Severance is the best show on TV right now, but these two new series are bringing the 2000s back [complimentary].
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My jaw dropped at the end of the pilots for both Paradise and The Pitt. That doesn’t happen very often these days—there are only seven basic stories, and something like 600 fictional series airing a year now thanks to the streaming glut, and if you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. What’s more, for the last 10 years or so the distinct qualities that make TV its own medium have been downplayed in favor of self-consciously cinematic production and a thirst for “prestige” aesthetics. You can always count on this argument to pop back up whenever Stranger Things drops a new season—so, once every presidential administration—because as that show’s gone on, the individual episodes have ballooned into misshapen, overlong slogs that run longer than your average January B-movie thriller.
For every handful of shows that get it right, it’s hard not to feel that overall, TV has kind of lost the plot these days. I’m convinced the aughts were the best era—those years when HBO and a couple of its cable sons were pumping out high art, but the Big Four networks (plus The WB—never forget The WB) still ran the game as well, with kooky series engineered to stoke rabid fan bases and sturdy concepts built to go the distance of seven months and seven years. And here, early in the year, we have not one but two shows that are giving me that great old feeling back.
Paradise is certainly the flashier of the two, thanks to the presence of the great Sterling K. Brown—finally at the top of the call sheet, and reunited with Dan Fogelman, the This Is Us showrunner who shepherded him to household-name status with one emotionally charged monologue after another. But crucially, this go-round they’ve come together not for a family drama, but a live-wire thriller. Sterling is Xavier Collins, lead Secret Service agent to the president, who’s played by national treasure James Marsden, fully ensconced in his bag as always. Marsden’s President Bradford is a frat-boy cad just decent enough to be a likable, idyllic commander in chief—so it’s a shock when Xavier enters the president’s chambers one morning to find him murdered.
That’s not a spoiler; it happens within the first 15 minutes. Meanwhile, flashbacks reveal Xavier and Bradford’s relationship soured to a point where someone in need of a quick and easy suspect could plausibly pin the whole thing on Xavier, who isn’t helping his case by concealing evidence and taking the investigation into his own hands. This Is Us was rife with puzzle-box flashbacks revisited from different perspectives and stories told across multiple timelines, drawing out ominous twists. Fogelman’s putting all his kinks into a genre they’re more naturally suited for (versus using them to torment a nice suburban family over multiple decades) should be a layup for Good TV.
It all builds to a final twist that draws the curtain back on what’s really going on. I groaned, and I fully committed to whatever journey this crazy shit is taking us on. I’ve only seen three episodes and there’s still more than enough time to fuck it up. But I’m choosing to trust Sterling, Marsden, and the equally great Julianne Nicholson. It reminds me of that post-2004 era when every network wanted its own Lost, and we got some of television’s all-time silliest concepts because of it. Who needs another straightforward political murder mystery anyway?
The Pitt, on the other hand, is a marvel of form. I’ve never watched more than 12 minutes of ER, but I’m not a philistine—I can appreciate the Tom Brady-to-the-Bucs, Jordan-to-the-Wizards vibe of Noah Wyle scrubbing in for another doctor show. Personally, medical was always my least favorite of the big three procedurals; give me a cop or lawyer setting any day. But The Pitt is objectively well-made: a casually bleak drama series with brisk pacing, fully formed if archetypal characters, a little lore intrigue to thread between episodes, gnarly surgeries. But then things turn on a dime.
I’m not even sure if it’s a spoiler to reveal The Pitt’s core conceit, but it genuinely surprised me so I’ll preserve the experience. Suffice to say, it harkens back to another extremely aughts-concept classic. (A look at the episode titles is a dead giveaway.) It might just be the first med drama to get a repeat viewing out of me just to see how they pull it off. Both shows may fumble—but as TV begins to inevitably contract from the streaming boom and only the most basic, cookie-cutter concepts thrive, it feels exciting to have not one but two shows giving off a vintage love of the game.
