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Watching Paradise feels like losing a match to a spectacularly talented professional wrestler. Sure, you may be skeptical of their abilities when you first step in the ring. But before you know it the chops are caving your chest in, the running knees are taking your head off, and the 450 splash off the top rope is putting you away for good. It’s hard to overstate how laser-targeted and powerful this show’s strikes against your heart can get.
Much of that is down to the direction of Glenn Ficara and John Requa, the team responsible for shaping the look of last season’s all-important first two and final two episodes. Their light is as luminous as sunset in Middle-earth. Their closeups resemble the way people look when you lean towards them for a kiss. They excel at capturing the everyday interactions that are ultimately what make characters endearing, but they can also do the action-thriller thing when that’s called for.
Their partner in all of this is composer Siddartha Khosla, whose contributions to this show are also hard to overstate. A more pedestrian, less swing-for-the-fences score might have sunk the whole project, but Khosla makes this thing sound like the music of the spheres. The gently repetitive theme, the ambient hum and tingle — they light up scenes that might otherwise feel ordinary.
This episode’s lengthy flashback storyline is a case in point. Triggered by the knee injury he sustains when his plane crashes, flashbacks reveal that Xavier Collins first dislocated his left kneecap during Secret Service training.
While recovering in the hospital, he meets his future wife, Teri (a charming Enuka Okuma). She’s there to have scoliosis surgery that will relieve her lifelong back pain. Intent on getting her doctorate, she tries to keep the very openly interested Xavier at arm’s length. But when a rare side effect of her surgery causes her to go temporarily blind, Xavier steps in like they’ve been married ten years, barely leaving her side until she recovers.
To be honest, the sequence overstays its welcome. Our last several returns to the past prior to the storyline’s conclusion are basically just Xavier standing around as Teri makes no progress, over and over. The material could easily have been condensed or cut, and probably should have been. The longer you watch it, the cornier it looks.
But Khosla’s score makes even treading water feel like bathing in a cool stream descending from Olympus on high. It’s because of him that we make it to the grand finale: Teri regaining her eyesight and reaching for Xavier’s face in the blinding sunset. It’s a whopper of an image, and the music helps us swallow it. At key moments in both the past and present storylines it takes over the scenes entirely, subsuming the dialogue, communicating in sound what perhaps words only imply.
It even adds an additional layer of mysterious awe to the improbable visions of Link, the guy we met last episode, whom we’d no reason to believe had ever met Xavier before. Is this just a memory we weren’t privy to, or is Xavier psychic now? The music makes me feel like either is equally possible.
The show’s finishing move, to borrow once again from wrestling parlance, is its lead. Sterling K. Brown is one of the most likeable actors of the prestige television era. He’s got the chops to handle serious dramatic work — and to make melodrama feel non-formulaic, which is a tricky thing. He has an intense screen presence that makes him convincingly formidable as a physical combatant, like when he kills a would-be killer by drowning him face-down in a puddle of mud. Finally, he has the broad, easy, slightly goofy smile of a cowpoke blushing and holding the brim of his hat and saying “Aw shucks, ma’am, ‘twarn’t nothin’.”
In other words, when you put this guy through his paces — crash his plane in Arkansas before he can rescue his wife in Atlanta, pop out his knee, pelt him with hail, pop in his knee, force him to fight for his life, have a gang of feral children steal all his shit, get rescued by a gun-toting pregnant lady who immediately chains him up and demands he take her and her unborn baby back to his safe bunker in Colorado — you put us through those paces, too.
In the course of all this we see some remarkable things. He strikes up a rapport with Daniel (Alexander Gumpert), the leader of a pack of otherwise almost entirely mute children who were left stranded on their own during a travel-team road trip when the shit hit the fan. He watches the children bury the man he kills, seemingly out of respect for the dead, before passing out from the stab wound we only just realize in that moment he’d incurred at all. He learns that one of the kids keeps his eyes closed all the time not because he’s ill, but because that way he can still see the faces of his parents, whom he does not wish to forget.
It’s all so effectively written and performed, shot and scored, that I don’t particularly care if it’s manipulative. It’s good television, that’s what it is. And hey, it didn’t do the corny “breathy cover of a massive pop-rock hit” gimmick at the end! So far, this season’s three-episode premiere is two for two.
Sean T. Collins (@seantcollins.com on Bluesky and theseantcollins on Patreon) has written about television for The New York Times, Vulture, Rolling Stone, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pain Don’t Hurt: Meditations on Road House. He lives with his family on Long Island.
English (US)