Summary
Despite a compelling hook and setting, Summer of 36 is burdened by too many characters and go-nowhere subplots that gum up every episode, and the shoddy plotting and writing limit any potential payoff.
Lots of shows are described as “messy”, and it’s usually a meaningless catch-all to describe the odd decision that audiences disagree with. But Summer of 36 is a proper, unambiguous mess, a stew of conflicting POVs and diverting subplots awkwardly strung together with shoddy writing – the script comes courtesy of Marie Deshaires and Catherine Touzet – and soapy theatrics. Across six 50-ish-minute episodes, it loses its way very profoundly and frustratingly.
And it didn’t have to be this way! The show, conceived by Iris Bucher and now airing on Netflix in a handy binge-watch format after debuting on French television, has a great setting and a serviceable enough murder-mystery premise. As per the title, we’re in Nice, in the summer of 1936, notable historically for being a turning point in French social history. For once, the Côte d’Azur is no longer the preserve of the bourgeoisie. Thanks to the Popular Front and paid vacations, legions of workers and their families have descended on the holiday hotspot, creating a socioeconomic melting pot.
This is an ideal time for a murder. When someone is found dead in the upscale Riviera Hotel, it’s up to four women from wildly different backgrounds – any one of which could just as easily be a suspect – to dig into it. They’re met with resistance from the authorities, each other, and the general classist social climate, helping to give what might have otherwise been an Agatha Christie-style whodunit some real thematic texture.
That, though, is the upsides pretty much out of the way. The various competing ideas and plot threads quickly prove too much for the writers to handle and the mere six episodes to contain, bogging everything down with go-nowhere storylines and highly questionable decision-making that can sometimes beggar belief. It’s simply too much story for a single season, and the episodes move at a rackety clip to try and squeeze it all in. By about the second episode, I was fully checked out, and I suspect most other viewers will be too.
There are game efforts, it must be said, to intertwine the actual murder mystery with the national story, but they’re largely fruitless. Summer of 36 is a curious story without being an especially capable one; it’s excited to be about things it lacks the craftsmanship to actually explore, so it mostly ends up feeling like a parade of ideas that don’t coalesce. A questionable finale feels more contrived than satisfying, so it isn’t even as if the destination is worth the bumpy journey.
Acting-wise, the efforts are admirable but wasted on thin characters whose relationships – often secretive and familial – have the unfortunate burden of having to be the engine that drives the plot. Eventually, it’s driven into a wall, or at least into a ditch; the wheels keep spinning, but there’s no progress being made. The mechanics of the mystery get lost in the soapy shenanigans of the relationships. Instead of one informing the other, they mostly feel at war, competing for limited space.
Looks nice, though. The setting is good for a landscape or two, and its innate sense of glamour is well rendered by the production. But the lack of clarity and curiosity about the political framework that underpins the premise is wasteful and creates an identity crisis that the show never quite overcomes, ambling towards that perfunctory conclusion without having illuminated much of anything in the meantime. This is one vacation you’d probably need to be paid to enjoy.
