Why ‘Paradise’ is the new ‘Lost’: “There’s a bigger story and mystery”
When I tuned in to watch episode one of Paradise, the new show from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, I knew nothing about it except what was shown in the trailer. I hadn’t seen any of Fogelman’s previous work but was taken in by the promise of a political thriller about the murder of a US President, played by X-Men star James Marsden. Throw in Sterling K Brown in the lead role as a crusading Secret Service agent and Julianne Nicholson as the female lead, and I thought, “Yeah, that sounds like it could be cool”.
Imagine my surprise, then, when Paradise pulled off an absolutely seismic twist at the end of its first episode, revealing that the entire advertising campaign had been a masterful bait-and-switch. Paradise wasn’t a political thriller – or, at least, that wasn’t all it was.
Instead, the jaw-dropping denouement of episode one reveals that Brown’s Agent Xavier Collins is investigating the death of a former US President in an enormous city-sized underground bunker dug deep into a Colorado mountain. This quintessential white picket fence wonderland is called “Paradise”, and it’s where an unspecified number of Americans were chosen to start a new society while escaping a doomsday-level event that has supposedly rendered the outside world uninhabitable.
So far, so compelling, right? A murder mystery wrapped up in a post-apocalyptic society drama? Sign me up. However, the setup for Paradise doesn’t exactly scream Lost, the classic JJ Abrams/Damon Lindelof drama that launched a million fan theories – and broke an even larger number of brains – between 2004 and 2010. It’s not in its plot or setting that Paradise most closely resembles Lost, though. Instead, it’s all about how it tells its story and how it chooses to dole out information about its extensive cast of characters.
You see, Paradise is the most heavily flashback-reliant TV drama that has come along in quite some time. Lots of shows these days will delve into a flashback or two if they need it to reveal a certain plot point or element of a character’s backstory. Similarly, plenty of shows will feature entire episodes that depart from the main story to dive into an extended flashback. However, few shows have made the main story and character-centric flashbacks exist hand in hand quite like Lost – until Paradise.
Episode four of Paradise – entitled Agent Billy Pace – was when it clicked in my brain that I was watching the new Lost. That episode focused on a character who had previously only made minor appearances across the first three episodes, each time revealing just a little more about him. This time, though, he was front and centre. Actor Jon Beavers carried gripping scenes in the present-day storyline and delivered increasingly impressive flashback sequences that turned everything we thought we knew about the character on its head. Within a single episode, the creative team made the audience care deeply about someone they’d barely noticed before, while both timelines pushed the story forward in compelling ways. Then, like Lost at its best, it ended on a cliffhanger that raised even more questions.
Throughout its eight-episode first season, Paradise only further cemented its status as Lost’s heir apparent in my eyes. One of the things Lost always excelled at was creating compelling characters, even if the payoffs to their stories didn’t always please everyone. In its first season, Paradise has introduced a handful of genuinely captivating characters, with Marsden’s Cal Bradford and Nicholson’s Samantha ‘Sinatra’ Redmond being particular standouts. In fact, Nicholson might be the show’s version of Michael Emerson’s Benjamin Linus. Both are villains so delightfully devious but also psychologically complicated that viewers can’t help loving them.
Naturally, some things separate Paradise from Lost. For one thing, Paradise’s first season is a third as long, and it is unlikely that the show will last for 121 episodes, as Lost did. This likely means the speed with which Paradise will dole out its twists and turns will be a lot swifter than Lost.
Creator Fogelman has all but confirmed this by telling The Hollywood Reporter, “We have a really giant three-season story coming that’s bigger than what people think it is right now, and it’s going to span a couple of genres.”
He added, “It expands upon itself. We have a plan, and hopefully, by the end of all three seasons, people will feel like they’ve been served a complete meal.”
In a way, though, while having an endpoint set out from the start differentiates the shows, Fogelman saying things like, “There’s a bigger story and mystery” only reminds viewers of Lost’s modus operandi. Also, in Lost’s defence, the fact that it didn’t have an ending to work towards until late in the game is more of a function of how network television worked in the 2000s than a purely creative decision.
Ultimately, while the concept of a mystery box show is nothing new, Paradise feels much more indebted to Lost than some of the other examples of the genre. Sure, in recent years, shows like Severance, Yellowjackets, From, Westworld, and Manifest have pushed some sense-memory buttons for Lost fans. However, for our money, none of them have executed it in quite the same way as Fogelman’s ambitious, dark, and more than a little preposterous high-concept mystery.
