Paradise hides an entire city under a mountain…

Sterling K. Brown investigates a murdered president inside a town that shouldn't exist, in one of the sharpest thrillers Disney+ has picked up.

What kind of show gets renewed six episodes into its first season? Paradise did exactly that, and once you've watched the opening hour it isn't hard to see why Hulu moved so fast.

A dead president and a town that makes no sense!

Sterling K. Brown plays Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent who wakes up, goes for a run through an immaculate suburban street, and finds the former president he was assigned to protect dead in his own home. James Marsden is that president, Cal Bradford, and the show uses flashbacks so freely that being murdered in episode one barely reduces his screen time. Marsden plays him as charming, weak and considerably more complicated than the setup suggests, which is a harder job than it looks.

The community itself is the real hook. Everything looks like a well-funded American town until the show reveals what it actually is: a sealed city built inside a mountain in Colorado, housing a selected population after a catastrophic event the residents refer to only as The Day. Clear an evening for the first episode and you'll understand the appeal immediately, since the reveal lands within the opening hour rather than being held back for weeks.

Julianne Nicholson quietly runs the whole thing!

As Samantha Redmond, codename Sinatra, Nicholson plays the tech billionaire who effectively built and governs Paradise. She's polite, reasonable, and entirely willing to do appalling things, and the performance never once tips into obvious villainy. It's the sort of turn that would be showered with awards attention on a bigger platform.

Sarah Shahi plays Dr. Gabriela Torabi, Enuka Okuma appears as Xavier's wife Teri, and Nicole Brydon Bloom and Krys Marshall fill out a supporting cast where almost everyone is protecting a different secret. Dan Fogelman created it, which surprises people who only know him from This Is Us, though the emotional bluntness of that show turns out to transfer well to a conspiracy thriller. Sterling K. Brown is also an executive producer, and you can feel how much of the series is built around what he does best: a controlled man slowly running out of ways to hold himself together.

Two seasons are done and a third is unconfirmed!

Season one ran eight episodes across early 2025. Season two arrived on February 23, 2026, dropping three episodes at once before shifting to weekly releases, and finished at the end of March. That second run sends Xavier outside the bunker to look for Teri and to find out how anyone survived the three years since The Day, while the community he left behind starts coming apart.

Fogelman has said he has a plan for three seasons and described each one as a slightly different show inside the same show with the same characters. Nothing has been confirmed beyond season two so far, though the show's ratings performance suggests the decision won't be a difficult one.

Both seasons sit in the on-demand catalog now, which means you can skip the weekly wait that shaped how season two was originally experienced. There's no long contract involved either, so a month is enough to get through all sixteen episodes if you're inclined.

See what people who are already watching are saying in the comments on my website: https://en.altertv.site.

Critics responded well to both runs, particularly to Brown, Nicholson and Marsden, and the praise consistently landed on the writing rather than the spectacle. That's the right read: the science-fiction premise is a frame, and what the show is actually interested in is how quickly people rationalise unforgivable decisions when survival is the excuse.

If a closed community where every resident is hiding something appeals to you, Ufak Tefek Cinayetler works the same psychology on a much smaller scale, and it's worth a look between seasons. For the record, a month of the subscription costs roughly what a couple of bakery breakfasts do, which puts sixteen episodes of this well inside impulse territory. 

https://en.altertv.site lays out what each service actually carries if you're weighing them up.

Siddhartha Khosla's score does a lot of quiet work here, and I noticed it more on a rewatch than the first time through. What stays with me is Nicholson's Sinatra, though, and how reasonable she manages to sound while explaining the indefensible.