The Year’s Breakout Streaming Series Is a Postapocalyptic Hit for the Elon Musk Age

Hulu’s Paradise is a fictionalized speedrun of our real-life tech oligarchy.

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It’s not hard to see why Paradise would be the first new TV show to hit big this year. Created by Dan Fogelman (This Is Us), the Hulu series, in the tradition of other genre-inflected shows like 24 or Battlestar Galactica, is keyed into the current moment, deliberately spinning very pressing modern anxieties—about the climate apocalypse, the renewed threat of nuclear war, and a crisis of faith in government—into a propulsive late-night drama.

In a decision that was probably wise, if annoying, Paradise doesn’t open with any of this. Instead, it presents itself as a murder mystery, in which Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) must determine who killed President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) while he was supposedly safe in his bedroom. Then comes the Episode 1 twist: This is all taking place in Paradise, an underground bunker resembling an idyllic American town after some kind of cataclysm makes the surface of the Earth uninhabitable.

The nature of this disaster is vague until Paradise’s penultimate episode, a tense hour that reveals that an ecological nightmare scenario ignited the chain reaction fueling the show’s mysteries, and its characters’ various resentments. Yet even in its careful obfuscation of whys and wherefores, there’s one thing chillingly clear throughout: The survival of what’s left of the United States is indebted to, and largely overseen by, a tech billionaire.

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This is one of the more sly maneuvers in Paradise’s early episodes: In the immediate wake of Bradford’s murder, tech magnate Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) is so involved, so commanding, that it’s easy for the viewer to believe she’s the vice president to Bradford’s commander in chief. When the actual veep appears to be sworn in, he’s such a high-strung mess of nerves that it’s almost a joke; there isn’t a soul in Paradise who appears to take him seriously or looks to him for a decision. In the power vacuum left behind by the president’s death, Redmond’s is the clear hand at the till, as perhaps it always was.

In Paradise’s second episode, “Sinatra” (titled after Redmond’s nickname turned Secret Service code name), the series lays out how a tech baron came to be the savior of the U.S. government and some 25,000 lucky survivors. Following the loss of her son to an illness the world’s best doctors and cutting-edge treatments couldn’t cure, Samantha Redmond attends a conference that radicalizes her. At a sparsely attended talk, a grim climate scientist lays out in stark terms the certainty of an ecological catastrophe in the ensuing decade. Thinking of her remaining daughter, Redmond then decides to take seriously the scientist’s advice for survival: Dig the deepest hole you can, and get inside. She commissions an engineer to build her a city for riding out the end of the world.

It’s notable that in this flashback, set a decade prior to the events in Paradise’s premiere, Cal Bradford is there too. He’s just a senator at this point, the pretty yet prickly son of a wildly influential oil baron. The scientist’s talk doesn’t inspire him to take action; he jokes about what a downer it was. The truth goes unstated: He gets to be president in Paradise not because he did anything, but because he’s friendly with someone who did.

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Paradise doesn’t seem as if it’s intended to be a cynical show. There’s too much of a soft-focus glow around every character, a sincere interest in This Is Us–style portraits of beautiful brokenness for any sense of nihilism to truly set in. Its vision of American survival, however, is tremendously bleak, one that underlines the cynicism undergirding American culture at this juncture. The show is speaking to not just the erosion of public trust in government but its speed—people know there are troubles here and headed our way, and the tech barons of the world have, thanks to some excellent PR, rebranded themselves as nimble go-getters running circles around bureaucrats. Paradise reflects that popular sentiment: It is Samantha Redmond, not a political leader, who is radicalized into believing that a bunker should be built; Samantha Redmond who has the money and power to bend the government’s ear; Samantha Redmond who essentially buys her way into running what remains of the country.

The parallels are obvious. Paradise is effectively a fictionalized speedrun of our real-life tech oligarchy, infused with just enough optimism and humanity to fuel the soapy drama that keeps it from veering into full paranoid thriller. Over the course of the season, Samantha Redmond teeters between sympathetic suspect and overt villain, her tragic backstory providing a fairy-tale logic for her iron grip on Paradise. Her late son loved mechanical horse rides; a bank of them sits in front of the Paradise grocery store. The fears and insecurities of the wealthy become infrastructure for everyone else.

In the United States, we cannot seem to imagine the future without some kind of robber baron paving the way. The railroad tycoons, oilmen, and various captains of industry have long been the American avatar for progress, in spite of the plunder and injustice that make said progress possible. Now, in the 21st century, that progress feels illusory, a temporary boon hiding a festering rot.

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One of the more deft reveals in Paradise’s puzzle box of a first season is the finale’s answer to the question of who killed President Bradford. Like any good mystery, it’s a character we’ve met before, with no reason to suspect: Trent (Ian Merrigan), Paradise’s librarian. Trent, it turns out, is actually a disgruntled foreman who worked on the construction of Paradise. He discovers early in the project that they are blasting through arsenopyrite, poisoning the workers, and demands that the project be shut down. He is fired instead, radicalized by watching the bunker that will save what is left of the United States government built on the bodies of his blue-collar colleagues. It turns out the rot is in Paradise too.

Paradise was filmed in early 2024 and conceived a year prior; Fogelman and his writers room could not have possibly foreseen how extreme Trump’s second presidency would immediately become, nor could they have imagined Elon Musk’s rapid seizure of the federal apparatus. Rather, they’re responding presciently to something more fundamental than current events: a long-crumbling decay in the spirit of social obligation within both the government and its people, coupled with what is now decades of tech-CEO hagiography that serves to mask mass exploitation. There is nothing new under Paradise’s artificial sun. The men and women who built fortunes breaking the world will then build the bunkers to ride out the havoc they wreaked.

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