The Reunion (ITVX) promises some gorgeous January escapism, but don’t be fooled by that bright blue water and those sun-kissed rocks. It’s adapted from Guillaume Musso’s bestselling novel of the same name, it’s mostly set on the French Riviera, and it revolves around the mysterious disappearance, 25 years earlier, of a charismatic student named Vinca, and a group of friends who have covered up layers of secrets in order to protect themselves and each other. It could have been The Secret History via A Place in the Sun. What comes out in the wash, however, is a frothy potboiler so highly strung that the only way to endure it – and sticking with it is a feat of endurance – is to marvel at the sheer ludicrousness of each unlikely twist.
Our narrator is Ioan Gruffudd as Thomas, a successful author who is taking part in a dreary book signing when he is invited to attend his former school’s 25th reunion celebrations. A woman who looks an awful lot like his old friend Vinca drops a flyer on the table, inviting him back to the Lycée International Saint-Exupéry in the south of France. The only trouble is that the real Vinca disappeared in 1997, and the flyer has a message scrawled on the back in marker pen: “What did you do to her?” So far, so I Know What You Did Very Many Summers Ago.
In hazy flashbacks, shot through with hazy statements in voiceover such as “Memory is a false friend” and “Memory can’t protect you for ever”, we see Thomas and his tight-knit friendship group of four. Thomas was in love with Vinca, and Fanny was in love with Thomas, and Max was just sort of there, but he is well-connected, which will turn out to be very useful when the bad stuff goes down. After receiving the flyer, modern-day Thomas decides to get the old band back together. Vinca is still missing, but Fanny is now a successful doctor who has stayed in France and is friends with Thomas’s mother (Dervla Kirwan, playing across two timelines, though there is not enough grey hair dye in Europe to convince me that she is old enough to be Gruffudd’s mother). Max is now a successful politician and family man, who tells Thomas not to go to the reunion and not to contact him again.
Of course, Thomas makes his way straight to France, where he remembers the group’s carefree summers in the 1990s, spent swimming, zipping around on scooters, pushing office chairs down student hall corridors, drunkenly arguing about philosophy and, oh, sort of accidentally killing people. I have sat through enough thrillers on ITV to know my way around murder-mystery hokum, and for a while, this feels like a rough episode of Unforgotten, with no offence to Unforgotten, which does this sort of thing brilliantly. The thriller puzzle pieces are all familiar. Here, as often happens in these kinds of series, a skeleton that was supposed to be covered in concrete for the rest of time is about to be discovered, a group of old friends have maintained a pact of secrecy that is suddenly stretched by unforeseen events, there are philandering husbands, mistaken identities and pillars of the community just waiting to be torn down.
But there are also elements that are less familiar. Perhaps it is to the show’s credit that just when it starts to feel as if you’ve seen it all before, it takes some truly surprising turns. There were parts I just didn’t see coming, particularly the performance art flashmob protest stunt, in which present-day students at the school don Vinca-style bright red wigs and shout about her being “snuffed out by the patriarchy”. At points, it is truly and unexpectedly gruesome, which seems at odds with its luscious setting and soapy, soft-focus sensibilities; there is a scene so violent that I had to look away. There are some queasily retro ideas about sexuality, too, and an old-fashioned feel that isn’t entirely down to the fact that half of the drama is set in the 1990s.
In the wake of Emily in Paris, I keep reading about “ambient TV”, or the kind of shows that you put on in the background so they wash over you while you’re doom-scrolling or cracking Wordle. Sometimes all you want is a serviceable thriller that allows you to switch your brain off and enjoy the ride. The Reunion could have been a contender, an ambient crime show that exhumed its bodies while frolicking in the sun. But as it lurches around with melodramatic gusto, it makes hard work of the job.
