Disney+’s Wedding Season Is A Thrilling Reinvention Of The Romcom

Minor spoilers ahead. When you first hear the phrase Wedding Season, it's likely that your mind jumps straight to images of beautiful white dresses, teary-eyed family members and happily ever afters. Well, in the case of the first ever Disney+ UK series, two out of three are correct. Set in Scotland, the romantic thriller follows Katie (Rosa Salazar) and Stefan (Gavin Drea) as a disastrous big day turns into a series of unfortunate events.

As with all drama-filled love stories, their story begins under much more casual circumstances. Meeting at a mutual friend's wedding, the pair enjoy a modern meet-cute when Stefan returns Katie's phone to her after bumping into one another on the dancefloor. Soon after, it becomes clear that Katie has actually taken the phone from another wedding guest, bonding the pair in a strange and sexy cover up story. As they continue chatting, the couple divulge their true feelings about marriage, including Stefan’s desperate desire to catch up with his friend’s and Katie’s lack of interest in the matter.

Spending the evening drinking and dancing together, the night seems to be going swimmingly, that is, until Stefan is forced to perform an emergency tracheostomy on an elderly wedding guest. Luckily for him, the doting doctor act and romantic wedding setting seems to impress Katie, who quickly pulls Stefan into an alleyway to make out. However, just before the pair move things into the hotel bathroom, Katie casually informs Stefan that she happens to have a fiancé, something neither of them spend too much time thinking about after articles of clothing start being removed.

Cut to a few months later, we watch as Stefan makes his way down the aisle himself. However, it's not actually the setting of his own happily ever after, instead, he decides to crash Katie's wedding in a desperate attempt to stop her marrying another man. It’s a rash and ill-advised move, one which leaves Stefan with a bruised eye and a broken heart. But the crushed ego is nothing compared to what follows, when the next morning he’s taken into questioning at the local police station. There, he’s informed that Katie is missing, after her groom and his entire family were found dead at her wedding (you know, the one he just tried to stop). 

Bewildered and confused, he’s forced to undergo an intense interview, all while coming to terms with the fact that the worst thing to happen at Katie’s wedding wasn’t in fact his painful public rejection. Eventually, Katie arrives at the station with the promise of answers, offering to fill in some of the gaps in exchange for Stefan’s faith in her innocence. Begging him to literally ‘take a leap’ over a three-story building and go on the run with her, Stefan makes a split decision to embark on a Bonnie and Clyde-style runaway mission, in the hopes of collecting enough evidence to clear his name.

While the series sounds like it has a lot of moving parts, at its core, Wedding Season is all about keeping its audience entertained while also asking questions. Jumping back and forth between timelines, viewers are intermittently shown Stefan and Katie's interactions in the months prior to the incident, all of which emphasise the mixed signals that may have contributed to their mess. But while the guessing game is what largely pushes the plot forward, the real joy comes from the series ordinariness.

This includes the beautifully familiar setting, with Stefan and Katie starting their run from the law in the stunning Scottish countryside. It’s something that makes the action-packed episodes feel grounded, with the characters almost blowing their cover to buy some Creme Eggs at the corner shop. This sense of Britishness is present in the supporting characters too, with the investigating officers performing a perfectly dry, British, ‘good cop, bad cop’ routine. This, coupled with an expertly crafted soundtrack of familiarly cringe wedding songs, makes the show's more obscure moments feel based in reality.

As an oddball combination of genres, Wedding Season aims to provide audiences with something new, stitching together a police drama with quirky romance and offbeat comedic timing. While at times this mix feels hard to balance, the first few episodes prove that the series is all about embracing fun, inviting viewers to commit to a world where an ill-advised hook up can end in an arrest warrant. Charting the character’s chaotic journey over the course of eight episodes, Wedding Season is sure to be an affair to remember.