Peacock’s The Resort gives true-crime enthusiasts what they need: a mirror

polygon.com:

The Resort begins, as so many good things do, with a cocktail. The dark comedy has its protagonist step out of her cab from the airport to a luxury Yucatán resort and down a complimentary drink with the sort of fevered intensity that suggests this vacation is sorely needed. Emma, played by the always excellent Cristin Milioti, is a woman in need of distraction, and finding the mobile phone of a young man who has been missing for 15 years proves just the trick.

There’s much to admire in The Resort — unexpected twists happen in every episode, building to the sort of high-concept time-bending premise seen most widely in the works of Denis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan. But beyond a cast with impeccable comic timing and impressively realized concept, The Resort is perhaps the best example of “true-crime brain” adapted to screen.

True crime is a complicated phenomenon. Its early iterations were more niche concerns, with enthusiasts dissecting the Victorian slaughters of Jack the Ripper and the butchery of Ed Gein that would go on to inspire Hitchcock. Then as the 24-hour news cycle emerged in the 1990s, mainstream audiences watched each day of the O.J. Simpson case, and Court TV began broadcasting trials live on television. But the pre-internet public feedback loop was contained, and dissection by non-experts was limited to the water cooler. In the years since, with social media in full force and podcasts becoming an increasingly popular medium, the role of the amateur detective has snowballed into something insidious.

At first the modern wave of true crime took on a prestige sheen: The podcast behemoth Serial was an impeccably researched and produced dissection of the tragic murder of Hae Min Lee, while television series