“What do you do when you aren’t happy, but nothing’s really wrong?” William Jackson Harper muses over Zoom. He’s answering a question about the appeal of his new project, Peacock’s The Resort, which he is co-leading with Cristin Milioti (Black Mirror, Made for Love). The ambitious new series is written and produced by showrunner Andy Siara, the screenwriter behind the trippy time loop rom-com Palm Springs that was an early pandemic hit, and Allison Miller (Angelyne). With The Resort, Siara has once again found a way to draw out the creepiness of a seemingly beautiful location. Harper’s Noah and Milioti’s Emma are a married couple celebrating their tenth anniversary with a vacation to Akumal, Mexico where Emma finds a phone in the woods and — out of a growing sense of listlessness and a desire to not address the staleness of her relationship — decides to investigate its previous owner, a college student who went missing 15 years earlier. This small but important decision takes the pair down a rabbit hole that ironically begins to repair their marriage while endangering their lives. In lieu of traditional couple’s counseling, the eight-episode miniseries takes the twosome on an adventure that is part conspiracy thriller and part dark comedy.
