both in plotlines and literal area codes.
The biggest addition to Paradise’s already impressive ensemble is Shailene Woodley. The early few episodes are partially handed over to Woodley’s Annie, a survivor on the outside who hunkers down at Elvis’s Graceland. Her journey is a compelling one, another great example of Fogelman’s ability to take the show back and forth between the past and present to paint a full picture of a person we previously did not know. This second season does that a few times with new characters who have been forced to live in less-than-ideal circumstances in the outside world. Not everyone had access to a bunker, and some handled that adversity better than others. Adaptation remains a key theme of Paradise.
Annie’s romance with Link (Thomas Doherty), a fellow survivor with intentions of his own, is important to the narrative and eventually intersects with the bunker’s story. As for the pre-established characters, Brown once again plays Xavier like a thoughtful action hero. We learn more about his relationship with his wife (Enuka Okuma), and we always buy both his physicality and his compassion. He takes quite a few blows in his (literal) crash-landing into the outside world, scratching and clawing his way to her anticipated location in Atlanta.
Back in the bunker, Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) wakes up from a weeks-long coma, but as soon as she’s back up and running, she gets back to her scheming ways. While not technically in charge, she remains the architect of the bunker, her ruthlessness only offset by her love for her naive daughter. Xavier’s daughter Presley (Aliyah Mastin) continues the spirit of her father’s rebellion, working with former President Bradford’s son Jeremy (Charlie Evans) to disrupt the status quo.
Secret Service agent and Xavier’s ally Nicole Robinson (Krys Marshall) tries to keep the kids safe in their father’s absence. She’s at odds with Agent Jane Driscoll (Nicole Brydon Bloom), who revealed herself to be quite the lethal weapon for Redmond in the tail end of season 1 (before shooting her in the chest) . The expansion of Bloom’s unpredictable and unhinged performance is one of the most improved aspects of this season. She is clearly having a lot of fun,, and for a show that does a good job at creating complicated characters, it’s nice to have one person who is really not morally dexterous at all. The only question with Jane is whether she’s literally Satan reincarnated.
As with a lot of shows that are tasked with following up a successful first season, Paradise experiences its fair share of growing pains in season 2. Fogelman and his writer’s room add a lot of new pieces to the board, but sometimes struggle to keep some of the best characters of the first season relevant with all those introductions. I think Nicholson suffers the most, though her role regrows as the season goes along. There’s good material up and down these episodes, but by the end of the season, it feels like we are too stretched out, and the storytelling starts to get unwieldy. I have not seen the finale yet, so I cannot say if the wrap-up is satisfying, but the lead-up to the finish line grows to be a bit overwhelming than necessary.
The core problems that I had with the first season are still present, most specifically in how the dialogue is written. There’s just something a little off about the way these lines are written, with a lot of references to recognizable pop culture things that I believe are supposed to make it feel more natural, yet have the opposite impact. Just because someone references the Battle of Helm’s Deep doesn’t make it necessarily more clever. Also distracting is the surprising amount of product placement in this season, including one reference to the Nintendo Switch that was so wildly out of place that I thought I had accidentally clicked on an Ad.
For all of my various gripes, Paradise certainly did not lose all of what made the first season such a success. The show’s best hook remains how Fogelman and his writers play with time in clever ways. The constant flashbacks not only allows them to fill in gaps of decades-old backstory, but also allows them to retain certain characters who are very much not alive in the present timeline. There are also multiple story zags that I must commend for their boldness, as there’s no real adherence to narrative convention. All characters are in danger at all moments, adding to the mortality of this specific dystopia. Season 2 of Paradise is imperfect, but it will probably satisfy anyone who was highly anticipating the show’s return.
The first three episodes of Paradise season 2 premiere next Monday on Hulu, with weekly releases every Monday after that.
