David Farnor | On 11, Sep 2022

This review is based on the opening episodes of Wedding Season.

It’s that age-old story. Boy meets girl. Boy marries girl. Boy and girl’s wedding turns into a whodunnit mystery after the bridal party (apart from the bride) end up apparently murdered. That’s the starting point for Wedding Season, Disney+’s first UK original series – except, well, that’s not the starting point at all, because we begin partway through said nuptials as Stefan (Gavin Drea) attempts to interrupt proceedings and declare his love for Katie (Rosa Salazar).

To say things don’t go smoothly is an understatement, and soon we’re at another wedding, and then another, and then another – all of them designed to help us understand both what happened at Katie’s ill-fated wedding and what led Stefan to fall for her in the first place. There’s a nicely observed truth in the way that everyone’s 20s eventually slides into a long string of marital celebrations that can be either winningly sweet or socially awkward, but Wedding Season struggles to build on that recognisable reality with characters who are relatable or likeable.

Gavin Drea’s Stefan is written as lovelorn and illogical to the point of being irritating, while Rosa Salazar’s Katie is written as unknowable and mysterious, and illogical to the point of being irritating. Together, despite Drea’s and Salazar’s performances, they don’t convince as a couple – a scene in which they have to pretend to be old school friends captures the enjoyable rush of two people sharing an improvised in-joke but the script for the most part isn’t believable or funny enough. It doesn’t help that the couple are cheating on Katie’s fiancee throughout, which makes it difficult to even root for them in the first place.

Created by Cheaters writer Oliver Lyttleton, the series aims to be a comedy and a crime caper, balancing romance and action with a road trip and police interrogation scenes. But the rapidly edited back-and-forth structure winds up chaotic rather than playful, which means that the plot’s bigger picture unfolds too slowly, the characters don’t get a chance to stick – Stefan’s ensemble of friends never develop into more than a group swapping knowing sitcom banter – and incidents such as an emergency piece of dance floor surgery feel jarring rather than amusingly unexpected. The result lacks the fun of Four Weddings and a Funeral – both the film and the TV series – and misses the steamy unpredictability of HBO’s Run. A disappointing mismatch.

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