Review: Two Weeks in August is a simmering pot of resentment, entitlement and foreshadowing

There’s something in the winds coming off the Ionian Sea.

The Odyssey is fighting the good fight in cinemas and now we can go on holidays for two weeks in Greece on the small screen. Everything old, that is to say, antiquity, is new again.

Two Weeks in August is a British series that screened in its homeland in May, but it actually makes sense for it to have held until now in Australia.

For one thing, it’s in the title, and for another, if the brisk winter evenings are chilling you to the bone in our not very insulated houses, the blazing sun of a Greek island be a form of artificial warmth.

Only, you’re not going to want to go on this holiday. No, siree. If ever there was a cautionary tale, it’s this.

In the burgeoning genre of “beware the friend group holiday”, Two Weeks in August follows three forty-something London couples who decamp to Greece for a getaway, and before they even get there, you already know it was a bad idea.

Zoe (Jessica Raine) and Dan (Damien Molony) are travelling their with their two kids when they allude to some unresolved struggles they’re trying to hide from their mates. Upon arrival, they resent being assigned the room that basically serves as the corridor to everyone’s bathroom.

Solomon (Nicholas Pinnock) and Jess (Antonia Thomas) have the grander room in the shabby villa, while the two singles, Nat (Leila Farzad) and her gay bestie Jacob (Hugh Skinner) are bunked in together.

There’s tension and a mismatch immediately, from who’s doing the first night’s dinner (and the cost of fish), to the secrets they’ve been keeping from each other.

These six people (and their combined three children) should not be stuck together on an island in the heat. There’s too much simmering, generally unacknowledged bad blood between them.

It doesn’t take much to spark more resentment – and an illicit kiss on the first night between two of the group (not married to each other!) will be the catalyst for a series of dramas that beset the group.

If there is a main character in the series, it’s Zoe, who serves as something of an audience surrogate into this group, and she’s the one who starts hallucinating Greek mythology figures warning of the things to come.

One catastrophe is telegraphed in the opening moments – the island is on fire and the group are trying to escape on inflatable dinghies – before it flashes back to the start.

It’s an all-too-common storytelling device in the streaming era (how many times does a show now start with a murder before a title card declares, “one week earlier”), designed to pique audience interest so you don’t click off to something else.

It’s a cheap and overused trick, but in Two Weeks in August, it works alongside the mythological bad omens. That spirit of forthcoming doom-and-gloom reshapes the lens through which you view the show, and the truths the characters are hiding from themselves – none of them are particularly happy or even content.

That’s a noble ambition, and the series even achieves its thematic aims in parts, but the overall execution of the show feels so laboured. It also drags over eight episodes.

It’s a shame because there are some great pieces of dialogue exchanges, and there are sharp moments when it feels like the show it was trying to be. If it had been condensed in three or four episodes, it would be much better.

There are also a handful of local characters – the taverna owner, a young waiter, the cleaning woman who comes every day and tsks at the group’s supposed hedonism – that are often oppositional forces who are supposed the highlight the core gang’s cluelessness and self-centredness.

This is the part where we bring in the inevitable comparison to The White Lotus.

Two Weeks in August features holidaying Britons in Greece, who sometimes chaffs against local customs or expectations, and there are comments about the refugee crisis (Jacob repeatedly tells people he works for an NGO and therefore understands the humanitarian issues at stake).

For all of The White Lotus’s faults and inconsistencies, at least that show is disciplined. There are too many ebbs and flows, and even superfluous episodes and repeated moments. By the end, all the characters have tested your patience and it’s hard to still be invested in their fates.

Two Weeks in August? Should’ve been just the weekend.

Two Weeks in August is streaming on Binge