Paradise is a post-apocalyptic political thriller from This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman, premiering on Hulu on January 26, 2025, and it wasted no time making noise. The show drew 7 million views in its first nine days, climbed to number one on Hulu’s streaming charts, and picked up Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series along with acting nods for its three leads. Sterling K. Brown plays Xavier Collins, a Secret Service agent living inside a city-sized underground bunker in Colorado three years after a doomsday event. James Marsden plays President Cal Bradford. Julianne Nicholson plays Samantha Redmond, known as Sinatra, the most powerful person in the bunker. The setup is propulsive from the jump.
What made Season 1 work was its commitment to momentum. Fogelman structured the season around a single central mystery—who killed President Cal—and kept peeling back layers until the full picture finally snapped into place in the finale. The show blends political thriller, murder mystery, and sci-fi without ever feeling like it’s juggling too much, largely because the character work stays grounded even when the premise gets big. Brown carries the show on his back, and the ensemble around him holds up. With Season 2 already airing, here’s a full breakdown of everything that happened in Season 1.
Hidden City and Murder Mystery
The series opens with its lead character, Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown), out for a morning jog. Collins is the head of security, essentially the Secret Service chief, for the President of the United States. As he passes the White House, he runs into one of his agents and close friends, Billy Pace (Jon Beavers), who reports that he was on duty inside the White House the night before. Collins lives with his two kids, Presley (Aliyah Mastin) and James (Percy Daggs IV). His wife passed away.
After his run and breakfast with the kids, Collins heads back to the White House for his shift. Out front, he’s met by Agent Jane Driscoll (Nicole Brydon Bloom), who’s relieving Billy from the overnight watch. Once inside, he checks in with two other agents on duty who tell him everything looks normal. Collins then makes his way to the President’s quarters. The current president is Cal Bradford (James Marsden).
He tries to rouse him, but the President isn’t coming out, and after waiting long enough, Collins decides to go in. What he finds stops him cold. The President is covered in blood. Collins forces himself to stay calm, but when he checks for a pulse, it’s clear: President Cal is dead. Rather than sounding the alarm right away, Collins sweeps every room first. That’s when he notices one of the most valuable items in the residence, a tablet containing classified documents, is also gone.
He quietly pulls Jane aside and tells her to lock down the White House without making a scene, and that Billy is the only person allowed in. Collins then calls Billy and tells him to get there immediately. After that, he heads to the security control room, where Agent Mike Garcia (Eddie Diaz) is on watch, and has him pull up the previous night’s footage. The recordings show President Cal going about his evening as usual, nothing out of the ordinary.
But Collins spots something. Agent Nicole Robinson (Krys Marshall) had been with the President at some point, and her earring was left behind on the nightstand. Still, Robinson wasn’t the last person with the President that night. Collins was. When Billy arrives, they go into the President’s room together. Billy is stunned. Collins shows him that the safe holding the tablet has been emptied. He explains why he called Billy specifically, since he’s the only one Collins trusts, and asks him to comb through every inch of the White House for clues before Collins officially reports what happened.
Billy gets to work. Outside the bedroom door, he finds a plant that’s been knocked over, with footprints in the soil. Meanwhile, Collins gets a call from Garcia, who’s found something off in the footage. After Collins left and Billy took over, Billy apparently fell asleep on the job for about an hour and a half. And a few minutes into his nap, the cameras stop recording. The feed just freezes on the last frame. That gap is more than enough time for someone to slip in and out undetected. Collins goes back to Jane and officially orders a full lockdown, and tells her to call a Code Red, because the President is dead.
That announcement brings every agent running. Collins is questioned almost immediately. He was the last person to see the President alive and the first to find him dead. He tells them nothing seemed off that night. Then Agent Robinson walks in, the woman whose earring turned up on the nightstand. She asks Collins what happened between him and President Cal that night. Collins tells her they talked, like they always did, and nothing was unusual.
That pulls Collins back to the memory that changed everything, the day President Cal pulled him aside and let him in on a secret. The world, Cal had told him, was heading toward a catastrophe. A natural disaster of a scale that could wipe out humanity. In response, the government had quietly built an underground city inside a mountain, a refuge designed to shelter around 25,000 carefully selected people and give the human race a chance to survive. Collins is one of those 25,000. He’s been living down there ever since.
