Fantasy Island premieres Aug. 10 at 9:00 PM ET/PT on Fox.
On paper, a revival of Fantasy Island, ABC’s old-school anthology about everyday people flying to a remote island to live out their pinnacle fantasies for a weekend, sounds like perfect escapism for our times. There’s certainly not enough light, scripted TV to distract us these days, and anthology storytelling can be a great avenue for that. Unfortunately, Fox’s updated version of Fantasy Island proves that what worked then, doesn’t always translate into the now.
Even if you’ve never seen an episode of Fantasy Island, which ran for seven seasons back in the late ‘70s, you’ve likely seen a riff on the show’s signature characters: the white-suited Mr. Rourke (Ricardo Montalbán) welcoming guests, or his diminutive assistant, Tattoo (Hervé Villechaize) yelling, “The plane, the plane!” Week after week, the classic series played out its perfected formula of feeding audiences concise contemporary moral fables, or romantic jaunts about as frothy as a Pina Colada.
This new series keeps the same structural bones and mythology of the original, but modernizes everything on the surface. The island is still in the family with Elena Roarke (Roselyn Sanchez), the niece of Mr. Rourke, now running the operation as the sole proprietor and wish-granter-in-charge. She’s gorgeous, enigmatic, and continues to exclusively wear exquisitely tailored white garb du jour. But there’s also a pervasive loneliness to Ms. Rourke that initially plays well with the inherent mysteries of the island.
And the resort still functions in the same way as it did four decades ago, with paying guests arriving on her shores with a specific heart’s desire to explore. How that actually plays out is entirely according to how the island sees fit. Even Elena seems to be at the mercy of its nebulous, supernatural whims, sometimes a bit perturbed at having to navigate the squawking disapproval of the confused, or initially unhappy guests. But rest assured, by each episode’s end, the guests will have achieved their personal epiphanies, with tidy resolutions that send them on their way more elevated than when they arrived.
Even the guests themselves are relatively pedestrian. There are some dalliances with shaking it up, like the long-married woman who frolicks herself into a Sapphic experience with a hot masseuse, or the exploration of a young Indian woman’s choice between an arranged marriage or sticking with her boyfriend. But most are pretty vanilla, like the bickering, disconnected married couple who get Freaky Friday’d into one another’s bodies, or the bland scientist who wants to experience something unexplainable.
While the location is appropriately wind-swept and pretty, there’s an overall scaled-back quality to everything in the series. The production value isn’t lush enough to woo your travel-starved eyes. The attempts to flesh out Rourke and her eventual assistant’s island lives often feel like stilted afterthoughts. And the stories themselves haven’t been reinvented enough to meet the needs of today’s more savvy TV watchers.
In particular, the throwback episodic structure of “wish, twist, resolution” might be storytelling comfort food, but there’s surprisingly no ambition to turn the expected into something truly unexpected. Yes, the updating comes with an infusion of more relevant topics like the tepid exploration of bisexuality, female ageism, or toxic parental narcissism, yet each one is resolved in the same manner they were back in 1980. As in, once the “problem” is in crisis, the solution is neatly solved with nary a residual issue. There’s no attempt to weave in the kind of provocative bite needed to make any of the stories truly memorable, challenging, or even exceptionally steamy.
Showrunners Elizabeth Craft and Sarah Fain (Angel, The Shield) do manage to weave their signature wit throughout various episodes, but overall the series feels as if it’s operating under a stifling executive broadcast note to not stray too far from the format and execution of the classic series. And while safe and familiar has its place for many, Craft and Fain’s creativity and talent feel tethered. Maybe as the series progresses, its unique voice will emerge. But as is, this Fantasy Island is more like that disappointing vacation that leaves you wanting more.