There’s just something about holiday resorts and true crime. Whether you’re dashing around a WHSmith in Gatwick airport for a last-minute holiday read or thinking about what podcast to plug into on your sun lounger, crime content is the natural choice for many. Even better, crime content that has a holiday theme at its core is an instant hit. Think, a beach-read romance that turns deadly with a tropical location as its setting, or even hit HBO series The White Lotus.

Peacock’s latest series, The Resort, blends all of those elements together to make for an unexpected hit of a series. It follows married couple Emma (How I Met Your Mother’s Cristin Milioti) and Noah (Love Life’s William Jackson Harper) as they celebrate their 10-year anniversary at a luxury Mexican holiday resort.

It’s obvious from the start that this is a couple that has succumbed to the routine and monotony of everyday life, finding it awkward to spend so long together doing nothing. 

Their room comes with two double beds instead of a king-size and instead of pushing them together or just sharing one, they both automatically gravitate towards their separate sleeping quarters. Dinner plans are squashed when Emma comes out dressed up and ready to go only to find Noah asleep in front of the TV on the sofa instead. It’s something she guessed would happen and spends the evening in their hot tub, smoking cigarettes, drinking wine from the bottle and taking a ‘How do I know if I should leave my relationship?’ quiz online.  

This isn’t the picture-perfect ideal of a marriage, and on their first group excursion the next morning, they’re regaled with tales from another couple – grey Ted and young Ted – who talk about their secret to a successful 21-year relationship. “Every seven years, we’ll pick a vacation spot that we haven’t been to… we also spend the week re-evaluating our marriage to see if we want to stay married,” they explain.

“Marriage is technically a contract. People change, love changes… so why not plan for these things by really asking ourselves ‘Do we really still make each other happy?’”

It’s on that excursion that things take a turn – Emma crashes her quadbike and falls down a ravine, finding a crushed mobile phone. She becomes fascinated by it, taking the sim card out and putting it into a new phone, finding pictures and trying to uncover the life of the person who lost it, who turns out to be Sam Lawford (Licorice Pizza’s Skyler Gisondo). 

Soon, Emma finds out about the 2007 Oceana Vista holiday resort disaster that also led to a police search for missing tourists, one of them being Sam. With the help of early 00s flashbacks, we find out more about Sam’s journey to Yucatan. Along with his parents and girlfriend, they’re taking a Christmas break of epic proportions, but it’s on the flight there that Sam finds out that his girlfriend is having an affair with her college professor.

He’s a little quirky, drawing on the flight and clearly not getting on very well with his girlfriend at all. They exchange “I love yous” in place of awkward silences, leading his parents to ponder his sexuality and then, on arrival at the hotel, he goes off on his own to skateboard around the pool. 

It’s a similar – somewhat painful – relationship dynamic that is mirrored in the present-day Emma and Noah. But in the case of the latter, their relationship is almost saved – or at least distracted – by this missing person case. Emma soon tells Noah all about it and they trawl through Sam’s phone, retracing his steps and events to see what Sam’s last days with fellow holiday resorter Violet (Nina Bloomgarden) involved. 

Although this is a series that blends elements of beloved true crime series Unsolved Mysteries and The White Lotus, it’s the focus on the disappointment of time that sets The Resort apart. It manages to transport us back to 2007 while keeping up with the present-day to reveal different – but very similar – relationships that could potentially be on the brink of even more chaos.

What seems like a relatively easygoing comedy about a young couple is so much more. Scenes will definitely have you chuckling along but The Resort is also a series that quickly transforms into a tale involving parallel love stories, holiday resort mysteries and the kind of “what the hell actually happened here” questions that will keep us guessing till the very end.

New episodes of The Resort are available to stream weekly on Peacock, exclusively on Sky and Now.

Images: Sky