“Don’t you miss it?” Emma asks her husband at the start of Sky’s new crime thriller The Resort. “I’m starting to forget things. Who I am, who we are.”
They’re supposedly debating whether or not to investigate the murder case that has dropped into their laps, but they might as well be discussing their tired marriage. For all is not well between our two protagonists.
Emma (played with manic fragility by Cristin Miloti) and the cheerfully oblivious Noah (The Good Place’s William Jackson Harper) have checked into a glam Mexican resort to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary.
At the same time they’re supposed to be kicking back, Emma is googling ‘reasons to break up a relationship’ and drinking wine in the hot tub by herself. That is, until she discovers a battered old mobile phone in the jungle while they’re out exploring the Yucatan peninsula and rediscovers her lust for life.
As luck would have it, it’s the phone belonging to Sam Langford (Skyler Gisondo), a tourist who went missing in a nearby resort the day before a massive hurricane handily destroyed it. His disappearance (along with that of fellow tourist Violet, played by Nina Bloomgarden) has never been solved.
Can our middle-aged super sleuths crack the case? Should Emma down tequila while on a course of antibiotics? In both cases, the answer is “probably not”.
Emma and Noah’s relationship is a strange thing: as we see via flashback, they initially bond over the high levels of sewage in the ocean in which their more adventurous friends are swimming, cracking jokes about drinking hot “turdies” around the bonfire.
That same energy permeates their present-day relationship, which feels pleasingly lived-in and full of the in-jokes you collect after years spent together. Emma is the boss, the dissatisfied one; the very earnest Noah is clearly still smitten and goes along with her sleuthing with a kind of bemused resignation.
They’re goofy and accident-prone: the pair lightsaber-duel with torches in the ruins of the clearly-unsafe hotel they’re exploring; Noah gives them away during a chase with the bad guys by taking a loud phone call in the middle of a crowded marketplace.
It’s all very sweet, and very funny – in fact, a particular highlight of this show is its sense of humour. One scene where Emma and Noah attempt to reconstruct the relationship between the two missing tourists via their old text messages in particular made me chuckle.
However, the show never really comes up with a better explanation for Emma’s obsession other than boredom, despite her protestations of delivering the grieving families justice and closure.
Maybe it doesn’t need to, but seeing two Americans blithely running around and putting locals in danger with their blunt-force questioning (and total disregard for danger) feels a bit cringeworthy. Why are they so keen to find answers? Why don’t they care if other people get hurt? Is this intentional on the show’s part, or not?
Fortunately, the missing tourists in question also get some much-needed (and savvy) emotional investment in the form of sepia-toned flashbacks. Watching Sam and Violet’s meet-cutes unfold in tandem with their present day counterparts’ investigations lends the show momentum, building towards the inevitable day that they go missing. Plus, Parks and Recreation’s Nick Offerman makes a welcome cameo, playing Violet’s grieving father.
The Resort is described as a show that explores “love and the weird things we do in the name of it, encased in an elaborate true-crime conspiracy.”
Having seen it, I’d say this is almost entirely accurate. The show is fizzy, fun and easy to binge-watch. Plus, there’s the escapism of seeing Mexico in all its glory on the small screen. If only our two sleuths could stick to sharpening their deductive skills rather than dulling them with quite so much tequila.
