Get the latest gossip
We Built This City on Cheesy ’80s Hits
Paradise’s commitment to dramatic cover songs is both a misguided choice and one of the most entertaining things about it.
One of the running themes in Paradise ’s just-wrapped first season is that President Cal Bradford, played by James Marsden as a well-meaning seat-warmer of a leader, has terrible taste in music that he insists on jamming into the earholes of his teenage son, Jeremy. It’s that commitment that leads a slower, more melodramatic version of “We Built This City” to show up a few minutes later, during a montage that includes a flashback to Sinatra’s now-deceased child asking if he’ll go to heaven and Jeremy and Presley revisiting the entrance to Paradise. When the song resurfaces in the finale, this time in a piano-based version by series composer Siddhartha Khosla, who also handled the score for Fogelman’s This Is Us, it’s when President Bradford’s murderer, who goes undercover as a librarian named Trent, has finished explaining his motives to Xavier.
Or read this on VULTURE