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SPOILER ALERT! This story contains details from the season one finale of Paradise on Hulu.
Dan Fogelman’s political thriller starring Sterling K. Brown wrapped its eight-episode first season March 4 with some much-needed answers to several burning questions. But it also promised more mysteries to come in season 2, like how Julianne Nicholson‘s character may not be the show’s only villain.
Here, creator Dan Fogelman talks about the origin of that episode title, why we felt confident about writing a cliffhanger for season one before he had a renewal from the streamer, and what to expect when season 2 drops sometime in 2026.
DEADLINE I feel like the author of the Peter Lawford book, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, is going to owe you a debt of gratitude for mentioning it. Where’d that come from?
DAN FOGELMAN We always knew the number that Cal [James Marsden] put on the cigarette was going to be a Dewey Decimal number for a book that would be stuffed with instructions for Xavier [Brown]. And obviously we had a monologue in the second episode where Cal talks about his father always referring to him as Peter Lawford and Nicholson’s character as Sinatra. I believe it was our writer’s assistant, Seena, who one day emailed me and was like, ‘check out this book.’ It was perfect. It is exactly the book that Cal would use. So we optioned it.
DEADLINE Speaking of Sinatra, between the Lawford reference and naming Julianne Nicholson’s character Sinatra, were you going for some kind of Brat Pack Easter egg this season?
FOGELMAN It was more that Gerald McRaney’s character Kane was a rat pack guy, and he was constantly referring to people by nicknames and by which person they reminded him of. That’s probably as far as it goes.
DEADLINE And what is it about Nicholson’s character that reminded him of Sinatra?
FOGELMAN It’s the leadership. She’s the true leader. That’s how he saw Sinatra, the top of the heap of that group and those singers.
DEADLINE Let’s back up. When you first embarked on this season, did you plan on including a cliffhanger before knowing you would get a season two?
FOGELMAN I felt confident we were going to get a season two, though I’ve been confident before and gotten screwed by ending on a cliffhanger that never gets an answer. So it’s a very fair question. But I never really questioned that, honestly. If I felt the show had been turning out terribly in the edit bay, maybe I would have ended it more completely. But this was always the plan. When I first told Sterling where the show was going after he read the pilot, I said the season ends with him getting on a plane and flying out of the bunker to see what’s out there in the world. My other hope was that it would feel like a great cliffhanger in that it asks a whole new set of questions. Every other question you’ve been asking in the course of the season, like who killed the president? What happened in the world? What was the catastrophe? What is this? That all would have been answered in a satisfying way. And now it’s like, okay, we’re heading off into a new journey and a slightly new iteration of the show. Yes, it would’ve been very disappointing if we had gotten canceled and we just ended with Sterling getting on that plane. I probably would’ve had to self-publish a bit of fan fiction or something to tell people what happened.
DEADLINE So is it okay to come to the conclusion now that Sinatra really isn’t a bad person?
FOGELMAN Well, I think it’s a really good question, and I think Sinatra’s story has a lot more layers and a lot more secrets to be revealed, what her mission here was and what she’s been doing the entire time. Clearly she’s played the delicious part of a super villain for a bulk of the season. We also know how the super villain was born and what her origin story was. It was born out of trauma and out of loss and out of a desire to protect her family and the 25,000 other people she could protect. I think we find her now really incapacitated and weakened and a little broken down, having lost the cover that she did this to protect a large group of people. The terrible things I did were in service of the larger, the greater good. I think she’s going to be at war with that. What her long-term plan is has still not been revealed. And I think there’s a lot more to Sinatra’s journey, her story, her character, and the creation of the bunker.
DEADLINE What’s up with Jane Driscoll [Nicole Brydon Bloom] and her love of the Wii Game? Is that just a device for you to show that this woman is a little off?
FOGELMAN I think so. Jane’s story remains to be told, but I find her delightful playing her thus far as a sociopath. She didn’t necessarily shoot Sinatra because she wanted to play the Wii. She was called insane by Sinatra so the Wii is the but into the joke. This probably would’ve been all easier if you’d just given me that Wii. But she does love that damn video game, and I think it remains to be seen if Jane is playing three-dimensional chess while everybody else is playing checkers. Or, she’s just batshit crazy. That is a question that looms for the season to come.
DEADLINE Why Wii? It’s kind of outdated.
FOGELMAN In our mind’s eye, Cal brought the Wii. This is a 50-year-old dude who likes We Built This City on Rock and Roll and Rocky movies and Eye of the Tiger. As he was gathering up shit for his below the ground mansion, he wanted to bring his old school video game that reminded him of his childhood.
DEADLINE How grateful are you for Phil Collins and his song Just Another Day in Paradise?
FOGELMAN Originally it was misreported that I had planned on using a cover of Paradise City by Guns N’ Roses. I’d heard that Guns N Roses could be very expensive or challenging to clear, but we never asked them. They never said no, which was the part that got misreported. When I got into the edit bay, we found this cover of Just Another Day in Paradise. Quickly we were like, oh, it works so beautifully at the end of the episode. And yes, I’m grateful to Phil Collins every day. I have an old vintage truck that has a CD player in it, not a radio. And Phil Collins is on heavy rotation in my CD player.
DEADLINE Where did you shot the scene where the librarian jumps to his death?
FOGELMAN We shot that on a sound stage in Los Angeles and built some infrastructure. It was all done by our incredible visual effects team. The librarian stood on a platform and jumped into a green pad off of a beam.
DEADLINE What’s the backstory on the cashew cheese fries in the restaurant?
FOGELMAN We’ve done a lot of internal work about what the food sources would be and what would they would be doing about dairy. It’s a lot more plant-based down there, which they could grow with artificial sunlight. So that’s where the cashew cheese comes from. Then we needed something that could be an indicator of something that’s amiss with this waitress. If she was ostensibly supposed to be deathly allergic to nuts and had been talking the whole series about how much she loves cashew cheese fries, that triggered Gabriela [Sarah Shahi] to say something’s not right about that woman’s history.
DEADLINE How deep are you already into season two? Have you already broken stories?
FOGELMAN Oh yeah. Scripts are written. We go into production in four weeks. I’m becoming increasingly frustrated with shows that are off the air for a very long time in which people get invested in and then it takes a long time to get it back on television. We’re ready to go right now and hoping to get this show back on TV in a normal span of time, hopefully the same time as it came out this past year as opposed to waiting multiple years. So if we came out in early 2025, hopefully the next season’s out by early 2026.