The story then flashes back twelve years. Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) is gathering a group of scientists on her private jet, including one of the world’s foremost urban architects. She commissions him to design a fully functional underground city, capable of housing around 25,000 people. After landing, she takes him to a mountain that’s already been hollowed out for the project. Standing inside it, the architect is speechless.
Suspicion Falls on Inner Circle
Back in the present, Collins finds the President’s last cigarette. It’s the only physical clue he has, and scratched on it is a sequence of numbers that might mean something. The next day, Sinatra calls a meeting with the investors and tells them the public needs to be told that President Cal died of a heart attack, not that he was murdered. Afterward, Sinatra goes to find Collins, who’s still being questioned. When Robinson asks him point-blank whether he killed President Cal, Collins is firm and says he didn’t. He delayed the Code Red to gather evidence before investigators arrived, because the killer could easily be someone close to the administration.
When Robinson can’t find a single tell in Collins’s story, Dr. Gabriela Torabi (Sarah Shahi), President Cal’s personal psychologist, steps in. She asks Collins whether some part of him is glad the President is dead, then gives him a subtle signal to say yes. Taking the cue, Collins admits that yeah, in a way, he does feel a kind of relief. Sinatra still isn’t fully convinced. She tells him the public announcement is being prepared and a replacement is being lined up. But starting tomorrow, Collins is on a two-week mandatory leave.
The entire underground city is gathered in a large auditorium. They’re informed that President Cal passed away from a heart attack, and his successor, Henry Baines (Matt Malloy), is named the new President. While Henry is at the podium, Collins slips away to find Billy. He tells him he thinks Sinatra is behind the murder, since she seems to hold more power than anyone and it looks like even the President answers to her. Collins is going to figure out who Sinatra actually is.
The medical examiner reports that the President was struck with a blunt object, hard enough to fracture his skull. A full-body scan has been done to check whether the killer left DNA behind, which can be cross-referenced against every resident of the underground city. Meanwhile, Gabriela takes Collins to a garden. She tells him that shortly before his death, Cal had come to her office and told her something. But she’ll only share it if Collins is willing to be honest about his own past. Collins opens up about the falling-out he had with his father, how they never reconciled, how his father died before Collins ever got the chance to apologize.
Robinson, meanwhile, has summoned Jane and Billy for questioning. It turns out that on the night of the murder, they were the ones who cut the security camera feed. Caught, they can’t deny it. Jane explains that they turned the cameras off because they didn’t want to get busted playing Wii Tennis on the President’s Nintendo console. Sinatra and Robinson are absolutely floored. Gabriela finally reveals what President Cal told her. He came to her office drunk one night and said that if anything ever happens to him, find Collins and tell him to look into Billy Pace, his own best friend.
Collins reaches out to Billy but gets no response. He pulls Billy’s personnel file from the archives. What he finds is surprising: Billy did time when he was younger, convicted of killing his own uncle. That day is carnival day in the city. Collins takes his son along, planning to wait for Gabriela there. But he spots Billy deep in conversation with Sinatra and Robinson. That night, Collins meets up with Gabriela at the carnival and asks her to watch his kids while he tracks Billy down.
Finding him, Collins listens as Billy warns him to back off, since he’s on leave and shouldn’t be poking around. But Collins turns it around, accusing Billy of being the one who killed the President. Billy pushes back hard, pleading with Collins not to lose faith in him. After hearing him out, Collins tells Gabriela that Billy’s not the killer. But that only confuses her more. Why would President Cal tell her to watch out for Billy?
Elsewhere, Billy is at a bar when his eyes land on the bar owner’s wife, and it sends him back. He’d once been sent to the surface to check whether any life remained up there. He found people still alive. Instead of reporting it, he killed them, to make sure no one inside the city would ever find out that survival above ground was possible. That decision drives him straight to Sinatra. He tells her to not touch Collins or his family. He’ll follow her orders, even when it’s meant killing scientists sent to survey the outside world. But Collins and his kids are off the table.
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Billy goes back to find Collins at the carnival grounds and swears again he didn’t kill President Cal. Tomorrow, he promises, he’ll share something important that might crack the case open. Then he takes a drink from the glass Jane sets in front of him—and crashes to the floor. As Billy writhes in pain, Jane calmly lays out pill bottles on the table. She’s been working for Sinatra all along, tasked with making Billy’s death look like an overdose.
