Paradise review – a whodunnit with wit, heart and Sterling K Brown. Who could ask for more?

The Guardian

28-01-2025

Why, 2025 television broadcasting schedules, with this run of hugely entertaining drama-slash-dramedies you are really spoiling us. First there was Prime Target, about a brilliant young mathematician whose work with prime numbers has made him the – well, prime target – of a shadowy cabal of conspirators whose influence goes, naturally, all the way to the top. Then there was High Potential, about a brilliant cleaner-slash-intellectual who becomes her local homicide department's most dazzling crime solver. Now there is Paradise, a shinier, more prestigious and higher-concepted endeavour that provides just as much entertainment bang for your watching buck as the others. Basically, the last 10 days or so have been like working your way through an absolutely winning box of audio-visual chocolates.
Paradise is hard to write about without spoiling an important part of the concept, but here goes. The story is set in what seems to be the classic American idyll – an affluent town full of professionals and large houses in the 'burbs, with neat gardens and safe streets for children to play in. Sterling K Brown (maintaining his recent run of great roles and performances) stars as Xavier Collins, a widower and Secret Service agent appointed five years ago – we see, as we see many things, in flashback – to lead the recently re-elected president's protection detail.
The president is Cal Bradford, played by James Marsden – who arguably has never become an A-list actor because he is too good at everything and can't be easily slotted into a producer or viewer's mind as the man for that kind of thing. He is part Jed Bartlet, in his genuine wish to do right by America and its people (when 'the world is 19 times more fucked than anyone realises'); part Bill Clinton – the supposed dark side, a southern progressive who chooses Collins not just because he's the best, but because it doesn't hurt his optics to be seen with a Black man by his side. He is a smoker and a drinker, because the responsibility of everything weighs so heavily on him. Or rather, he was – because, back in the present, he is dead. Murdered by a person or persons unknown. The presidential safe is open and a boxful of national security secrets is missing.
Collins is the man who discovers him and who shortly thereafter finds himself as a possible suspect. Courtesy of more flashbacks and minor reveals foreshadowing the big one, more and more reasons for his hatred of a man for whom he once took a bullet emerge. It is partly the light racism ('Does my directness bother you?'), partly something to do with the death of Collins' wife, and partly something to do with the idyllic surroundings which simply cannot be as idyllic as they seem.
Building elsewhere in the first three episodes released by Disney is a plotline involving Julianne Nicholson as a tech billionaire shaping up to be the real power behind the throne (one of many timely touches – like Bradford dismissing his re-election because he beat 'an idiot goldendoodle' – that are never overplayed), and who is also pursued by a terrible grief. By the end of the first episode, the delicious and compelling concept will have you hooked – but the greatest achievement of Paradise is to keep the psychology of the inhabitants as its prime concern. The premise may be essentially ridiculous (or is it?) but the people are real and there is an unsettling air suffusing the atmosphere from the beginning. The series gradually becomes – amid the well-wrought whodunnit-and-why plot – a thought-provoking interrogation of what the life-changing decision the town's inhabitants made would have on a community. What binds us, what fractures us individually and collectively, who and whether you choose to trust again, and how you reconcile bereavements and other awful, irreversible things.
All of this is helped along by a script that is much better than it needs to be and doesn't forget to scatter some witty lines over the whole. Plus, of course, the high calibre cast, and Brown in particular – an actor with limitless gravitas as well as charisma, who can play every nuance there is to find and who cannot help but encourage his audience to think too. Paradise is a precision-tooled thriller with wit and heart. You could hardly ask for more.
Paradise is on Disney+ now.