THE RESORT EP Andy Siara on the Show’s Long Road to Peacock, and Balancing Character Arcs with Mystery Clues

Around eight years ago, writer Andy Siara had an idea for a coming-of-age story, where a kid goes to a resort with his family on a vacation. There, the kid would meet a couple celebrating their anniversary.

The only problem? “The script didn’t really work that well,” Siara admits in the video below. But it gave him the broad strokes for the characters who would populate the upcoming Peacock series THE RESORT, with Skyler Gisondo playing Sam (the young man on vacation with his family) and William Jackson Harper and Cristin Milioti playing long-married couple Noah and Emma.

Initially, “I didn’t do anything with it; I didn’t show anybody it, really,” Siara says of the initial script. “But I couldn’t quite quit it, either. And so I would just go back to every couple years, and I would dismantle it and try something new with it. I tried to turn it into an hour-long series [or] a limited series…I tried to turn it into a movie again. I threw everything against the wall. And after many, many failed attempts, I realized I was not only looking at the script itself, [but] where my life was at the time when I wrote it, and then the story that inspired the original script through this nostalgic lens. I was trying to recapture something I couldn’t recapture.”

In looking at the story through a current lens—and with the awareness his personal and professional lives, as well as the world as a whole, have changed—allowed Siara to find a way in.

“I split up those two main factions of the original story: the seeds of Emma and Noah and the seeds of Sam and his family, and then made it about this mystery,” he shares. Now, in the present day, Emma and Noah, whose marriage has seen better days, are “finding this phone, and they’re trying to solve the mystery what happened to Sam and [Nina Bloomgarden’s] Violet [in the past], and also trying to figure out what happened to their [own] marriage. And so there’s a mystery component kind of baked into that.”

To that end, the eight episodes spend significant amounts in both timelines, exploring both the new relationship developing between strangers Sam and Violet, as well as Emma and Noah figuring out how to reconnect after a period of complacency in their marriage. And the writers had to figure out how to juggle that with doling out pieces of the underlying mystery of what the heck happened at the resort 15 years earlier.

“It was always a challenge: I never wanted the audience to be ahead of the story,” Siara notes. “It’s always a game of how much we’re showing…But at the same time, when I kind of feel lI first cracked the story, to me, in the script, it says when Emma’s on the bed, doing her research and figuring out everything that happened…it says, ‘But this isn’t a story about blood, death, and murder, it’s the love story,’ and then it cuts back to Sam in the past. And I think from that point on, and every conversation I had from that point on, it’s [been about that].”

“We’re now trained to watch like multiple timeline mystery shows where you’ll get just little nuggets of the mystery in the past,” he continues. “And I wanted to show a lot more of the mystery in the past. I want to fall in love with those characters, rather than them just being the tragic figures that disappear or are murdered or whatever ends up happening…I want to attach ourselves to these characters. And in order to do that, and not so it’s not exploitative, we just have to live with them for a bit, and really get deep and really understand who they are. Not play the past for just the mystery part, but play the past for the relationship first, and the mystery is just kind of sprinkled on top.”

Watch the video for more from Siara…

THE RESORT, Series Premiere, Thursday, July 28, Peacock

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