Wedding Season Review: Hulu Series Is A Love Match Between Comedy And Action
Stars: Gavin Drea, Mohammed Amil Shafi, Rosa Salazar
Director: George Kane, Laura Scrivano
Streaming Platform: Hulu and Disney+
Filmyhype.com Ratings: 3/5 (three stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]
On the occasion of Hulu Day which is celebrated today, Thursday 8 September, Hulu will release the Wedding Season series. This is the first English original, a dark comedy thriller consisting of 8 episodes already available now and which have a duration varying between thirty and 45 minutes. The series was created by Oliver Lyttelton (Cheaters) who is also the series producer, for Dancing Ledge Production. The eight episodes are directed by George Kane and Laura Scrivano. Between laughter and murder, Katie and Stefan’s escape drags us into a difficult-to-unravel tangle where the twist is just around the corner.
Wedding Season Review: The Story
Stefan (Gavin Drea) is a young doctor in love with love. He is always the favorite guest of every wedding, the perfect best man even if he is too emotional and spends all the ceremonies talking about his disastrous love life of him or looking at the happy couple with shining eyes and dreamy sighs. So fascinated by the idealized vision of relationships that he launches into one story after another, he is blind to the incompatibilities and problems of the couple. It is during a wedding that he meets Katie (Rosa Salazar) and falls madly in love with her instantly. But she is already engaged, and as much as she seems interested in Stefan, she has no intention of leaving her current partner.
Stefan’s life is catapulted into a world ruled by organized crime when he is found the prime suspect in the murder of Katie’s newlywed husband and her entire family, poisoned during the girl’s wedding reception. Wedding Season plays with the stylistic features of the reference genres, creating the right balance between comedy and action. Starting from the cinematic stereotypes exploited for the writing of the characters: Stefan and Katie are specks, protagonists seen and reviewed both in comedy series and in action films, but whose roles are reversed. This reversal is the true soul of the show, the peculiarity that makes Wedding Season bright and fun.
Wedding Season Review and Analysis
The period of weddings, experienced as a nightmare and at the center of the jokes of Italian comedians, is not only a local phenomenon but is also found in other parts of the world. A series of weeks in which several weddings of friends, family and acquaintances are concentrated in which you decide to go even if you may not have seen that person for years. The Wedding Season is the title of the series and we retrace through the flashbacks that tell the love story between Katie and Stefan. He is a Manchester doctor, single in search of love surrounded by married couples or about to do so, who is dragged from party to party. She is ready for her marriage to the scion of an important family. The two meet, like each other and end up having an absurd and chaotic adventure, mostly because of Katie.
By now we are full of TV series that do not know whom they want to be, trying to differentiate themselves from others by mixing genres and styles. Streaming has exacerbated this phenomenon, either for the amount of stuff uploaded every day and that comes from all over the world that pushes us to look for originality, or for the possibility of playing with the number of episodes and above all with their duration. Wedding Season is an English series but with little British. It appears conceived as a product for the international audience. The humor is much less subtle and caustic than usual, and the chaos and fast pace that run through the series seem more suited to an American series. The structure built around weddings as well as being a bit forced, refers to the formula of Four Weddings and a Funeral but he quickly breaks away.
Wedding Season works when it recounts Stefan and Katie’s escape, much less so when it tries the romantic comedy approach. A series in which the chaos and frenzy that reflect Katie’s character overwhelm the viewer as happens to Stefan himself. But it is this continuing movement that holds an otherwise fragile series in place. More than a dark comedy it is a thriller comedy, in which the part of the mystery prevails over the comic one. More recommended to lovers of thrillers than to those of comedies. Surely the series enhances Rosa Salazar and Gavin Drea. The two have an obvious chemistry that would make them suitable for a romantic comedy and a natural propensity to tell the situations they are experiencing with their faces.
Gavin Drea fits perfectly into the role of a naive and funny, adorable and clumsy character who cannot read the room or the clear intentions of other people. He is rejected, cries on the shoulders of his friends who can’t stand him anymore and falls in love constantly repeating the same dynamics over and over with different girls. Stefan’s character follows the model of a perfect protagonist of a romance story, that girl who acts as a comic line due to her misadventures in the sentimental field and the whimpers that are the background to the main storyline that, usually, never concerns her. Katie, on the contrary, is the stereotype of the tormented hero, the mysterious and passionate male character, but who has no intention of deeply engaging in a relationship. Katie has a past she doesn’t talk about that makes her present ambiguous: is she a killer or was she framed?
The alchemy between the two actors is the icing on the cake that establishes the perfect balance that stabilizes the comedy side of Wedding Season with the action without either of them prevailing over the other. The series begins with a more comic setting supported by a linear and precise direction that highlights the mimicry and gestures of the protagonists who draw on their comic repertoire without overdoing it. But it is the quick editing and the sudden breaks that emphasize the comic tempos, also thanks to the soundtrack designed specifically for the series and composed of famous pop and dance songs that recall the playlists that can be found in every European wedding.
The classic detective couple following the case is inevitable, convinced that Stefan hides much more than a clandestine relationship with Katie. The two agents travel on a parallel line together with the protagonists, recalling the most classic combination of good cop and bad cop. But Wedding Season is not just a dark comedy based on sketches and exchanges of jokes. The main storyline is never left behind thanks also to the right time granted by a short but not restricted minute. The second part of the series, after the two get to know each other by meeting at various weddings, focuses on Katie’s past and the investigation, while continuing to wink at the scenic structure typical of comedy.
The sketches, misunderstandings and tricks are the narrative engines that also surround the most classic episodes of the action series. Those that tell Katie’s past and that highlight the reasons why the girl is so detached, revealing if she is a double agent or just a tormented soul in a plot twist that, once again, finds an unexpected solution that works perfectly in the economy of the series. But Katie is the real star of Wedding Season, thanks to the writing of the character that is never banal even if she takes inspiration from well-known characters, but above all to the performance of Rosa Salazar who gives her a new soul. Now in love, now mysterious and now dangerous or on the verge of a nervous breakdown, Salazar draws on her vast acting repertoire without ever falling into excess or bizarre.
Wedding Season Review: The Last words
Wedding Season does not fall into banality, packaging a fresh show that winks at black humor while always remaining fun and intelligent in the way she uses the stylistic features of the film genres from which she takes inspiration. A TV series not identifiable in any genre. On other occasions, it would also be an advantage, but here everything is very confusing and fluctuating. Few advantages.
