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In the very first shot of the pilot episode of “Paradise”—a recent dystopian political thriller from Hulu—a man played by Sterling K. Brown lies alone, unrestfully, in bed. His eyes are bolted open. A watercolor wash of blue light floods his face. He blinks a bit and looks around the room, then caresses the unused pillow next to his own. The man—soon we learn that he’s a hyper-competent, scrupulously moral Secret Service officer named Xavier Collins—is manifestly unhappy, and so the color of the light through the window is a bit of a pun. Xavier’s got the blues.
As it turns out, he’ll soon have more immediate troubles than his unsubtly drawn sorrow: his protectee, the U. S. President, Cal Bradford (James Marsden), is found dead—bloody, facially disfigured, surely murdered—in his palatial bedroom not much further into the episode. A tablet containing precious national-security secrets has been stolen from President Bradford’s safe. Xavier tells his underlings to hold off from reporting the killing until he can peruse the scene undisturbed. Already, instinctively, he knows not to trust the organs of justice that will be tasked with figuring out the truth. Because of the delay, he’s briefly a suspect. Oh, and—little detail—the earth’s surface has, apparently, been wiped clean by a world-historic climate event and a nuclear war, and everybody who survived is living in a bunker gussied up by its billionaire overlords to look like a perpetually temperate American suburb.
Questions keep coming: Who killed the President? What are the oligarchs, led by an increasingly suspicious tech entrepreneur nicknamed Sinatra (Julianne Nicholson), hiding about what really happened up on the surface? How does the vegan nut cheese melted over the fries at the town’s only diner really taste? Everybody who eats it makes a cooking-show facial fuss and professes to love it, but let’s get real. Maybe most pressing: who in this subterranean world can Xavier trust? Like Plato’s allegorical cave dwellers, he can apprehend his situation only in blurs and intimations, shadows and whispers. In order to really know, he’ll have to fight his way out.
“Paradise” does an exciting and sometimes moving job of managing so much plot and making its scenarios seem darkly plausible, given the real-life crises that, these days, are steadily encroaching upon its viewers. But, after watching all eight episodes of the show’s first season (a second one is in the works), I’m still thinking of that quiet first few seconds and its wordless picture of grief. Sad Xavier is a widower. That lonely pillow should belong to his wife, Teri. (That’s Dr. Teri Rogers-Collins to you: she was tough, and Xavier never fails to point this out.) She couldn’t make it in time to escape into the cave—she was on a work trip, that ancient eroder of marital bonds—and now Xavier’s left to serve the interests of a political order that couldn’t be bothered to save her life. He’s got two kids, a boy and a girl, over whom, even during his deepening investigation, he frets with a special intensity. He can’t stand to lose another thing, another face.
To the extent that Teri’s fate is what spurs Xavier on—giving him courage and productive anger, but also a hint of nihilistic willingness to die in pursuit of the truth—he’s not alone on contemporary TV. On the popular show “Severance,” for instance, a former college professor named Mark Scout is so rocked by the death of his wife, Gemma (in a car crash, we’re told), that he decides to undergo a procedure that splits his consciousness along the line between leisure and labor. By night he’s still himself, bleary around the eyes, sharp at the tongue, patently haunted by memories of Gemma. But, when he goes down the elevator to work, his memory clears and he’s a chipper new creature known as Mark S.—he’s working with a team of other severed “innies” on a project whose point is a mystery.
“Severance” is now in its second season, and becomes progressively stranger as it hums along. If the first season was fuelled by whodunit-style investigatory energy—the increasingly radicalized “innies” get curious about their extremely controlling employers at Lumon, eventually figuring out how to briefly override the bifurcating system and take over the bodies of the “outies,” who doomed them to corporate purgatory—the second is an experiment conducted largely on the level of dreamlike images. Behind one door at Lumon is an unexplained pastoral setting, gentle hills and cooing goats under fluorescent indoor lights. There’s an episode that opens, all of a sudden, in a vast outdoor snow-covered forest, the show’s quite rare foray into the sunlight: usually it’s nighttime or the electrified eternity of the office. Spoiler alert: we learn that Gemma’s not actually dead, at least not in the way that her loved ones have been led to believe she is, and the scenes that portray her current-day plight are interwoven with woozy memories of her mostly happy marriage with Mark.
One potential message of the weird new season—I love it, but it’s been controversial, leaving lots of people impatient with its proliferating strangeness—is that the life of intimate grief, one lover losing the other, quickly meanders from a strict chronological or causal rhythm. Henry Adams, the brahmin descendent of two American Presidents, called his life after the death of his wife, Clover, “posthumous.” He was a wanderer, a traveller, a vagabond historian and critic whose great midlife shock had left him feeling unfettered, sorrowfully free.
The same might be said of Mark Scout and Xavier Collins: the loss of their beloveds has wounded them but also cleared the way for the courage they display amid thickening intrigues. Marital life is liquid—it spreads to fit the containing shape of the self. When the bottle breaks, a livid flood comes rushing out. The widower becomes dangerous, breaks some glass against the wall of civilization. Mark and Xavier are both flailing against power in high places: Mark has the monolith Lumon, an entity that has sprouted its own kind of mystery cult, coöpting legislators and popular sentiment as it nears its nefarious ultimate goals. Xavier has the increasingly psychopathic Sinatra, who, we learn early on, has been dealing with a loss of her own: the death of her young son.
Both guys come from occupational backgrounds—education and law enforcement—that, at least in the popular imagination, tend to bolster society and keep it rolling on toward the future. But these posthumous men have already survived an apocalypse of a kind. Why not instigate another?
What televisual future does this kind of man portend? The long era of the antihero—Tony Soprano, Stringer Bell, Don Draper, Walter White, Bill Hader’s Barry—seems to have exhausted itself, at least for now. TV, newly chastened by shrinking studio budgets and a slowing pipeline of projects, seems to be retreating to familiar genres: the medical drama, the murder mystery, the police procedural, the thriller. Now, though, the old tropes unfold with a glossy sheen left over from the high point of so-called “prestige” TV. Sterling K. Brown, with flexible expressions and quivering eyes, has never been so well lit. You could call the high-concept “Severance” a more classic prestige product than “Paradise,” but its outer encasement as a whodunit (and the creative stewardship of its executive producer Ben Stiller, a severely underrated maker of TV) makes it, perhaps deceptively, legible to an impressively wide audience, at least at first. Maybe this latest swivel in sensibility, back toward a kind of crowd-pleasing populism, necessitates the emergence of a new male archetype: Mr. Hurt but Good. Old Sad Eyes.
The quite violent and wildly entertaining recent Netflix Western miniseries “American Primeval”—you can’t get more traditional than a tale about the untamed American roughlands—features a loner named Isaac (Taylor Kitsch) who’s hired to guide a woman and her young son across the treacherous Utah territory. Isaac’s a white man but knows Native folkways and is accepted by Native people. He survives cold nights by heating up rocks and burying them in the soil beneath his body. His wife and child were murdered years ago, we learn. He’s got nothing to lose; the outdoors has become his home.
As the series draws to a close, Isaac springs into sacrificial action—one last gesture of protection toward a little family he’s come to love. You can’t really process it as a loss. When we met him, he was already dead. ♦
Sourse: newyorker.com
