How a Paradise Episode Captivates — Even When You Know What Happens

Paradise, the story of a small band of survivors living in a utopian bunker, is loaded with surprises and twists. But the seventh episode of the series, “The Day,” revisits things we mostly already know. 

As Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) and billionaire Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson) flash back to the end of the world as they knew it, viewers already know that a tsunami has wiped out millions, and that the survivors include Collins, Sinatra, Collins’ children, and, at least for a while, the pragmatic President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). 

But even knowing, generally, how “The Day” turns out, it’s still among the most propulsive and emotional TV episodes ever made. 

Paradise, created by Dan Fogelman, is a throwback to the event broadcast TV shows of the 2000s like 24 and Lost — shows you could watch on DVR, sure, but felt compelled to catch in real time. Paradise adroitly mixes the cliffhanger sensibility of peak broadcast TV with the cinematic artistry of streaming sensations, and in a nice bow to both mediums, premiered on Hulu on January 26th, and ABC three days later. 

Brown and Fogelman previously worked together on one of the biggest broadcast hits of the last decade, NBC’s This Is Us. The directors of “The Day,” Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, are longtime collaborators who first worked with Fogelman to direct his script for the 2011 hit Crazy, Stupid, Love, and directed the pilot and six additional episodes of This Is Us. The NBC show is where they first worked with Yasu Tanida, the cinematographer of “The Day.”

We asked Ficarra, Requa and Tanida — on the eve of their starting Paradise Season 2 — how they mined so much drama from an episode where so many facts are already established. The answer, they say, came largely from how it was shot.

“When we read the script, the first thing that jumped to our minds was Paul Greengrass,” explained Requa. “What if you did a Paul Greengrass movie in the White House at the end of the world?” 

They specifically cited Greengrass’ United 93, a film in which the audience already knows the grim ending: The 2006 drama tells the story of passengers on the hijacked 9/11 plane fighting back to keep it from hitting its target.

Though the directors and Tanida borrow elements of Greengrass — including ample Steadicam and shooting scenes in real time — their cuts are less noticeable, and the camera doesn’t move as rovingly as it does in many Greengrass scenes. 

The actors, said Ficarra, “are really the ones who are driving the tension. You can read it on their faces.”

Tanida added to the intimate feel by shooting with spherical lenses, rather than the anamorphic ones typically employed by Paradise, “because spherical is a little more personal. Anamorphic is a little more stretched and cinematic.” 

As immaculate as Paradise looks, Ficarra said that it’s “not a big-budget show. It’s big for broadcast, but we probably got a third of the budget for an Apple show or an HBO show per episode. You can’t create the whole world.” 

Budget is one reason the show takes the approach that Steven Spielberg used in his 2005 alien-invasion film War of the Worlds: “Everything is told from the characters’ eye level, basically. You’re always with the characters,” Ficarra said. 

“All the news is coming from the TV or from texts, as you would experience it. It’s not like we’re cutting to Antarctica and seeing the big Roland Emmerich shot.”

“The Day” takes place mostly at the White House, which Paradise reproduced on Paramount’s historic, nearly 16,000-square-foot Stage 32, where past shoots have included Chinatown and Citizen Kane. 

The episode used almost every inch of available stage space, filling it with hundreds of extras, and shot long stretches of scenes, using multiple cameras, to capture a sense of continuity and urgency. One take was 10 minutes long, nearly a sixth of the episode.

“When you do it, you realize, this is not just great filmically, but it’s also great for the actors,” said Requa. “The shooting style affects the performance. There’s a certain amount of energy to actors knowing that it’s a ten-page scene that you’re shooting, and that if they mess up, everybody — all these extras, all this crew that have been running and sweating and getting to their moment — they’ve ruined it for all of us. You have this great tension. And when you’re trying to create tension, it really charges those performances.”

Tension in Paradise

Shooting long scenes required lots of rehearsal with Tanida and camera operators John Joyce and Richard Coy Aune, as well as with the boom operators, all of whom needed to stay out of the shots.

“For that episode, they’re part of the cast,” Requa explained, because the camera people move as much as the actors. 

The length of some scenes was constrained only by the need for commercial breaks and the physical limitations of the stage: “People were running and diving behind desks,” laughed Requa.

The intense amount of rehearsal raised some eyebrows, he said: “We would rehearse sometimes for four hours before we would ever roll one frame. Every day the studio would come to set and say, ‘Why haven’t you shot anything yet?’ Then we’d shoot it in two or three takes and go home early.”

Also Read: FYCit Wants to Help You Keep Up on Award Season Events

Actors on the White House set would watch tsunami news updates, filmed in the moment with real-life ABC journalist Bob Woodruff and actors playing talking-head experts, sitting in the writers’ room and other available offices.

“We pushed the ‘live’-ness of it,” said Requa.

“We weren’t trying to get any kind of perfection. We were trying to keep it rough,” added Ficarra.

Because so much of the episode features news broadcasts, “The Day” departs from Paradise’s normal aspect ratio, 2.4:1, in favor of the 16:9 ratio more common to TV, Tanida said.

Despite all the challenges, things went “very smoothly,” he added. “It was well-rehearsed and really fun.”

“All of us were like kids on a playground,” said Requa. “We were having the time of our lives.” 

The episode also benefits from subtle elements that underscore the drama — like Tanida’s use of light to imply contrast.

“Overall at the White House, the lighting is basically warm light inside tungsten, and there’s this kind of cool, overcast blue light coming from all the windows,” he said. “It feels like the blue is in their wardrobe and on the desk, and it’s almost inviting them, pulling at them, but then they’re trying to stay in this warm light.” 

Another delicate touch: Composer Siddhartha Khosla included in the soundtrack a “really great heartbeat of a throb that beats throughout the entire episode,” said Ficarra. “Each act, it gets a little faster. It’s almost imperceptible and it really helps.“

Of course, Paradise wouldn’t be Paradise without a few twists: “The Day” ends with a big one that changes everything we knew… or thought we knew.

Paradise is now streaming on Hulu.

Main image: James Marsden as President Cal Bradford and Sterling K. Brown as agent Xavier Collins in Paradise Episode 7, “The Day”

Photos courtesy of Hulu