Awards “stuff,” as Dan Fogelman calls it, has always been “kind of fun and a little foreign to me,” admits the double Emmy nominee, who’s up for best drama series as the creator of Paradise and best comedy series as an executive producer of Only Murders in the Building. Since 2021, Fogelman has had consecutive nominations in one of the two categories, dating back to the NBC drama This Is Us, on which Sterling K. Brown, who now leads his postapocalyptic Hulu thriller, starred. But as nice as the recognition is, Fogelman confesses, “We tend to never win.”
That could change with the acclaim that’s surrounding Paradise, which is already close to wrapping production on season two and also has seen its three leads — Brown (Xavier Collins), Julianne Nicholson (Sinatra) and James Marsden (President Cal Bradford) — earn noms as well. Fogelman teases to THR what’s to come in season two.
You mentioned there are some conspiracy theories about the Denver airport and the Colorado region where Paradise is set that you might explore in the future. Have you made a decision yet?
People have to wait a little bit, but certainly there was a reason Colorado was picked, and in season two, you start learning. We had a three-season story in mind when we started this television show, and the show really explodes in season two into a different world and space. It’s about the same things, but it expands thematically, as do the places we go. The science fiction nature of the show expands as well.
Do you still feel strongly about the show only being three seasons?
I will admit that the breadth of the second season — I’m filming the finale as we speak — it’s gotten so big and exciting that it does make me go, “You know what? There might be a little bit more meat on the bone here than I realized.” But for the most part, Sterling and I made a commitment to each other to do three seasons of this, eight episodes a season. The only way I would expand it is if I was like, “Oh shit. There is a lot more story to tell here that I can’t tell and tell well [in three seasons].”
After Sinatra, Nicole Brydon Bloom’s Jane might be the most impactful character of season one. At a THR Frontrunners panel, the audience (playfully) booed her.
The ironic part is — and it’s why the casting worked so well — when you speak to her in real life, she’s the nicest, sweetest, most soft-spoken person, and she’s playing the ultimate bad guy in this, which was so exciting and fun. This is an example of a character that was written in the show who I knew was going to have a turn, but I didn’t realize how much I was going to like it and her. You start writing, and you’re like, “Oh, I like this actress in this role. I like this character; I’m going to do more with it.” Our sixth episode of season two is called “Jane,” and it tells her story.
The season one finale was quite satisfying in that you tied up a lot of loose ends.
I wanted it to be a propulsive page-turner of a novel that would make people ask questions and wonder what’s going to happen next, but I didn’t want to make people wait until next season to find out. We were really careful about saying, “OK, the end of episode one’s going to yield eight billion questions. Let’s, in episode two, at least say, ‘OK, the world looks like it really ended as the result of some kind of environmental catastrophe,’ then let’s give more answers to that in three and in four, so that by the end of the first season, when we’re no longer weekly releasing episodes, almost 99 percent of the questions have been answered.” And if you have any questions remaining at the end of season one, it’s probably, “Is Xavier’s wife alive? And what has happened in the outside world?” We’ve answered the questions of what happened to the world: Who killed the president? Why did people kill the president? Why is everybody acting the way they act? The only thing left is what’s out there, and that’s what season two explores.
This story first appeared in an August stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.
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