Personally, I hate going to weddings so much (gotta shower, dress up, go to an actual place, then another place, gotta fake emotion or even worse, feel it) that attending one in which almost the entire bridal party ends up fatally poisoned on the top table is quite an attractive proposition.
Thus I was set to enjoy Disney+’s first UK original series, Wedding Season, in which a murder by ingested toxin – probably via a disappointing chicken kiev – is the inciting incident.
First, though – thanks to a jittery flashback structure – we meet our hero Stefan (Gavin Drea) as he interrupts the wedding of Hugo Delaney (George Webster) and Katie (Rosa Salazar), the woman he has been having an affair with ever since they met at another wedding three months before. We will see them meet after we’ve seen the bit that comes after the not-quite-present that is him interrupting his inamorata’s wedding, if you follow me? If you don’t, good. I am trying to convey the fact that Wedding Season is chaotic in both form and content from the off, and warn you of the level of investment that is going to be required from viewers if you decide to say “I do” to Oliver Lyttelton’s eight-part creation.
Onward. We next see Stefan in a police interview room. He is being interviewed by officers as the prime suspect, along with the missing Katie, in the murder of Hugo and seven other Delaneys at the wedding breakfast.
Viewers might soon come to consider that – potential murder charges aside – Stefan has had a lucky escape, because the more we see of Katie, the clearer it becomes that she is somewhere between tricksy irritant and full-scale blight on humanity. It depends on your tolerance for manic pixie dream girls with added 2022 cynicism. Mine is low.
Katie is effortfully, exhaustingly kooky. She steals people’s phones at parties when she gets bored, spins a web of lies around herself and pulls in hapless flies such as Stefan to add substance to them. She thinks herself a streetwise tough nut but can’t spot a patent double-cross at 50 paces, refuses to explain things she knows and is simply, indefinably annoying.
This makes it hard to care when she – in essence – kidnaps Stefan, a doctor who really should have his medical licence revoked for being so hapless, and forces him to go on the lam with her, across the UK and the US, to clear their names – amid more flashbacks to more weddings and engagement parties at which their paths crossed.
It’s a frenetic blend of romcom, road movie and action thriller but suffers from the truth of the adage that when you try to be all things to all people, you become nothing to anyone. The mashing together of different genres, putting tropes from each back-to-back without either one illuminating or putting a twist on the other, leads it to become less rather than more than the sum of its parts.
Taken at a superficial level it just about gets away with it, skating by on Drea’s charm and the relatable happiness and horror of being part of a gang of friends in your late 20s who are all on the brink of making the kind of decisions that can, for good or ill, shape the rest of your lives. Especially if, like Suji (Ioanna Kimbook) – a sort of Bridget Jones-ish throwback, single and shrouded in desperation for a man – you blindly chat up underage boys in your bid to follow your sister down the aisle. (No, it wouldn’t be playable for laughs if it were a man chatting up an underage girl. Why? Send a postcard to the usual address if you need me to explain the workings of comedy within specific sociocultural context again.)
Wedding Season is an ambitious undertaking that might fail at what it’s trying to do but remains entertaining enough. Those who like their fun fast and furious and don’t want to decree nisi Katie as soon as she appears will no doubt have a better time still.
