Paradise Season 2: When Will Sterling K. Brown's Hulu Series Return?

Do not proceed if you haven't finished season 1 of "Paradise." Spoilers for the season finale lie ahead!

The first season of "Paradise," the twisty new drama from "This Is Us" creator Dan Fogelman which also stars "This Is Us" veteran Sterling K. Brown as Secret Service agent Xavier Collins, just came to a close, and even though the season 1 finale, "The Man Who Kept the Secrets," answered a handful of burning questions, it also raised even more. With that in mind, fans of the show are probably disappointed to hear that, unfortunately, they'll have to wait quite a while for the forthcoming second season.

In a post-finale interview with Deadline on March 4, the showrunner said that they haven't quite started production on "Paradise" season 2 yet, so it'll be a little while before audiences see it. "Scripts are written. We go into production in four weeks," Fogelman said before acknowledging that, as a TV watcher himself, he's getting tired of shows taking very extended breaks (we're all looking at you, "Severance" season 2). 

"I'm becoming increasingly frustrated with shows that are off the air for a very long time in which people get invested in and then it takes a long time to get it back on television," Fogelman continued. "We're ready to go right now and hoping to get this show back on TV in a normal span of time, hopefully the same time as it came out this past year as opposed to waiting multiple years. So if we came out in early 2025, hopefully the next season's out by early 2026." That's a while from now, but it's an understandable timeline.

In that same interview, Dan Fogelman was asked about the way he ends season 1 of "Paradise," which, like I said, answers some questions while also raising some new ones. We now know who killed President Cal Bradford (James Marsden) — it was a disgruntled librarian, which is a larger story — but at the very end of "The Man Who Kept the Secrets," Xavier boards a plane to leave the bunker so that he can search for his family, meaning we'll likely get a much closer look at the state of the world outside of the protected dome.

Ultimately, Fogelman said he was pretty sure Hulu would renew the show, so he just went for it. "I felt confident we were going to get a season 2, though I've been confident before and gotten screwed by ending on a cliffhanger that never gets an answer. So it's a very fair question," Fogelman admitted. "But I never really questioned that, honestly. If I felt the show had been turning out terribly in the edit bay, maybe I would have ended it more completely. But this was always the plan."

As for the specific ending, Fogelman said he knew what would happen to Xavier in the season finale right away. "When I first told Sterling where the show was going after he read the pilot, I said the season ends with him getting on a plane and flying out of the bunker to see what's out there in the world," the showrunner continued. "My other hope was that it would feel like a great cliffhanger in that it asks a whole new set of questions. Every other question you've been asking in the course of the season, like Who killed the president? What happened in the world? What was the catastrophe? What is this? That all would have been answered in a satisfying way. And now it's like, okay, we're heading off into a new journey and a slightly new iteration of the show."

Overall, critics are fans of "Paradise": season 1 scored a solid 82% on Rotten Tomatoes, and the critical consensus declares, "Teeming with heady concepts and themes, 'Paradise' is an overstuffed but addictively ambitious reunion of Sterling K. Brown and creator Dan Fogelman." 

As far as individual critics, while many of them noted that "Paradise" is sometimes overstuffed and over-the-top, Fogelman's big swing and Brown's central performance combine to cover up the show's major pitfalls. "A moreish if preposterous murder-mystery wrapped up in a swing-for-the-fences premise," James Dyer wrote for Empire Magazine. "If you think you know what to expect going in, think twice — it's far more than just another day in paradise." Nina Metz at the Chicago Tribune appeared to agree, saying, "There are only so many ways to tell that story, but I give 'Paradise' credit for finding a unique way into it," and Alan Sepinwall expressed a similar sentiment in his review for Rolling Stone: "The rest is middling and at times outright silly versions of things you've seen dozens of times before, well-paced and watchable throughout, and frequently elevated by its cast." (When Sepinwall refers to "the rest," he's singling out the season's 7th episode "The Day" as a standout.)

Ultimately, people accept "Paradise" as it is ... and enjoy it despite some of the overt silliness. "Paradise isn't a brilliant brainteaser or a mind-blowing science-fiction story — far from it — but Fogelman's latest serialized endeavor is a sturdy combination on a number of levels: It's a satisfying mystery (most of the time) and a moving melodrama," Ben Travers said in his review for IndieWire. The first season of "Paradise" is streaming on Hulu now.