Fresh from the mind of the man who brought us the hit show This Is Us, Paradise is a sci-fi political thriller framed around the murder of a former US president. It’s a series full of twists and turns, but does it have what it takes to become a swimming success, or will it end up just like Warren G. Harding after the Teapot Dome scandal?

Episode one begins with every secret service lead agent’s worst nightmare: discovering the president they’ve sworn to protect has been murdered. Scrambling to make sense of the situation, Agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) has just a 30-minute window to search for clues before he’s forced to call in the cavalry.

As an introduction to the series, “Wildcat is Down” succeeds immediately in engaging the viewer. Through the creation of a 30-minute window, it uses this time to build and solve seemingly smaller mysteries, which fit to layer complexity onto the wider narrative mystery. What, at first, seems like a locked-room whodunit quickly escalates, with each small mystery adding to the evidence that there’s more going on than meets the eye, ultimately hooking the viewer.

Not only does this 30-minute window work for the show’s mystery but for the characters as well. This plot device is a blessing on this front, as it can easily slow down and introduce the main players without losing any of the build-up.

Within the first five minutes, we are given a clear view of the protagonist, Agent Xavier Collins. His morning routine reveals a well-weathered man, adjusting to single fatherhood under a high-pressure job. These traits carry over to his work, where his straight-laced attitude earns him respect. He does things by the rulebook, that is, until the former president’s murder sends him off-script.

As he spirals to keep everything under control, we see how good Xavier is in a crisis, but more importantly, we learn about his relationship with President Cal Bradford (James Marsden).

Xavier and Cal’s shared scenes take place through flashbacks. In this episode, they work to create an overview of their time together, starting when Xavier got the job to the night before the murder. In essence, these scenes show how their relationship blossoms and grows, ultimately becoming strained by the time of the murder, thanks to an as-yet-untold event. It’s a conflict that’ll undoubtedly be touched upon numerous times as the season progresses.

These flashbacks also give us a glimpse at the president’s personality and his time in office. Despite his joking and blunt personality, he’s clearly at odds with the secrets he has to keep. Throughout, these allusions play well into the larger mystery at hand. A few hints here and there and a nicely timed assassination attempt build to the final, biggest twist by the episode’s climax: Paradise is an artificially created underground town for survivors of an extinction-level event.

From here on out, the genre changes, and so too does the context behind the many mysteries posed throughout the episode. While an underground society dystopia is nothing new, its fusion alongside a political thriller and a classic whodunit gives the series the potential to go places never thought possible.

Part political thriller and part high-concept sci-fi, Paradise’s first episode makes for a fantastic introduction to the series. The key to its success is how it engages viewers from the offset. It starts by using small mysteries that, in their unravelling, lead to a more layered overarching problem. Whether this series will be able to contain this level remains to be seen, but it’ll sure as hell be an interesting journey to get there.

I Give Wildcat is Down: 9/10