'Paradise' Season 2 finale: Creator Dan Fogelman on Sinatra and what's in store for Season 3

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This article contains many spoilers for the Season 2 finale of “Paradise.”The second season of “Paradise” ended with a literal bang.In Monday’s chaotic finale, the bunker protecting most of the U.S.

elites imploded, seemingly taking its creator, Samantha “Sinatra” Redmond (Julianne Nicholson), along with it.It’s a startling development that leaves its population homeless and reframes the entire series.“In my initial pitch, I told people, ‘The second season is going to end with the bunker failing and the collapse of the whole infrastructure,’” creator Dan Fogelman says.

“That was a lot to figure out: How are we going to pull that off? How is that going to send us forward into the third season? It was big and daunting.”For Fogelman, the destruction of the bunker is just one of Season 2’s “big swings.” Instead of opening the season with Xavier Collins’ (Sterling K.Brown) search for his wife, he introduced a new character, Annie Clay (Shailene Woodley), who has been holed up in Graceland since apocalyptic events transformed Earth.

Then, the writers killed Annie in Episode 4 — leaving Xavier to care for her newborn baby.Later in the season, they dedicated an entire episode to the backstory of Teri Rogers-Collins (Enuka Okuma).Dan Fogelman’s latest TV series starring Sterling K.

Brown and James Marsden is a mystery wrapped in a conspiracy wrapped in a sci-fi premise.“One of the coolest parts of the show is to be able to have big ideas and to actually be able to execute them when they’re the right big idea,” Fogelman says.“I’m writing the third season as we speak, and it’s the first time I’ve ever turned to my writers and said, ‘Are we allowed to do this? Are we breaking some rule of television?’ But it’s been really exciting in that way.”Fogelman and his team of writers are already at work on Season 3 of the Hulu series,...