Rebellion Against Sinatra Begins
The next day, Collins attends President Cal’s funeral but doesn’t see Billy anywhere. Before he can head over to Billy’s place, Robinson pulls him aside. She tells him the DNA samples sent to the lab never arrived, because someone intercepted them. The only person with the access to do that is Sinatra. She’s convinced Collins is innocent, and she wants to work with him to bring Sinatra down.
Collins and Jane go to Billy’s apartment and knock. No answer. Collins kicks the door in and finds Billy dead on the floor. Jane puts on a show, breaking down in hysterics. The cause of death came back as a fentanyl overdose. Collins doesn’t buy it, since Billy was about to tell him something and Collins thinks he was killed for it, same as President Cal. Robinson tells him she knows where an arms cache is hidden, enough weapons to build a strike force and stage a coup.
They agree to move. Collins goes home and tells Presley that Uncle Billy is gone, then tells her to pack up, because Carl is coming to pick them up. He crosses the street to his neighbor, Carl Jenkins, and asks him to get the kids somewhere safe. Once that’s handled, Robinson gets Carl access to the city’s central control room, and he hacks the system. Not long after, the sky above the underground city turns red. A message blazes across it, reading They’ve been lying to you. Collins put it there as a message to Sinatra. By morning it’s still there, and people are staring.
Sinatra rushes into the control room and orders her team to take it down. But Carl has locked the system, and nobody else can touch it. At the same time, Robinson clears out the weapons cache completely. Collins, at the diner with Gabriela, asks her to pass a message to Sinatra that he’s coming for her. Gabriela delivers it. That’s when Sinatra learns that not only have Collins and his family gone off the grid, but Robinson has too. She sends people to check the weapons room, and it’s empty.
Robinson had already moved the weapons to a hideout behind the mountain. Meanwhile, the message in the sky changes to You want to know the truth. Sinatra demands her team kill it. The techs say the fastest way is a full reboot of the sky display system. Gabriela immediately objects, since cutting all those screens without warning could trigger mass panic. Sinatra tells the techs to find another way.
In the city’s library, President Cal’s son Jeremy is listening to music when Presley—Collins’s daughter and his classmate—walks in. She shows him a tablet she found at the President’s residence, spotted on the floor during one of her visits with Uncle Billy. She’d taken it hoping it might help her find out what happened to her mother. But it requires special access. Jeremy takes her to his grandfather, one of the original investors who helped build the city, to unlock it. Once they get in, Presley finds a document confirming that Atlanta, the last city where her mother was known to be, was hit by a nuclear bomb. Her mother is almost certainly dead.
Elsewhere, Collins gathers his team. President Cal was murdered. Billy Pace was murdered too, right before he was about to expose something about Sinatra. They’re going after her. The sky message updates again to Who is Sinatra?, followed by a countdown. Collins and Robinson start firing flares toward the control room. Sinatra panics and orders the techs to cut and reboot the sky immediately. Hundreds of screens go dark at once. Residents are terrified. Security protocols kick in, and Sinatra and the investors are escorted to a secure shelter.
Collins heads for Sinatra, but Gabriela intercepts him. She tells him she was one of the people who helped build this city, which means she also bears some responsibility for protecting it. Then the sky comes back on, and she steps aside. Collins goes straight at Sinatra, asking why she killed President Cal and why she killed Billy. Sinatra tells him she didn’t kill Cal—Billy, yes, but not Cal. Then she tells Collins something that stops him cold. His wife is still alive, out there on the surface, and if Collins stands down, Sinatra will help him find her.
Teri’s Survival Changes Everything
Collins doesn’t believe a word of it. But then Sinatra plays him a radio recording of voices from the surface, people still alive and still communicating. That’s why she believes Teri might have made it. Collins’s mind goes back to the evacuation. He and the President and a handful of others were heading to the underground city. His kid called him, because Teri still hadn’t shown up. Collins refused to go. But President Cal forced him onto the transport, telling him Teri was too far away, and Collins was furious. Cal had promised him Teri would be evacuated.
