On Tuesday, it was announced that Hulu has renewed Paradise for a third season. The announcement comes ahead of the Season 2 finale on March 30th, but it also comes with a little bit of a caveat. Season 3 of the critically acclaimed and popular series may just be its last by design.
While Paradise has proven to be a popular and engaging sci-fi series, it’s also one that has had a limited lifespan from the beginning. Series creator Dan Fogelman notably pitched Paradise as a three-season project, and even executive producer John Hoberg has reiterated that Season 3 would be the series’ end, going so far as to note that they know how things end and moving beyond that ending would be “very difficult”.
“We know what the end is, and it’s an end that would make it very difficult to make a season four come afterward,” Hoberg told The Hollywood Reporter.
While it sounds like the plan is to stick close to the original three-season format for Paradise, that doesn’t mean that things won’t shift and change. Each season of Paradise thus far markedly different from each other, something that lines up with Fogelman’s teases that each season of the series is a slightly different show within the same show. It’s something that allows for each season to layer into the larger story, something one could argue means that even if the larger story that we’ve been following — specifically that of Secret Service agent Xavier Collins (Sterling K. Brown) and his search to find out what happened to his wife — does find a conclusion in Season 3 and that conclusion ties in with the larger story that Paradise has been telling, there could still be more to tell.
That said, the idea that Paradise has a definitive end already on the horizon may end up being exactly that: the end. If the series does stay true to the original plan — and Hoberg ha said that they are already well into breaking Season 3 — then at least fans will be able to go into it knowing that there is actually a conclusion, rather than wondering what comes next.
While the Season 3 renewal news is exciting, Season 2 of Paradise isn’t done just yet. After this week’s Jane-centric episode, giving us the backstory of agent Jane Driscoll (Nicole Brydon Bloom), there are still two episodes remaining in the season, “The Final Countdown” on March 2nd, and “Exodus” on March 30th. With just those two episodes remaining in the season, fans can expect things to get way more intense from here.
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