Fantasy Island

There’s an obvious grabbiness to the premise of “Fantasy Island” — the 1977-84 ABC drama now revived as a Fox summer soap. In the show’s first run, Ricardo Montalbán and Hervé Villechaize were hoteliers able to alter reality per guests’ cravings, often in frightening ways. The appeal is as old as King Midas, whose request for the golden touch, once fulfilled, ruined his life — a reminder to be happy with one’s own lot. Little wonder that there have been several attempts to bring the isle back, including a horror-film adaptation last year.Fantasy Island Season 1 Download

This new “Fantasy Island” lacks the 2020 Blumhouse film’s savage imagination, but has its pleasures. Roselyn Sanchez plays a descendant of Montalbán’s Mr. Roarke; her frosty mien helps create oddity and remove. Aided by Ruby (Kiara Barnes), who journeys to the island in the pilot, Sanchez’s Elena Roarke improves her guests by giving them what they need, in a manner that looks in literal terms like what they want.

This can add up to a trite semantic reversal: Bellamy Young, for instance, plays an image-conscious news anchor who wants to eat whatever she wants without gaining weight. Would you be shocked to learn that food is not what she’s most hungry for? Elsewhere, a mother (Debbi Morgan) wishes to reconnect with her estranged daughter; Morgan’s narcissist is forced to radically decenter herself when she’s made invisible. The daughter who wouldn’t see her now cannot.

This “Fantasy Island” lets itself off the hook too often, tending toward the simplistic. And though the “White Lotus”-y surroundings evoke a contemporary wellness resort, there is little in the story about what people in 2021 would expect from their time there. There’s a certain first-pass quality to the writing here: Just a bit of polish would have benefited a show meant to evoke the best of everything.