After Hulu’s Paradise Finale, I Can't Stop Thinking About James Marsden's Prez Being The Show's Biggest Tragedy

Spoiler alert! This story contains major spoilers for the entire first season of Paradise, which is available to stream with a Hulu subscription.

Lots of great shows have premiered this year already, but for me, Paradise Season 1 was not only one of the best series to stream on Hulu, but one of the best so far on the 2025 TV schedule overall. From the characters to the performances to the twisty plot, Sterling K. Brown and his co-stars had me locked into this political thriller. After the finale dropped on March 4, I found that I couldn’t stop thinking about the tragedy of James Marsden as President Cal Bradford.

The penultimate episode of Paradise’s first season absolutely broke my heart as we finally got to see the disaster that (supposedly) rendered the Earth’s surface unlivable. That phone call between Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) and his wife Teri (Enuka Okuma) was a lot to handle, but after the final episode, “The Man Who Kept the Secrets,” I can’t help but be devastated for Cal and the loneliness of his final days.

Cal’s Last Conversations With Everyone Were Straight-Up Brutal

First I will say it’s not lost on me that nepo-President Cal Bradford was not a perfect man. He was an entitled white man who got handed the keys (and the nuclear codes) to the country simply because the patriarchy is alive and well. He was not a good husband, probably not a great dad, and he left a loooot of people to die as he and his family fled to the safety of Sinatra’s underground Paradise. But was he evil enough to deserve what his final hours held?

Early on we learned that Cal was somehow responsible for Xavier’s wife getting left behind on that fateful day, and while Xavier has continued to do his job as a Secret Service agent, he makes no secret about how he feels for the president, with his final words to Cal being:

Then there’s the president’s teen son Jeremy (Charlie Evans), who got into an argument with his dad over his role in what happened on “The Day,” delivering the parting words:

Just because it’s true doesn’t make it not cruel. So that’s two of the people closest to him savoring the thought of his demise. Surely his dear old dad will be a source of comfort, right? Maybe in a different show, but not Paradise. Here, when Cal tells Kane Bradford (Gerald McRaney) that he's in danger and asks if — after a life spent as his dad’s chess piece — he ever made him proud, Kane replies:

That one really took the wind out of Cal’s sails. I can imagine he was rarely, if ever, as vulnerable with his father than in that moment, and he did not get any validation for the life he knew was likely ending soon.

Think about these conversations in comparison to the heart-wrenching phone call between Xavier and Teri before the bomb hit, where he says to imagine he’s holding her, and they cry and shower each other in “I love you”s in what they think are her final moments. And she didn’t even die!

Xavier, Jeremy And Kane Change Their Views, But Not Until After Cal Is Dead

In Paradise’s final episodes, we find out Cal is taking steps to right his many wrongs, putting his life in danger by standing up to Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson). This leads to Xavier learning that on that terrible day when he thought he’d watched a nuclear missile hit Atlanta, where Teri was, Cal had actually flipped a switch that deactivated all of the world’s nukes, thus saving his wife’s life. We see Kane — in his dementia mistaking Jeremy for Cal — tell the man he thinks is his son:

We also see Jeremy embracing not just his dad’s music, but the advice Cal gave him — if you don’t like this world, change it — and begin doing what his father hadn’t done by being open and honest with his fellow citizens about what he knew.

However, Cal Bradford will never know that the three people who so brutally told him his life was a waste — who said they wished he was dead and would not rest until it was so — had changed their minds. Paradise may be able to bring Teri back from what we thought was certain death and nuclear winter, but Cal is dead dead.

Even with Paradise renewed for Season 2, there’s simply no way to reverse the final interactions that Cal had with his friend, dad and son.

Will James Marsden Return For Paradise Season 2?

President Cal Bradford was murdered in the premiere of Paradise but still managed to play a main role throughout, thanks to flashbacks. Now that we know who the killer is and the national security secrets have been spilled, will that continue to be the case? Or — with Season 2 presumably going to focus on recovering survivors and the rebuilding efforts on Earth — did we learn all we could from Cal in the first eight episodes?

It’s likely far too early for that kind of question, but even if Cal does show back up when Season 2 hits the Hulu schedule, it won’t change the terrible things he heard from his loved ones before he died, and to me, that makes his story (the ending of it, at least) the most tragic.

If you want to relive all the political thrills and A+ performances of Paradise, the entire first season is available to stream now on Hulu.