Syfy and YAL have long given us pictures of the apocalypse, but current streaming TV has ordered a theological infusion, with shows titled like Paramount+’s Evil, AMC+’s Fallen, or Hulu’s Paradise. I’m waiting for Netflix to do a miniseries of the Book of Revelation.
Paradise most taps into the zeitgeist, a West Wing meets Westworld, where we see the end times from the vantage point of the Oval Office. Paradise stars Sterling K. Brown as the president’s top Secret Service agent, Julianne Nicholson as either a much prettier George Soros or a much shadier Elon Musk, Sarah Shahi as the fedgov’s top shrink, and a slightly-worn James Marsden as the president.
It’s interesting that Marsden is famously rumored by actresses he’s worked with to be really pretty but not that smart. (In the X-Men franchise for which he’s best known, his character Cyclops wears a visor that prevents audiences from seeing his eyes, and he mainly stands around and looks hot. In Paradise, after saying something vacuous to Sterling Brown’s character and a subordinate Secret Service agent, and then leaving the room, the—heterosexual, male—subordinate agent jokes: “I’d fuck him!” One fan site bemoaned his frequent choices to star in cinematic duds, arguing: “James Marsden, I implore you to be in films that are worthy of 1) your looks; 2) your comedic timing; 3) your looks again; 4) your acting ability; and 5) definitely your looks some more.” I doubt few straight women or gay men would disagree with this, though in Paradise, Marsden’s looks are beginning to go (though the body is trim and fit as ever).
This isn’t one of his bad choices and he shows more talent than usual, though he plays a handsome empty suit promoted in politics by his wealthy father and then manipulated by Nicholson’s billionaire character who intends to control humanity and plan its future.
Nicholson’s tech billionaire character, known only as “Sinatra,” has seen a sparsely-attended environmentalist workshop at a Davos-type conference. And immediately hires the scientist presenting the new theory to find out when and where the End will begin, and then hires a group of top minds to figure out how she and her child (surviving child—she lost one to cancer) can survive it.
For the first half-dozen episodes we’re led to believe this is a standard environmentalist apocalypse, with tsunamis and rising oceans, etc. Not exactly. Humanity dies more the way the dinosaurs went.
The solution is hollowing out a mountain in Colorado, high above the new sea level, where a city of 25,000 top minds and politically-connected people and their servants and guards will inhabit an artificial and perfect small town that looks like something from 1950s TV, except it’s in color and its populace comes in different hues.
But we get lots of allusions to current affairs. The entire federal government lies like the best of Biden-era public health authorities about what’s going on, both to the people who aren’t selected to be saved in the government-planned Galt’s Gulch, and to the lucky 25,000 who are housed there. In the most recent episode we see the president and top White House staff evacuated to a helicopter that will take them to a jet to Colorado. The lower staff left behind revolt, and the White House staffers start shooting each other. Of the three planes taking Senior Executive Service and other higher-ups to Colorado, someone—maybe a fedcrat worthy, maybe a deplorable serf±shoots one down in flyover country.
The 25,000 who make it into “Paradise” also begin to learn of the hoax perpetrated by the powers-that-be, and a revolt brews. One wonders if whistleblowers, or just people who want someone else in their three-letter agency to be fired first, will similarly begin turning on each other here in our less paradisal Washington, D.C.