The past 15 years have seen the emergence of streaming as one of the dominant ways that Americans consume entertainment, but it’s also led to tons of stuff. If you try to navigate through Hulu for a TV show that’s worth your time, you might find that you spend more time scrolling than actually watching anything.
Paradise is a great place to start if you’re looking for a compelling new show that isn’t overwhelming. The eight-episode series follows a secret service agent who must investigate the president’s death as mysteries continue to reveal themselves around him. Besides the length, here are three reasons why Paradise is worth checking out.
We also have guides to the best movies on Netflix, the best movies on Hulu, the best movies on Amazon Prime Video, the best movies on Max, and the best movies on Disney+.
There are several seismic reveals in Paradise that are best left unspoiled. These twists are designed to keep you watching as the show unfolds. Written by Dan Fogelman, who also created the twist-reliant This Is Us, Paradise knows exactly how to dole out its reveals without feeling overly gimmicky.
Instead of changing the name of the game, Paradise is continuing to reveal things about its world to us. The audience learns things at roughly the same pace as the central character, which keeps the whole enterprise from feeling too frustrating.
Sterling K. Brown, who was a standout on This Is Us, is just as great as the central character on Paradise, and he’s supported by two equally good supporting turns from Julianne Nicholson and James Marsden.
Marsden, who plays the president, seems a natural fit for the role, and Nicholson is steely-eyed and excellent in the kind of performance she should be allowed to deliver more often. Brown, though, reminds us why he received so much acclaim for This Is Us. He’s at once steely and sensitive, a man shouldering enormous burdens who nonetheless always exudes a steady confidence.
It’s impossible to fully describe what makes the seventh episode so great without understanding more details. Trust us. Paradise produces an exceedingly tense hour of television that will keep you riveted from start to finish.
The episode, which is also unsettling, is a masterclass in holding out on your audience until exactly the right moment and then filling in a bunch of necessary details. The episode has been discussed as the show’s defining achievement, and given how riveting it is, that’s undoubtedly true.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?