Paradise review – A mystery with ingenuity, heart and sterling k brown. Who could ask for more?
Why, television broadcast schedules of 2025, with this series of tremendously entertaining dramas and tragicomedias they are really miming us. First we had Prime Target, on a brilliant mathematician whose work with prime numbers has made him the – good, perfect white – of a gloomy clique of conspirators whose influence comes, naturally, up to the top. Then we had potential High, on a brilliant cleaner-intellectual that becomes the most dazzling crimes resolution of its local homicide department. Now we have Paradise, a more glowing, prestigious and greater concept project that provides the same amount of entertainment for your viewing money as others. Basically, the last 10 days have been like working through an absolutely winning box of audiovisual chocolates.
Paradise is difficult to describe without ruining an important part of the concept, but here we go. The story is set in what seems to be the classic American idyll – a prosperous city full of professionals and large houses in the suburbs, with ordered gardens and safe streets for children to play. Sterling K Brown (maintaining his recent streak of great papers and performances) stars in Xavier Collins, a widower and agent of the Secret Service designated five years ago – we see, as we see many things, in retrospect – to lead the protection team of the recent president re-elected.
The president is Cal Bradford, played by James Marsden – who may have never become a frontline actor because it is too good in everything and cannot be easily pigeonholed in the mind of a producer or spectator like man for that type of things. He is a Jed Bartlet, in his genuine desire to do the right thing for the United States and his people (when “the world is 19 times more screwed than anyone realizes”); Part Bill Clinton – The alleged dark side, a southern progressive that chooses Collins not only because it is the best, but because it does not harm his image to be seen with a black man by his side. He is a smoker and drinker, because the responsibility of everything weighs so much about him. Or rather, it was – because, back in the present, he is dead. Killed by a person or unknown people. The presidential safe is open and a box full of national security secrets is missing.
Much better than it needs to be … James Marsden and Sterling K Brown in Paradise. Photography: Brian Redel/AP
Collins is the man who discovers him and that shortly after becoming a possible suspect. Courtesy of more flashbacks and minor revelations that prefigure the great revelation, are emerging more and more reasons for their hatred towards a man for whom he once received a bullet. It is partly light racism (“My frankness bothers you?”), Partly related to the death of Collins’s wife, and partly related to the idyllic surroundings that simply cannot be as idyllic as they seem.
Developing in the first three episodes launched by Disney is a plot that involves Julianne Nicholson as a technological multimillionaire that is emerging as the true power behind the throne (one of many timely touches – like Bradford dismissing her re -election because she beat “a golden poodle Idiot ” – that are never exaggerated), and that is also persecuted by terrible pain. At the end of the first episode, the delicious and convincing concept will have hooked you – but Paradise’s greatest achievement is to maintain the psychology of the inhabitants as their main concern. The premise can be essentially ridiculous (or is it?), But people are real and there is a disturbing air that permeates the atmosphere from the beginning. The series gradually becomes – in the midst of the well -elaborate plot of who did and why – in a provocative question about what impact the decision that changed the lives of the inhabitants of the town in a community would have. What unites us, what fractures us individually and collectively, to whom and if you decide to trust again, and how you reconcile the duels and other terrible and irreversible things.
All this is helped by a script that is much better than it needs to be and does not forget to spread some ingenious lines throughout the whole. In addition, of course, the cast of high caliber, and Brown in particular – an actor with unlimited gravity and charisma, who can interpret every nuance to find and that cannot avoid encouraging his audience to think too. Paradise is a precision thriller with ingenuity and heart. You could hardly ask for more.
Paradise is available on Disney+ now.
