From Resplendent Resorts to Beloved Beach Houses: Vacation Drama on TV Shows

A relaxing travel destination is the perfect setting for these great stories!

Who doesn’t love a good vacation? A luxury trip to a picturesque island, a leisurely getaway to a family beach house, an adventure to an exotic locale–all of these away-from-home experiences are perfect settings for great storytelling–especially when family and friends are present to stir up some drama. We put together some TV shows you can stream right now that offer up vacation comedy, drama and mystery. 

The White Lotus

The White Lotus Seasons 1 and 2 both take place on vacation. A group of strangers are eerily connected at the same White Lotus chain resort, the first season in Maui, Hawaii and the second in Taormina, Sicily. Both seasons feature almost entirely different casts of characters (with a couple of exceptions) and the seasons exist in the same multiverse while being their own contained stories. Both seasons of the black comedy start with the aftermath of a death, and the season goes back in time to show the events leading up to the grim event. The locations are stunning; the outrageous beauty of the resorts and the scenic locales are in stark contrast to the characters’ dark psychoses and inner struggles. Every episode is captivating for both reasons. A third season is in the works, set in Thailand.

The Summer I Turned Pretty

Based on the beloved young adult book series by Jenny Han, The Summer I Turned Pretty is for those of us who always longed for a real life vacation romance as a teenager. The series follows Isabel, or Belly as everyone calls her, on her annual summer-long vacation with her mom, Laurel, and brother, Steven, to her mother’s best friend Susannah’s family beach house. The beach house is Belly’s happy place–it’s where she feels safest and happiest. But there’s another reason: Susannah’s sons Jeremiah and Conrad are her best friend and biggest crush, respectively. Now that Belly is a teenager, the boys have taken notice, and must negotiate whether they can go on treating her like the little sister they never had if they start having different kinds of adolescent feelings. And Belly, faced with some big decisions–as well as some big drama with her family and friends–must decide whether young love is worth risking it all for.

The Lake

A Canadian comedy series, The Lake is the ultimate modern family story that tackles common family squabbles while featuring a diverse cast of characters. Following a breakup with his partner, Justin is determined to connect with the biracial teenage daughter he gave up for adoption. He does this by taking her to his family’s lakeside cottage for the summer, a picturesque place he spent every summer growing up with his family and made lots of fond memories. Upon arrival, he finds out that the cottage has been left to his stepsister–to his great dismay. What ensues is a hilarious season-long bickering match between siblings and father and daughter, and a great deal of general family drama. But the series has a lot of heart in equal measure, and may have you longing for a lake house of your own to fight with your siblings over.

The Resort

The Resort takes dark comedy to the next level: think The White Lotus meets Lost. In this vacation-setting series, a couple takes an anniversary trip to the tropical Yucatan. Before long they find themselves deeply invested in a fifteen-year old unsolved mystery after the discovery of an old phone in the jungle: the disappearance of two adults just like them. Told in flashbacks of the missing couple’s journey and jumps to the present with our mystery-obsessed main characters, it’s perfect for the vacationer who gets bored easily at a resort and longs for a mysterious adventure. 

The Decameron

Not a vacation per se, but in modern times we can empathize with a group of folks going away together to escape a pandemic. The pesky disease here? The bubonic plague of medieval 1348. The series takes its name from a collection of short stories from the time by Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio. While The Decameron is not directly based on these stories, the theme is similar: a group of Italian nobles and their servants escape Florence during the Black Death, and reside together in a countryside manor. “Decameron” in Greek means 10, and there are 10 characters who “vacation” together for 10 days. Each day, one of them is “king” or “queen” and gets to decide the group’s activities. It’s a dark, sexy comedy inspired by the idea of a group of people stuck together inside for a while with not much else to do but entertain themselves–a concept we know well in post-pandemic pop culture.

Beverly Hills, 90210; Seasons 2 and 3

Despite what you might think, Beverly Hills, 90210 wasn’t a bonafide instant hit. The show, one of the first soaps geared towards teen viewers (if not THE first), didn’t really have great ratings during its first season run in 1990. But in the summer of 1991, the show and the Fox network made an experimental decision that was unheard of in a world before streaming: to begin the second season during the summer, when most network TV shows would air reruns. The risk paid off: teenagers were eager to watch the show written just for them while on their own summer vacations from school, and…there was literally nothing else on. While the picturesque setting of 90210 might have looked like a permanent vacation to those viewers who don’t live in Beverly Hills, these “mini-seasons” took place largely at the local Beverly Hills Beach Club. Some of the characters worked on their tans as members, while others did manual labor at the club (tapping into one of the biggest themes of the series: the difference between the haves and the have nots, even amongst friends, in Beverly Hills). It was in the beginning of Season 3 where the real drama ensued (and the show solidified its hit status) when Brenda and Donna went to Paris (a real vacation) leaving Kelly and Dylan at home. Thus began one of the most epic love triangles in television history.

What are your favorite shows set on vacation? We want to hear about them in the comments!

Want more? Head over to our Discord where you’ll find tons of other fans there chatting in our forums about the books, TV shows, movies, music, and games we all love! Don’t forget to follow us on Instagram, tumblr, and Spotify for more fandom content—and hit that subscribe button so you never miss a thing at rmrk*st!