From the minds behind Palm Springs and Mr. Robot comes the dark comedy series The Resort. The show centers on Emma and Noah, a married couple struggling to maintain their relationship after a decade who find renewed excitement in investigating a decade-old disappearance of two young adults from their vacation resort.
The Resort features an ensemble cast including Cristin Milioti as Emma, William Jackson Harper as Noah, Skyler Gisondo, Nina Bloomgarden, Nick Offerman, Luis Gerardo Méndez, Gabriela Cartol, Dylan Baker, Becky Ann Baker and Ben Sinclair.
Ahead of the show's premiere, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with creator Andy Siara to discuss The Resort, keeping audiences guessing, how his love of High Maintenance factored into the series' development and more.
Screen Rant: The Resort really came out of nowhere for me, and I've really enjoyed what I've seen so far. How did the concept for the show really start to come about for you?
Andy Siara: It started about eight years or so ago, I wrote a feature that was about Sam and his parents go to a resort and over a week, he strikes up a friendship with this older couple, who eventually became Emma and Noah and there was no mystery involved in that one, it was a little indie coming-of-age story. Then it didn't work, it was not very good. [Laughs] So I put it away and then it was the thing that I couldn't quite quit, at all, I would just go back to it every single year and try to look at it through a new lens, try to blow it up, try to reimagine it as a totally different thing. It just kept on not working.
Then eventually, I realized, like maybe 2019 or so, I was not only looking at the relationships that inspired the original story, but also the script itself through this nostalgic lens as something that was trying to recapture, but I was now like eight years older and my life changed and the world had changed drastically at that time. [Chuckles] So I blew it up and just split those characters up over these two timelines, where you have a married couple who's trying to solve this mystery about what happened to these two missing missing young adults, but also trying to solve what happened to themselves in the past eight years or so, or I guess 15 years in the story.
So there's a mystery baked into that and then mixed in with all that are my thoughts on nostalgia and the true crime industrial complex and my love of disaster movies and mystery movies and comedies and the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Those all became filtered through all this and so it became this wild show that takes some big swings.
What were some of the biggest challenges for you trying to hone in all of these various genres and ideas into one story?
Andy Siara: I'm always trying to think of the audience perspective here, I never want the audience to be ahead of what's going on, I don't want my audience to predict what's going to happen. I hope that by the end of the first episode, you definitely have no idea where the show is gonna end up, I'm pretty sure about that. It just takes a major left turn, obviously, in episode 4, but those left turns don't stop, so it's a rollercoaster ride of sorts. We're more of a log ride, I guess, where there's some drops and some chilled out parts. [Chuckles] But I'd say that was the hardest part is trying to balance how much the audience knows and how much they don't know.
I know that as an audience member, I always feel the most excited when I know I'm in good hands where I don't know what's going on, I don't know what's gonna happen, but I know I'm in really good storytelling hands. It's those feelings that are so rare to have as a viewer where you truly have no idea what's going to happen next, but you're totally locked in for the ride and that's the most exciting part about anything we watch, I think anything I watch, so I'm just trying to try to do that, kind of recreate that feeling.
You've captured it really well in this show. As much as I love the entire cast, I'm also a big High Maintenance fan, so to see Ben Sinclair get in front of the camera as well as behind the camera for the show was great. How did his involvement come about for this?
Andy Siara: I love High Maintenance. I remember it was back in film school when I was first working on that earlier feature version of this that Max, the director of Palm Springs, he showed me the web series and I was like, "Oh this is perfect." I just became a big fan of it then and then when it came on HBO was a huge fan and I never missed an episode and I would just take pictures of the screen when they had really great credit sequences, like end-credit things, there's one where he's swinging from this moon chandelier over a club. Just these images that make you feel something.
I think he has such a great handle of tone, where you go from silly to sincere and then back to silly and then back to sincere and sad. So when we were looking for directors last year, I was like, "If I can have anyone, I want to go straight to Ben." He read it right away and I said, "Yeah, however much you're able to direct" and it fit in that he was able to do the first four and then when we were looking at who do we want to cast for Alex, it was like, "Well, actually why doesn't Ben just play Alex? That makes perfect sense." [Chuckles]
You've seen what he does in his part and it's so specific, but to me, it's this kind of midpoint of the show that the whole show shifts around what this ingredient that that character brings to it all. I think he nailed it. so it's, But ultimately, it's because I'm a huge High Maintenance fan and I wanted to work with him.
The Resort Synopsis
A multi-generational, coming-of-age love story disguised as a fast-paced mystery about the disappointment of time. An anniversary trip puts a marriage to the test when the couple finds themselves embroiled in one of the Mayan Riviera's most bizarre unsolved mysteries that took place fifteen years prior.
Check out our other interviews with The Resort stars Cristin Milioti & William Jackson Harper and Gabriela Cartol. You can also catch our previous interviews with William Jackson Harper for We Broke Up and Midsommar.
The first three episodes of The Resort are now streaming on Peacock.