Aboard the aircraft, Cal had received word that enemy nations were launching nuclear strikes against the U.S., including the bunker. He was supposed to authorize a counter-launch to intercept the missiles. Instead, Cal activated an EMP-style kill switch that would shut down every power grid on Earth, including all nuclear weapons systems. The cost: human civilization set back by centuries. But it’s that decision, Sinatra tells Collins, that’s why the warheads aimed at Atlanta never detonated.
Then a woman’s voice comes through the radio, someone in Atlanta. It’s Teri. She’s alive, and she’s been looking for him and their kids. Collins agrees to call off the assault. He goes to Robinson and tells her to stand down. But Sinatra reveals she’s been holding Presley, and Collins caves. The weapons are returned, the attack cancelled. Sinatra calls Jane, who is with Presley, and orders her to kill the girl, since she knows too much from the tablet. Jane says she’ll do it, but only if Sinatra hands over the President’s Wii console. Sinatra refuses.
Collins goes back to President Cal’s residence to look for leads. He remembers Cal had left behind a cassette tape meant for Jeremy. He follows it to the library, where Cal recorded it. Inside, Collins finds a numeric clue pointing to a specific bookshelf. He finds a book titled Sinatra, nothing unusual. But next to it is The Man Who Kept Secrets, and something pulls at him. He opens it and finds handwritten notes tucked inside, possibly written by President Cal himself. Before he can process any of it, the librarian walks up behind him and knocks him out cold.
Robinson goes to Gabriela and asks her to pull the full entry roster for the city. The DNA from President Cal’s murder scene doesn’t match anyone who’s supposed to be living there, which means someone got in who shouldn’t be. A name catches Gabriela’s eye, and it’s Maggie, the owner of her regular lunch spot, so they go to her. At the diner, they test Maggie. Her file says she has a nut allergy, but she eats a nut-containing dish without reaction. Cornered, Maggie (Michelle Meredith) confesses that she’s not the real Maggie. She came in with Trent (Ian Merrigan), a man now impersonating Eli Davis, the head librarian.
Real Killer Finally Revealed
Back at the library, Collins comes to, tied to a post. Trent reveals himself as the one who tried to assassinate President Cal during a press conference years ago. He wanted to expose the truth, since a catastrophic disaster was coming and the wealthy elite were building bunkers for themselves with no intention of warning anyone. That attempt landed him in prison. When news broke that the disaster had actually arrived, the chaos gave him his window. He escaped and made his way to the underground city.
He tracked down the real Eli Davis, who was stuck in traffic. He offered Davis and his wife an alternate route to the bunker, then killed them both. He stole Davis’s identity, altered his appearance to match, and recruited a woman he’d met to pose as his wife, Maggie. Once inside, he settled in as head librarian and let his original mission fade. Until the day President Cal came to record that cassette tape. Seeing him up close brought everything flooding back. He took the mining hammer mounted on the library wall, slipped into the President’s residence, and attacked him. President Cal fought back, but Trent kept going until it was done.
Now Trent tells Collins he’s grateful, since Collins unknowingly led him to a book revealing a secret passage out of the city. He’s going to the surface to tell the world about this place. Robinson arrives and frees Collins. They take off after Trent and catch up to him on top of the city’s sky display. They corner him and order him to come with them. But Trent, seeing no way out, jumps and falls to his death somewhere in the city below.
Collins goes straight to Sinatra. The killer was an impersonator who murdered the real librarian to get inside, and he’s dead. Collins reminds her of their deal. Find the killer, get Presley back. But Sinatra tells him she’s already had Presley killed. Collins is gutted. Then the grief snaps into something else. He draws his weapon and shoots both of Sinatra’s guards. He walks up and puts the gun to Sinatra’s head. Then Jane appears and shoots Sinatra herself, telling Collins that Presley is alive and that she protected her.
After Collins leaves to find his kids, Jane crouches next to a barely breathing Sinatra and tells her that she shot her in the chest instead of letting Collins put one in her head. It’ll be a long recovery, but she’s alive. Collins drives home and finds both his kids are fine. After resting with Presley and James, he makes a decision. He’s going to the surface, using the clues President Cal left behind. He’ll board a plane, fly up there, and find Teri. He takes off, with Cal’s map in hand. And that’s where Paradise Season 1 ends.
