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Apple premiered a program called Now and Then two weeks ago that has a very similar premise to Two Summers.
If you think you've seen it before, you aren't hallucinating. As someone threatens to spill the beans on a long-held secret, a group of longtime pals gets together at this spot.
In the previous two years, we've seen so many tales like this that it's nearly its own genre. Two Summers' place among these productions is unclear.
The Gist
To watch is a 1992 video in which Peter Van Gael (Tom Vermeir) is viewing a tape of himself and a buddy, Mark (Felix Meyer), taking advantage of Sophie Geboers (Louise Bergez) while she's unconscious.
It will be revealed soon after the private island reunion he and his wife Romée (An Miller) are holding off the coast of France unless he pays a particular sum in Bitcoin.
The two were pals who used to spend the summers in Zandhoven, Belgium, together. Sophie (Inge Paulussen) and Didier Verpoorten (Herwig Ilegems), a self-professed flight attendant, meet up in Antwerp before heading to the island.
Lia (Sanne-Samina Hanssen) is accompanying Luk Van Gael (Kevin Janssens). He and his ex-wife Saskia Van Dessel (Ruth Becquart), who was also in the group, share custody of an adult special-needs son.
A government politician nicknamed “Mowgli” by the gang because of his untidy attire as a young man finally arrives, Koen De Bouw playing Stef Van Gompel.
Since Vincent Van Sande (Mowgli's younger self) was the cameraman, Peter reveals the film to Mowgli first, and the two wonder who has the tape, since they destroyed it in the past.
There is no doubt that someone on the island is blackmailing them, and they're going to find out who it is. When Didier (Bjarne Devolder) reveals to Sophie that he was at the party, she is shocked.
In the 1992 flashbacks, we also learn that Luk (Tijmen Govaerts) was recovering from cancer or another major disease at the time of the show's initial airing.
He also seems to have perished in the house's fire the night after the film was taken, when Mark got into an argument with Peter (Peter branded him a freeloader).
We know this because Peter and the others are trying to enter Mark's room but are stopped by the raging fire.
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What Shows Will It Remind You Of?
The narrative of Two Summers is reminiscent of Now and Then, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Yellowjackets, Who Killed Sara? and other programs in which a group of individuals shares a horrific secret that might be revealed. There have been a lot of these kinds of plots in the previous few years.
Our Take
If two histories are covered in order to indicate what secret the current-day group would not want to be exposed to, one of the timelines receives a lot of attention.
The whole program suffers since the characters are more established in one timeframe than the other.
At first glance, the characters in the 1992 timeline of Two Summers appear to be the most one-dimensional.
In the first episode, for example, we don't get a clear picture of who young Saskia (Tine Roggeman) and Romée (Marieke Anthony) really are.
Even if she wasn't the victim, Sophie's two female companions would be unable to tell her apart from them.
The author Paul Baeten Gronda and Tom Lenaerts should have stretched the characters' characterizations out further because the program is about a sexual assault one of the other members of the group committed.
However, it appears that we learn more about the men's younger selves than we do about the women's.
However, we must give credit to the authors: Despite our confusion about how old each character was in 1992, we're able to connect their younger and older selves at the end of the first episode.
What makes us believe that? In part, this is because the older performers appear to be between the ages of forty and sixty-five, whilst the younger actors all appear to be either college students or recent college grads.
When we link the younger and older versions of each character, we lose part of the credibility of the story since there aren't enough credible aging individuals up or down.
Our Call
DISTRIBUTE IT TO THE WORLD. Aside from a few minor issues, Two Summers is one of the genre's more dependable entrants, thanks in large part to its strong narrative clarity and a large cast of well-defined characters.
If you follow Joel Keller on Twitter (@joelkeller), you'll know that he's a self-confessed TV addict. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company, and elsewhere.
