Paradise’s Dan Fogelman on the art of the twist (and dead dads and dad rock)

[Editor’s note: This piece contains spoilers for Paradise’s premiere.]  

Sometimes it’s that the beloved relative we see in flashbacks is now dead. Other times it’s that the person we were told was deceased was actually alive or that this whole story was always about an extended family. Eventually, somebody somewhere—either the characters onscreen or the people watching at home—will end the night crying. If there’s one thing that fans of writer Dan Fogelman’s long-running NBC tearjerker This Is Us or Fox’s too-pure-for-this-world sports drama Pitch know to expect, it’s that there will be a surprise twist at the end of the episode. Even some of his films, like the Emma Stone/Ryan Gosling rom-com Crazy, Stupid, Love, utilize this storytelling tool.

These reveals are usually familial, driving home the point that these seemingly unconnected stories are, in fact, connected because everyone here is related. But this isn’t the case with Paradise, Fogelman’s new series that stars Sterling K. Brown as a Secret Service agent enacting his own investigation into the assassination of James Marsden’s somewhat adversarial President. The twist at the end of the first episode of the Hulu show, which premieres January 28, is that Xavier (Brown) has sworn to protect the Commander In Chief of a planned community deep beneath the Earth’s surface—one that may very well be the last vestige of human civilization. 

Fogelman tells The A.V. Club that he doesn’t intentionally think about whether his projects may have a twist, noting that his process is to come up with a “kernel of an idea and then I sit down and I write it.” This is Us, for example, was conceived as a movie with the reveal that they were all related coming toward the end of the film. By making it a TV show and closing the pilot with the bombshell that this is a show following an intergenerational family at different points in their lives, he says he was able to make it a “story about a family that explores the relationship between family members through time.” 

On the other hand, with Paradise, he says, “I wanted to unfold two mysteries in the course of the television show. One was, what is the conspiracy? What has happened in the world? And the second was, what happened to the President? Who murdered him?” He tells us that saving the reveal that this is all taking place in an underground utopia was “not because I wanted to have a twist, but because that was the order in which I wanted to tell the story.” That way, he says, the audience can get invested in “some of the relationships and some of the unraveling of the mystery” of who offed the Commander In Chief.

But it isn’t just the surprise ending in the first episode. Paradise shares other DNA with shows in the Fogel-verse. So we asked the creator to dig into some of his shows’ go-to themes and ingredients. 

Departed or missing parents 

Paradise gives Xavier and his two kids an AWOL wife and mother. This Is Us held out as long as it could on the reveal of how and when patriarch Jack (Milo Ventimiglia) died, temporarily making Crock-Pots the most feared murder weapon in the United States. Plus, the premiere episode of Pitch, which Fogelman co-created with Rick Singer, ends with the surprise that Michael Beach’s Bill—the father who was such a motivation to MLB all-star Ginny (Kylie Bunbury)—has been dead for years. 

“This missing parent [in Paradise] is a very complicated story that unravels through the course of the first season and into the second,” Fogelman says. “Perhaps it’s because I lost my mom young that I’m constantly writing stuff about missing parents. But that would require hundreds of dollars in therapy that I’m not I’m not going to do. I don’t sit down and go, ‘Shit. I don’t have a dead parent yet. I gotta find one.’ But maybe it’s something that’s internally fueling me at times.”

Dad rock

The musicologist in charge of the tunes for the planned community in Paradise has a certain taste: Starship’s “We Built This City” factors into an episode, some of President Cal’s final moments include a drunken rendition of Phil Collins’ “Another Day In Paradise,” and the leader’s CD collection includes Journey’s Escape. And Fogelman’s other works lean into the genre, too: This Is Us’ Jack is an avowed Bruce Springsteen fan, and Olivia Wilde’s Abby in Fogelman’s film Life Itself is such a Bob Dylan devotee that she wants to name her daughter Dylan.

“I always like a good scene with a nice ‘coffee house’ [vibe],” Fogelman explains of his musical choices. “The soundtrack of this show is a lot of ’80s and early-’90s songs that maybe make you smile…and we kind of reinterpret them. Some of them became more anthemic. Some of them became more singer-songwriter ballad versions. And it’s very much drawn from Cal’s love of music.”

Sports references

The first episode of Paradise is called “Wildcat Is Down,” with Cal’s Secret Service codename nodding to his years at the University of Kentucky. The show also includes an anecdote about Duke’s Christian Laettner, a rival college basketball player. And golf figures prominently in both Paradise and Crazy, Stupid, Love. (Steve Carrell’s character in that film is also named Cal.) What’s more, Pitch is about a female baseball player, and the family in This Is Us treats Pittsburgh Steelers games like religious experiences.

“I’m a huge sports nut, so that’s where the sports references come from,” Fogelman explains. He says that, when he was developing Paradise, he debated whether he’d have to explain who Laettner is for those who are not such aficionados. People told him he did—and those of us who have never heard of the guy thank them for their services. 

And the sporty tradition continues: Fogelman’s next project for Hulu is a family drama that takes place within the NFL. He jokes that he “should do a NFL show with a dead dad and dad music and that will check all the boxes.” That sounds cool—but maybe it could also be a musical?