Spoilers for Season 1 of Paradise are ahead! If you haven’t seen the series yet, you can stream it with a Hulu subscription.
This Is Us and Paradise have a couple of very obvious connections – they were both created by Dan Fogelman and they both star Sterling K. Brown. Outside of that, though, I didn’t expect the Hulu series on the 2025 TV schedule to remind me of the NBC hit at all. However, after binge-watching Paradise, I realized these shows hit my emotions very hard in similar ways.
Now, as you know, Paradise is a heart-pounding thriller about the murder of the president that takes place in what is basically a bunker built for the end of the world. The Is Us is an emotional drama about a family. In concept, these projects don’t have much in common at all. However, based on each show’s emphasis on family connections and their effective use of timeline hopping to build empathy and understanding, I found myself reaching for the tissues while watching them for similar reasons.
Like This Is Us, The Heart Of Paradise Is The Families The Show Is Based Around
Dan Fogelman and his team are experts at building empathy. In both This Is Us and Paradise, you fall in love with big families, and you ride through life with them as they experience their highest highs and lowest lows. What that means is you see their greatest qualities and ugly flaws, and you accept it all.
While the stakes are obviously more extreme in Paradise, at its heart, these people are simply trying to protect those they love. On This Is Us, the heart of the show was Rebecca, Jack, Randall, Kevin and Kate’s relationship and how they worked through life together. What drives Paradise’s main character Xavier is his love for his kids and (missing?) wife, and what motivates our primary antagonist Sinatra is protecting her daughter.
So, when I watched Paradise, I found myself getting misty-eyed over character deaths (like Billy’s) and plot developments, like, you know, the world ending, because I was watching these characters struggle deeply with how their families had been impacted by great loss. It took this show past your general thriller and turned it into a deeply emotional drama that had me as emotional as I was when I found out how Jack died.
I think that’s a big reason why I love Paradise so much. Like This Is Us, it puts family first in a lot of ways, and those relationships (and how we learn about them, which we’ll talk about next) are what invested me on a deeply emotional level.
Both Paradise And This Is Us Effectively Use Timeline Hopping To Tell Their Stories
If you watched This Is Us (you can do so now with a Hulu or Netflix subscription), you are no stranger to timeline jumping. On the NBC drama, that was the name of the game. We bounced between Kevin, Kate and Randall’s childhood and their adulthood, and that back and forth gave us a deep, emotional and complex understanding of the Pearson family.
The same thing happened in Paradise.
By alternating timelines between pre- and post-world ending event, we got to know the characters and their pasts, which ultimately made their fates hit harder.
Take James Marsden’s President Cal, for example. For the first section of the series, it was hard to empathize with him. He’s kind of a jerk, and on the surface, it was hard to root for him. However, by the end of the season, Cal might be the show’s biggest tragedy. That’s because it’s revealed in flashbacks that he was trying to right his wrongs, however, in the present his loved ones didn’t realize that until long after he was dead.
Billy is another example of this. His character is fully fleshed out in basically one episode. In the lead-up to his death, we flashed between his present and past, learning about his childhood and what got him into the bunker. While his actions above ground weren’t good, we also see that the world wasn’t exactly nice to him. It became clear that this place was a second chance for him, and learning that minutes before he died ripped my heart out.
In both cases, like This Is Us, we were able to see these characters as three-dimensional folks because we learned about certain facets of their past at perfect moments. Basically, the structure of both shows makes it so they can deliver heavy emotional blows.
Overall, like This Is Us, Paradise is a show based in human connection, it just also happens to take place at the end of the world. So, yeah, this series absolutely ripped my heart out exactly like Sterling K. Brown’s other drama did, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
