Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

(Spoilers ahead for people who haven’t watched “Wildcat Is Down,” Paradise‘s first episode, and the rest of Paradise‘s first season yet.)

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Siddhartha Khosla’s “Welcome to Paradise” from “Wildcat Is Down.”

Paradise—This Is Us creator Dan Fogelman’s serialized thriller starring Sterling K. Brown as a Secret Service agent uncovering unpleasant truths about the titular underground bunker he and 24,998 other survivors of an extinction-level event call home—finished its first season earlier this month and was renewed by Hulu. It’s like a post-apocalyptic and mostly non-comedic version of Only Murders in the Building (which Fogelman co-produces, while John Hoffman is OMITB’s showrunner and co-creator): Both shows are built around a season-long murder mystery within a giant complex that was the architectural brainchild of a power-hungry weirdo, and they both have copious flashbacks to the characters’ lives before they moved to the complex.

One of my favorite movies is The President’s Last Bang, director Im Sang-soo’s brutal dark comedy about the 1979 assassination of South Korean dictator Park Chung-hee, an event I knew nothing about prior to Im’s movie. (The assassination’s aftermath was also revisited in two Korean movies I haven’t seen, 2020’s The Man Standing Next and 2023’s 12.12: The Day.) I took a vacation from work in 2005 and flew by myself to New York City to check out the New York Television Festival. I had no idea the New York Film Festival took place at the same time, and I found out a Korean comedy was debuting there, so I took a cab by myself to the Lincoln Center to check it out even though I knew nothing about its director or his filmography.

In addition to being treated to a post-film discussion where Im talked about getting sued by Park’s family and being forced to delete documentary footage from his movie, I was struck by how dazzlingly made and irreverent the movie was. (“This isn’t a sanctimonious, animatronic Hall of Presidents but an orgasmatronic political whorehouse, aroused by everything it knows or suspects to be corrupt,” wrote the Film at Lincoln Center nonprofit in a 2015 summary of The President’s Last Bang.) Baek Yoon-sik was funny and terrific as Kim Jae-gyu, the stressed-out director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and Park’s assassin at a drunken dinner party.

Im’s movie was the first Korean flick I fell in love with, and I wish more people knew of its existence. (I’m considering devoting a chapter to The President’s Last Bang for a future non-fiction book I’m planning to write.) As a project about the assassination of a president, Paradise isn’t as great as The President’s Last Bang. Someone in the r/Television subreddit came up with my favorite description of Paradise: “it definitely feels like what would happen if NBC tried to make its own Silo or Fallout.”

The show feels like a throwback to an era when all the broadcast networks wanted to do ambitious mystery box shows in the style of Lost. ABC, not content with just Lost, tried things like The Nine, an initially promising but ultimately tedious non-sci-fi drama about the survivors of a bank robbery from Without a Trace creator Hank Steinberg, and then joined forces with HBO to produce FlashForward. CBS had the post-apocalyptic Jericho (which happened to star Paradise semi-regular Gerald McRaney). NBC tried to make The Event a thing. Paradise reminds me of those short-lived shows, except whenever the Secret Service agents and their adversaries get to drop unbleeped F-bombs as if they’re cosplaying the first three Die Hard movies.

The thing that makes Paradise feel the most like a late ’00s/early ’10s network TV or basic-cable drama is my least favorite thing about the show: 2010-ish montages that feature slowed-down cover songs that have become an annoying staple of movie trailers after the popularity of the Social Network trailer’s use of Scala & Kolacny Brothers’s solemn 2002 cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” in 2010. (I long for the days when Craig Armstrong’s “Escape” from 1999’s Plunkett & Macleane was in every other movie trailer.)

Most of these covers weren’t recorded for Paradise—Aron Wright and Jill Andrews’s cover of Starship’s “We Built This City,” which concludes Paradise’s second episode, appeared 11 years ago on Grey’s Anatomy—and they’re meant to reflect the normie musical tastes of murder victim Cal Bradford, the alcoholic president of the U.S. and the boss of Brown’s character, Agent Xavier Collins. As the stress of the job as commander-in-chief worsened, Cal, who wanted to be a schoolteacher instead of a politician, climbed into a bottle—while taking with him his collection of dad-rock CDs—and never came out, which alienated his wife and teenage son.

Almost all of these slowed-down cover songs aren’t very good—the only cover that works for me is producer Tommee Profitt and vocalist Alexandra Petkovski’s 2020 cover of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger,” which concludes Paradise’s “In the Palaces of Crowned Kings” episode and serves as a callback to Cal’s urge to rewatch Rocky III earlier in the episode—while James Marsden is excellent in the show’s flashbacks as the lonely and self-loathing Cal. He grew a spine when he objected to the machinations of Samantha Redmond, the evil tech billionaire who created the bunker and is willing to resort to murder to keep the bunker’s denizens from finding out that there are survivors above the surface.

Played by Julianne Nicholson in soft-spoken nighttime soap villain mode, Samantha, one of the prime suspects in Cal’s murder, is known around the White House as “Sinatra” because of her confidence. But she’s more like Red Herring from A Pup Named Scooby-Doo. Nicholson even has red hair like Red Herring did.

Paradise is okay TV that doesn’t become great TV until the seventh and penultimate episode of the season. Superbly directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, the duo that directed several episodes of This Is Us (I never watched This Is Us, and the only Ficarra/Requa project I watched prior to Paradise was 2015’s Focus, another project where McRaney played a central role), “The Day” flashes back to the climate-related catastrophe that drove Xavier, Cal, Red Herring, and their respective families underground. The episode is one of the most nerve-wracking depictions of the end of the world: It’s less like a disaster movie and more like Uncut Gems meets Paul Greengrass’s Bloody Sunday.

Ficarra and Requa also directed Paradise’s first two episodes, and “Wildcat Is Down” closes with one of the niftiest and most discussed twist endings of a first episode ever: the revelation that Paradise is an underground city. This leads me to today’s prompt: Do you have a favorite twist ending from a first episode? The series premieres for The Shield and Game of Thrones had shocking endings that were great. I’m not a Modern Family fan, but its pilot’s revelation that Jay is Claire and Mitchell’s dad was elegantly done. The twist endings in the series premieres for Mad Men and Severance awesomely set up major conflicts on their respective shows. And one of my favorite final scenes from a first episode is the Beast freezing time on the Brakebills campus, telekinetically killing a professor, and pulling out Dean Fogg’s eyes at the end of The Magicians’s first episode. The introduction of the Beast was—like Carl Kolchak’s sweaty attempt to pour salt into a zombie’s mouth without waking his rotting ass up—one of the best moments of silent horror on TV, and it was the first sign that The Magicians doesn’t fuck around.