James Marsden plays the US president in paranoid thriller Paradise. Save This lo-fi sci-fi series is The Truman Show for our times – and all the more disturbing “It just hits in a different way when you feel the connections to things that are happening on your screen,” she adds. Paradise was created by Dan Fogelman (This Is Us), who wrote the character of Xavier, chief security officer to the president in this micro-America bunker, with Sterling K. Brown in mind. And it was always clear that he was more interested in the interactions between people than he was in the landscape of a post-apocalyptic world. “I think Dan’s intention was to create something not so far removed from our world, so we could recognise parallels to the time and place we’re living right now,” says Brown. “I think he’s interested in what a post-apocalyptic world does to human connection, what it does to human interaction, how some of us become more self-contained, and how some of us learn to trust and believe in other people.” Advertisement That said, in the show’s second season, streaming now on Disney+, the action is split between the world of the bunker, where Sinatra is consolidating her power and tipping the community of Paradise ever closer towards fascism, and the outside world into which Xavier has ventured searching for his wife, whom he believes to be alive three years after Doomsday. Fogelman began work on the show “10 or 12 years ago”, says Nicholson, at a time when some of its ideas probably looked more fanciful than they do today. “Even when we filmed the first season, in mid-2024, there was a moment where we stopped and asked ourselves, ‘Can Sinatra even be in the Oval Office? She’s not an elected official. Would that even work?’ It was our imagination still, it was playing with the ideas of power and money and government.” And then, “a short few months later”, Donald Trump was re-elected, and Elon Musk was appointed his government efficiency chief. With tech billionaires cosying up, suddenly those scenes played very differently. Julianne Nicholson as Sinatra, the techpreneur who funds the construction of an underground bunker and decides who gets to come in. Disney+ “With each passing day, what we’re seeing with the 1 per cent and people in power and technology and AI, it’s just going in one direction,” Nicholson says. Paradise is no Severance, though. In many ways, the series, which was made for Hulu in the US, plays like an old-fashioned network drama – albeit at the higher end, rather than a high-concept streaming proposition. Advertisement ‘It’s like, what if Lost knew where it was going to end … We knew exactly, from the outset, where [Paradise] is going.’ Sterling K. Brown on the eventual ending of Paradise “The show Dan will compare it to most directly is Lost,” says Brown. “A lot of people say Lost lost its way at some point in time. And I think he’s like, ‘Well, what if Lost knew where it was going to end, how could they have made that a more satisfying experience?’ Dan’s trying to do that with Paradise.” Does that mean he has known how and where the show was going to end from the beginning? “We knew exactly, from the outset, where it’s going,” confirms Brown. “By ‘we’ he means him and Dan,” Nicholson chips in, laughing. You’re not in on the secret? “Some of us are outside that little pairing,” she says. “That’s all good. I like a little mystery.” Advertisement