At first brief glance, The Resort may seem like The White Lotus. But while the Peacock and HBO titles may have crime mysteries and vacation dramas connecting families and hotel staff in common, that’s where the similarities end. Led by Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper, Peacock’s The Resort (premiering July 28 with its first three episodes) is a mind-bending series that would do well with an introduction from The Twilight Zone‘s Rod Serling.
It’s Palm Springs screenwriter Andy Siara’s latest addition to the increasingly popular genre of multiverses, tales messing with time, and as star Luis Gerardo Méndez (Narcos: Mexico) describes it to TV Insider, “what time does to you” and how it both “destroys everything and heals everything.” Peacock describes the comedic thriller as a multi-generational, coming-of-age love story disguised as a fast-paced mystery about the disappointment of time.
The premiere is titled “The Disappointment of Time,” and it earns its name. In it, Emma (Milioti) and Noah (Harper) arrive at a Mexican resort to celebrate 10 years of marriage. But these two haven’t felt connected in a long time, despite Noah’s best efforts. In private moments, the closed-off Emma contends with the effects of aging on her body and considers divorce. Her numbness persists until she’s catapulted (literally) into a cold case involving the mysterious disappearance of two young guests at a neighboring hotel 15 years prior.
While visiting the Oceana Vista for Christmas, Sam (Skyler Gisondo) and Violet (Nina Bloomgarden) connect during a particularly vulnerable time for them both. But they go missing just before the resort is wiped out by a devastating once-in-a-century hurricane, never to be heard from again. After Emma crashes her ATV on an excursion 15 years in the future, she rolls over on the jungle floor to find a damaged Motorola Razr — Sam’s old phone. (Yes, we have reached the point of 2007 nostalgia — prepare to see Hollister fashion as the plot bounces back and forth between flashbacks and present day in trippy blurs.)
Finding the phone propels Emma into a true crime obsession, with the search for new information about this shelved mystery becoming the sole mission of her and Noah’s trip. They cross paths with former Oceana Vista head of security, Baltasar (Méndez), and there is no predicting where the plot goes next.
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Milioti and Harper have both worked on projects with similar themes before The Resort. The Made For Love alum starred in Siara’s Palm Springs on Hulu, in which she’s trapped in a time loop with Andy Samberg. In The Good Place, Harper’s Chidi found himself not only in the afterlife, but partially responsible for its evolution. Both stories force characters to come to terms with unbelievable circumstances, just like The Resort. The actors explained the appeal of those themes to TV Insider.
“For me, a lot of our ideas about how a story’s supposed to be told goes out the window,” Harper says. “Everything’s wide open, and it leaves room for a lot of weird choices, weird moments. I find that interesting, and those are also the kind of stories I like to watch. I like it when there’s some kind of weird, fantastical element taking place in a grounded world that elevates everything. I just find it a lot of fun as a fan.”
“I also like a fantastical element,” Milioti says, adding, “Maybe on some subconscious level, I gravitate toward things that have a sneaky way of making you think about the things that we all grapple with with being alive and getting older and deciding what to do with our time on this little blue pearl hurling through space.”
For Méndez, exploring how time ages you inside and out was a fascinating prospect. His Baltasar is depicted as a villain early on, but not everything is as it seems. Méndez loved the challenge of navigating his character through his 30s to 50s.
“It’s really cool to see these characters 15 years apart and see how the dreams get broken and these people change. I think that’s one of the main topics of the show: what time does to you, what time does to your skin, how time destroys everything and also heals everything, destroys relationships and heals relationships. I think it’s interesting to talk about those topics with humor.”
The cast certainly has the humor down, and Milioti and Harper’s comedic chemistry is especially strong. The adventure makes rekindling romance possible for Noah, and for Emma, there’s glimpses of reignited interest. But as Milioti explains, “[Emma is] so unable to move forward from this loss that they experienced together at a certain point in their marriage. I think she’s actually weirdly stuck in time herself, and she can’t get unstuck. And if she could only unstick herself, then she would be able to move forward with him as opposed to just running her wheels in place, which is also easier said than done.”
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For Noah, this whole thing is a massive leap of faith. “[Noah feels like], ‘I haven’t seen Emma this engaged in a very long time. I wanna get back to the fun that we had, even if it means courting a little bit of danger, so be it,’” Harper shares. “The relationship is more important than anything else to him, so yeah, I think he’s doing whatever seems to be working.”
Siara’s plot excels in making you think you’ve figured things out, only to flip everything on its head the next moment. It also has a great balance of drama, comedy, and mystery, with Emma and Noah pulling their “investigative” technique from action movies and convincing themselves their untrained instincts are sufficient enough to solve a nearly two decades-old mystery. The cast says to expect homages to Indiana Jones and a Twilight Zone feel, but don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ve seen a story like this before.
“I don’t think you’ll be able to predict anything that happens in Episode 8,” says Siara of the eight-episode season, “especially not after watching the first couple episodes. I’m curious if people do pinpoint what happens, but yes, it is trippy.”
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With Palm Springs under his belt already, what makes time such a juicy subject for storytelling? “We all grapple with it, and at different points in our lives,” Siara says.
“The first episode’s called ‘The Disappointment of Time,’ the last one’s ‘The Disillusionment of Time.’ In a literal sense — in terms of ‘what is that?’ — it’s a book within the show. But outside of that, while we don’t explicitly ask that question, hopefully that question is percolating throughout the whole show,” he continues. “If you were to ask anybody at any point in their lives, ‘What is the disappointment of time?’ I think people will give a different answer to that. The show is nice ground to explore how your answer to that will change based on your life experiences and where your journey has gone in your 10 to 70 years of being alive. Therefore, it’s an answer you can only have based on the time you have lived. It’s endless, in a way.”
The Resort also stars Nick Offerman as Violet’s father, Murray, real-life married couple Becky Ann Baker and Dylan Baker as Sam’s parents, Jan and Carl, Debby Ryan as Sam’s girlfriend, Hannah, Gabriela Cartol and Ben Sinclair as enigmatic hotel employees Luna and Alex, and Parvesh Cheena and Michael Hitchcock as husbands Ted and Ted. The first three episodes premiere Thursday, July 28 with new episodes dropping Thursdays after that.
The Resort, Series Premiere, Thursday July 28, Peacock
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