This article contains spoilers for Paradise on Hulu.
Hulu’s new hit show Paradise is usually a pulpy good time. Sure there’s drama in the Dan Fogelman joint, and plenty of tears and family angst (per the showrunner’s M.O. from This is Us). There’s even some action and intrigue, thanks to Sterling K. Brown’s upright secret service agent trying to unravel the mystery of who killed the President, played by James Marsden. It’s all good fun, at least until the seventh episode, “The Day,” which is the most upsetting episode of TV you’ll watch this year.
Is that a bold pronouncement for two months into 2025? Surely. But while the first six episodes are a good time at the ol’ boob tube, Episode 7 will punch you in the gut and bring you to tears for nearly the entire episode. It’s an unrelenting grand guignol of emotion that progresses multiple plot points in the show and sets up the season finale while you watch the world end.
And the focus of “The Day” – or at least what’s so gut-wrenching about it – isn’t the disaster, which we only get to see glimpses of on news footage, and hear about in phone calls and broadcasts. Instead, the episode presents what happened inside The White House in near real-time, and it is horrifying.
In the series, we meet Agent Xavier Collins (Brown), who has been tasked as the lead Secret Service agent guarding President Cal Bradford (Marsden). While it initially seems like Bradford is a young ex-president in the mode of JFK, lazing away his days after two terms in office drinking and womanizing, there’s actually a lot more going on – which becomes clear after Xavier discovers the dead body of Bradford on his bedroom floor.
In fact, up until his death, Bradford was still President – of about 25,000 people, what remains of the human race after an extinction-level disaster, who now live in the fake suburban community of Paradise under a mountain in Colorado. Over the course of the season through flashbacks, we slowly discover what may have led to this disaster, as well as how Paradise was built. Most of it is down to billionaire Samantha Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), who decided to prepare for a coming climate disaster by building this underground community, a little slice of heaven that is inspired by the dying wish of her youngest son. Again: This Is Us, Dan Fogelman, etc, you get the gist. It’s all very soap opera weepy up until this point.
And yes, this is a show about climate change, something that isn’t – as they used to say – advertised on the tin. Redmond encounters an unruly scientist in an earlier episode who warns her that there are about 10 years until a devastating climate-fueled disaster destroys the world… Not slowly, but all at once.
That’s what we get to see happen in Episode 7. Thanks to the melting of the polar ice caps, a volcano explodes in Antarctica, instantly melting a huge chunk of the ice and causing a tsunami hundreds of feet tall to crash over the Earth, destroying everything in its wake. The whole situation certainly seems to be Hollywood, Day After Tomorrow, on the surface – and it is. Having a climate disaster that is, in essence, “we’ll experience unlivable levels of heat over several years” wouldn’t be nearly as cinematic as what happens in the series.
Part of the neat, narrative trick that Fogelman and company have worked into this series is that we already know what is supposed to happen. In an earlier episode, Cal asks Xavier to walk him through the protocol for the disaster, code-named “Versailles” – likely named that due to the quick exit the royal family in France took from Versailles during the French Revolution. As Xavier talks him through the 20-minute plan they joke about Die Hard, chat about their families, and Cal strongly indicates to Xavier that his wife should stop taking business trips. Unfortunately, Xavier doesn’t really know the severity of the situation. So despite Cal’s strong looks at Xavier trying to indicate how bad things are going to get, Xavier merely defers that he can never tell his wife what to do – so of course she’s going to keep going out of town.
The signs are all there that this is going to be an emotional disaster, as well as a physical one. We also know that in the “present” Xavier’s wife is dead, and he’s solo-parenting his two kids in Paradise. We also have an inkling that Cal was drinking himself into a stupor every night before his untimely murder thanks to whatever happened on the day they left The White House. But again, given how pulpy everything has been up until now, there’s no reason to think this episode will be an emotionally harrowing hour that will leave you physically and emotionally drained.
It is, though. And the reason for that is everything starts to go wrong immediately, in big and small ways. Instead of the smooth roll-out that was presented in Cal and Xavier’s late-night walk, the sudden tsunami that destroys Australia – we get constant updates of which major cities are wiped off the face of the Earth as the episode continues – sends the White House into a frenzy. We watch as Cal wrestles with lying to the American people, ultimately telling the truth about the disaster through a final broadcast, urging everyone to spend time with the ones they care about before they die. We see that he does not escape cleanly as the people left behind in the White House realize the President and staff are exiting without them, leaving them to their deaths – those who aren’t shot down by the Secret Service first.
Of course, Xavier’s wife is out of town, and watching the usually unflappable agent fall apart as he tries repeatedly to get through to her on the jammed phone lines, working with the President and Joint Chiefs of Staff to get her a route to one of the planes to Colorado, is heartbreaking… As is the way he keeps avoiding his children’s questions about their mother. And the punch, that Cal always knew she wasn’t going to make it, leads to Xavier flipping out on the tarmac in a way that will tear your heart out.
Adding on to that is a trickle-down effect where Xavier, who is dealing with the fact that he may not get his wife out in time, is doling out the same lies to the President’s long-time secretary, who is not on the “to-be saved” list. Once she realizes she won’t make it out, all she asks of Xavier is that they save her special needs son (we don’t see him in the episode), leading to a moment right before the President flees where the action pauses on her. “Mr. President,” she says,” My sister is here with Edward, they’re at the gate. So I’ll go get him.” She turns to leave and pick up her son… But he was never getting taken along. And the level of betrayal at that moment is more crushing than any tsunami destruction footage.
That footage is brutal, though. The one time we get to see what’s happening in the world at large is through a news report from Jakarta, where a reporter is broadcasting from the tallest building in the city. They should be safe – but of course, aren’t. And as the tsunami approaches, the crash of the waves causes a repeated and off-tempo sonic boom that will make you jump in your seat. As the reporter realizes the wave is going to overtake them, the broadcast cuts out, it cuts back to a silent newsroom, and we watch the staff outside the Oval Office, similarly, silent, in tears, the full weight of what’s happening hitting them for the first time both literally and figuratively.
In the middle of this, Marsden gives the performance of a lifetime as President Bradford, initially acting strong and choosing a blue tie over a yellow one because it’s “more calming,” and then ultimately heartsick over getting to leave when everyone else is being left to die. There are classic drama moments like when he asks a White House janitor why he’s still cleaning the building with everything that’s going on, but even these more trope-y pieces of drama work because Marsden’s Bradford is so anguished over his role in not saving more people when he could.
Is “The Day” manipulative? Sure. But it’s to prove a point, and show the weight of a climate disaster that is coming in the real world so slowly we think it won’t happen in our lifetimes when it more than likely will. Thanks to the real-time structure, the performances, the direction, and the unrelenting nature of the hour, there’s no way you can’t come out of it feeling grief-stricken about this potential future of the Earth. In next week’s season finale, Paradise should be back to the pulp and fun that characterized the first six episodes. But for one hour, Hulu’s sci-fi show makes us live on the last day of the human species. It’s shattering and will leave you in despair. Here’s hoping – and dreading – that the team will find something else as traumatic and emotionally urgent for the already-announced Season 2. It’s a lot. But if you can handle it, it’s also a must-watch.
