"The Resort" (Peacock) Review

 A married couple (Christine Milioti as Emma, William Jackson Harper as  Noah) is experiencing the blahs on a 10-year-anniversary vacation to a  tropical Mexican resort. William Jackson Harper has only been known to  the world-at-large as the tight-laced hypochondriac ethicist from The  Good Place so it’s a little jarring to see him chilling out in the  tropics with his hair in an — — sorry I’m not well-versed on  African-American hairstyles and not going to try — un-Chidi-like state.

Anywho,  Noah and Emma get shaken out of their rut when Emma discovers an old  cell phone from 15 years through going down the rabbit hole of a local  missing persons case. During one frightful and stormy night (cue the  organ music) 15 years ago, a pair of late adolescents (Skyler Gismodo as  Sam and Nina Bloomgarden as Violet) disappeared during a hurricane.  Careful not to reveal the sequence of events before Emma and Noah (and  the audience) learn them, the series deftly cuts between past and  present as Noah and Emmy chase after the trail of Sam and Violet.

It’s soon revealed that Sam and Violet had a steamy fling, and the  series tries a little hard to posit Sam/Violet (Vam? Siolet?) as younger and hornier doppelgangers to Noah and Emma who not so coincidentally  also met for the first time 15 years ago. Although the series  acknowledges that Noah and Emma are going through a funk, they still  never exhibit much chemistry and are often the least interesting part of  the story except as audience surrogates.
Sam  and Violet, on the other hand, are a fun combination of hormones,  angst, and naiveté. They bounce between a coo coo hotelier who kinda sorta kidnaps them, to an  outdoor farmer’s market to an author (Luis Guzman) with mystical  prophecies and, remarkably, they still manage to stay separated from  their parents for over six episodes and counting.

In the interim, Emma and Noah join forces with Balthasar Frias, a local heir to a powerful family of tailors (this series more than any other needs a larger fan base, just so a  more robust wiki can be created and confusions like “rich family of  tailors” can be sorted out) who’s a delightful brand of kooky on  his own. Frias came to the resort looking for a job of any sort and is  urged by the manager to reinvent himself so he fashions himself a  detective after the novels his father used to read to him as a kid.

It’s  the same character motivation that defines many a film noir protagonist  like J.J. Gittes in Chinatown or Holly Martins in the Third Man who get  caught up in their own myth and are determined to solve the mystery at  any cost. For his part, Frias is still obsessed with this missing  persons case 15 years later, and it seems possible that he’s gotten a  little warped about it with time. He’s the kind of guy who takes the  Dirk Gentley Holistic Detective Agency approach to crime-solving (i.e.  he somehow believes that asking Noah and Emma about their sex life will  somehow provide a clue of a missing cell phone) than standards nuts and  bolts stuff. But what can I say, the show needs a wild card, so away we  go.

Filled with needle drops and time jumps upon time jumps,  the show is certainly ambitious. Whether it follows through, it can be a  little touch-and-go based on the episode, which is why I'll reserve judgment until season's end, but I'm enjoying it so far.