Hi everyone,
It takes a lot for me to get excited about TV. I mean – truly excited in that evangelical way many others get about every series that dominates whatever is the modern equivalent of the water cooler. Message boards and comment sections, I suppose. Maybe this is an effect of growing up at a time when TV was seen as a lowbrow product signalling the death of culture. The intervening “golden era” of TV has changed that impression somewhat, but there is the still the faint echo of that voice telling me, whenever I watch TV, that I should be reading a book instead.
All of this is simply to establish some credibility so that when you read me waxing ecstatic over the show that I am about to wax the most ecstatic over, you will know that such praise is not empty. The show is called The Resort, created by Andy Ciara (2022), starring Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper. The Resort somehow manages to feel as if it is doing everything – a big mystery, time jumps, multiple storylines, genre-twisting, skipping from comedy to mystery to horror to indie-drama, existential questioning, and deep exploration of character – while never feeling overfull or heavy.
I will avoid the modern cardinal sin of spoilers and will just offer the set-up: Noah and Emma are in their tenth year of marriage, are childless, and are patently unable to connect. Although it’s never stated, their holiday at a Mexican resort is clearly a last-ditch attempt at finding something lost, or at least avoiding their daily problems at home. This is as conventional as the show gets. From here, there is the mystery of two vanished teens fifteen years ago, a reclusive author whose invented language might reveal something otherworldly, a mafia-like family of tailors, and a yellow snake with four noses.
The solid girders on which all of this strangeness hangs (and is hung so artfully) are characters who speak and act like real people. A show like this, with its big questions about loss and being emotionally stuck, can so often rely on archetypes who serve two functions: to carry an idea or theme through the story, and to get the plot from A to B. In The Resort, Noah and Emma make choices that make sense, and even those that don’t make sense do so in the mystifying ways that all of us choose badly, or against reason, or based on prejudices.
What’s more, they act like a real couple, and their dialogue reflects this. In one scene, a bat poops on them, sparking a conversation about guano, into which they interject some half-remembered lines from Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Not only is this exactly the sort of stupid movie a couple of this age would remember from their youth, the way they slip in and out of quoting from it is so authentic; a lot of other movies and shows take the “Marvel approach” of mentioning the movie by name, not because this is how people speak, but simply to get the reference in, to place the Easter Egg and get “recognition points”.
One of my favourite moments of authenticity in The Resort comes after a huge reveal in the mystery, and Noah says to Emma, “I know we’re supposed to be all mature and cool about this, but … like … fuck.” This isn’t mere bathos, which undercuts seriousness with a joke, but a sincere representation of how normal people would respond in such a strange situation, and so it underscores the seriousness with humorous truth. It is a moment that deftly balances the profound with the mundane, showing us how we humans so often sit at the intersection between the two.
The Resort is tightly plotted and incredibly well-paced over eight half-hour episodes, so if you have a long evening or a weekend to try something new, I recommend making the popcorn and settling in for a lot of fun.
I seem to have a knack for being culturally behind the times (or, more charitably, “fashionably late”). It took me twenty years to discover that I’m a big fan of Jonathan Franzen’s writing; although I’ve seen Bram Stoker’s Dracula (just to take Francis Ford Coppola as an example), I still haven’t watched Apocalypse Now or The Godfather; and while I have lamented a certain lack of humorous books in my reading – the laughs are left exclusively to Wodehouse and Calvin and Hobbes – I hadn’t read a word by Bill Bryson. Until this month.
I confess to a prejudice that kept me away from Bryson’s books, namely that they always seemed to be the kind of book you could find left open on the dozing form of a grandfather, or else left on bedside tables to be picked up by those wanting a “light read” to serve primarily as an aid to sleep. In short, I thought Bryson’s books were a bit “safe” for my tastes.
(In case any of you see this – correctly – as snobbishness on my part, let me hasten to add that it wasn’t as much that I thought Bryson’s writing wasn’t good enough as it was that I fear waking up from an afternoon nap, a book by Bryson sliding to the floor, to discover that – Rip Van Winkle style – I have become an elderly man without noticing. Some fear death, others fear that Fitzgerald was right when he said that youth is wasted on the young.)
Reader, I was wrong. I have been wasting my time not enjoying the sheer pleasure of Bryson’s writing. I am working my way at a leisurely pace through Notes From a Big Country (1998), a collection of short pieces about his life on returning from England to his native US, with his wife and children. The man knows how to a) make an astute observation, usually one that makes you question a fundamental aspect of daily life and wonder why you’d never questioned it before, and b) make you belly-laugh in the midst of all this noticing.
The next essay published here is one that was inspired by a particular piece in Bryson’s book, but I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to encourage any of you still unfamiliar with his writing to acquaint yourself with it. Now I’m going to take a nap.
As ever, thank you for reading and supporting what I do,
Matthew