The following article contains heavy spoilers for “Paradise” up to and including episode 7 of season 1.
If you’re not watching Dan Fogelman’s new show “Paradise” on Hulu (Disney+ internationally), what are you doing with your life? This is a show that combines the kind of character drama Fogelman had the entire country glued to the screen for in “This Is Us,” plus a premise that would delight Michael Crichton.
The heavy use of flashbacks and the high-concept, ensemble-driven story feels like something straight out of the mid-2000s, a time when shows like “Lost” and “Prison Break” had audiences endlessly debating what new plot twist and complication awaited the main characters and what new mystery would begin to unravel. If you somehow missed what already was the single best plot twist of 2025 so far, I am here to tell you that “Paradise” doesn’t just have a killer first episode or a fantastic premise, but the entire season is worth watching.
The story is set in an idyllic town in which all hell breaks loose when Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) discovers the dead body of former U.S. President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). From there, Fogelman uses a cuckoo-bananas, bonkers, bats*** premise to explore (both superficially and with actual depth) the role tech billionaires have usurped for themselves within the U.S. government, and tackle current-era fears of climate change, political upheaval, and much more.
It’s the TV equivalent of an airport page-turner, a thrilling story that just keeps surprising with every passing hour. Even if the show has one too many emo covers of ’80s songs, this is a TV show you will want to catch up on before its season finale.
A thrilling show about the end of the world
The true premise of “Paradise” is that it’s a post-apocalyptic thriller set after a disaster all but destroyed the surface and killed countless people. Only 25,000 individuals managed to escape armageddon by taking refuge in an underground bunker deep in the Colorado mountains, unaware of the condition of the outside world. If that sounds a bit like the excellent Stephen King-recommended “Silo,” that’s not a mistake.
Just like “Silo” (and also “Fallout”), “Paradise” is concerned with not only the fear of impending natural disaster, but that the world after the end of the world will be much like ours in at least one key way: Tech billionaires ruining everything for everyone. In “Paradise,” we quickly learn that a group of rich people not only bankrolled and took command of building the doomsday bunker (ironically part of a plan called the Versailles Protocol), but even selected each and every one of the people who would move to the bunker.
The plot of the season so far deals with the mystery of who exactly killed the President, the thought of there being threats from both inside but also outside the bunker, and the many, many secrets that those in charge have hidden from the people. If you enjoy having new shocking plot twists that reveal an entirely new layer to a show every episode, “Paradise” more than delivers. Episode 6 also does a fantastic homage to “Die Hard” as Xavier pulls a coup to expose the truth of the bunker in a tense and thrilling episode that shows Fogelman and his writing team’s ability to weave in suspense and twists with good character writing.
Then there’s the latest episode, which just propelled “Paradise” from a great show into one that should be discussed alongside “Severance” and “The White Lotus” as appointment television.
The best disaster movie you can have on TV
In episode 7, after much vague talk, we finally get to see the day that brought about the end of civilization as we know it. This is a terrific episode of television, a masterclass in making a disaster movie within the confines of a TV episode. It turns out that the world ended with a bang, specifically the eruption of a super-volcano in Antarctica that kickstarts a tsunami 300 feet high that floods coastlines around the world. Knowing a whole lot of territory will be underwater soon, several countries start thinking about the next steps, and grab and secure resources by any means necessary (nukes, it’s always nukes).
Most impressive is how little of the actual disaster we see. Much like M. Night Shyamalan’s excellent thriller “Knock at the Cabin,” the only little bits we see of armageddon are via news broadcasts — in this case, a single blink-and-you-miss-it shot of a giant wave hitting a building in Indonesia at nightfall. And yet, the episode is more effective at building an emotionally devastating, hair-raising disaster than even the most expensive display of CGI or practical effects spectacle Roland Emmerich can conjure.
What really sells the episode and its portrayal of the end of the world is that the focus is on people reacting to the news. We don’t need to see entire cities being destroyed because we see how it impacts the people who know they’re next. Amidst the moments of pure nightmare fuel are many slower, quieter moments that focus on the people about to be lost to whoever the billionaires picked to survive the apocalypse. Moments like Cal stopping before evacuating the White House to talk to a janitor who has worked there for nine administrations and doesn’t think the situation is serious enough to stop cleaning, or the desperation in a terrified aide named Marsha who slowly realizes she and her son are being left behind to die … that’s how we understand what’s being lost. These are the moments that sell the horror, the pain, and the loss at the center of the show, and the ones that make “Paradise” not just a gripping, thrilling sci-fi drama, but one of the best shows of 2025, period.
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