2 min read
What’s the age old saying about paradise? It’s never what it seems? Well, that’s only partly true on the Hulu series starring Sterling K. Brown. Though the post-apocalyptic drama sends viewers on twists and turns after nearly every episode’s cliff-hanger, everything on Paradise is going according to creator Dan Fogelman’s design.
“It’s going to be a three-season show,” Fogelman told The Hollywood Reporter in January 2025. “I know where it goes. I know what the shape of each season is … I didn’t have it all mapped out when I wrote it, but by the time people got the first script, I knew where it was going to go.”
Though Paradise had yet to hear about an official season 2 renewal at the time, that three-season arc looked a little clearer when the first three episodes of season 2 premiered on Monday, February 23. After escaping the bunker that the late President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) and the world’s richest woman, Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) built due to fear of nuclear fallout, secret agent Xavier Collins (Brown) is now back outside and searching for his presumed-dead wife (Enuka Okuma). Whether or not he finds her, the story will still come to head of sorts in season 3.
There’s a whole new world outside the bunker in season 2.
“We knew we were in the bunker season 1, and we knew we were going out and Xavier [Sterling K. Brown] was going to look for his wife [in season 2],” executive producer and writer John Hoberg told THR after the season 2 premiere. “We also knew that we were headed for a collision of two different worlds. So when you have that beginning and you know where you’re swimming to, you know the high points.”
As Xavier searches for his wife with newcomer Annie Clay (Shailene Woodley) above ground in season 2, the rest of the residents still in the bunker deal with a new crisis of power. When the series returns for season 3, it seems everyone is headed toward “a collision” of those two fractured worlds. After that? There isn’t much of a possibly for season 4.
“[Season 2] is setting up that there are a lot of things going on in two different places, and if I were a viewer, I would wonder if those two different things might come together at some point,” Hoberg revealed. “We know what the end is, and it’s an end that would make it very difficult to make a season 4 come afterward.”
