Paradise Radio

What if the story didn't end when the episode was over?

Hulu's Paradise is a thriller set in an underground city where nobody is sure who to trust. For season two, Hulu wanted the audience inside that world between episodes. We built them a radio.

Paradise Radio is a makeshift transceiver that lives on the web. Tune across the dial and you find transmissions from survivors, rebels, government officials and everyone in between: more than 40 frequencies, most of them hidden when you arrive. There is no menu and no linear path. Clues inside one transmission point to the next, number stations carry codes to crack, and emergency broadcasts change with each episode. A simple switch, Amplify or Disrupt, lets you interfere with what you hear, and the story remembers what you chose.

The whole thing was written with the show's writers' room and voiced by the entire cast, alongside new characters created for the radio alone. Five storylines run at once, crossing at key moments and splitting again on the listener's decisions, and new transmissions dropped week by week with the season, so the radio evolved as the show did.

Fans did what we hoped they would: they compared notes. Frequencies were mapped, codes were solved and storylines were pieced together in the open, on Reddit and in the comments. Listeners came back and stayed; a large share of early listeners spent more than an hour at the dial in a single visit. Hulu entered Paradise Radio for the Emmys in Emerging Media Programming, as original programming in its own right, not a marketing campaign.