‘The Resort’ Showrunner Shares The Importance of Old Tech in the Series

There’s a lot to love about Peacock‘s mysterious dark comedy, The Resort. The show features a top-notch cast, a picturesque setting, and an entrancing score. But its greatest gift to viewers is an unexpected reunion with 2000s technology.

The series follows married coupled Emma (Cristin Milioti) and Noah (William Jackson Harper), who are vacationing to celebrate their 10-year anniversary. Though Emma is physically in paradise, she’s in emotional hell, questioning her marriage, mourning the loss of her child, and randomly dealing with a decaying tooth. She’s straight-up miserable, but her mood skyrockets when she stumbles on a crusty old relic in the jungle: a Motorola Razr.

After popping the old SIM card into a functional Razr, Emma powers on the phone and marvels at its contents. She reads text messages, checks out photos, and does research of her own to discover the Razr belonged to a teen named Sam (Skyler Gisondo) who disappeared 15 years earlier with another teen, Violet (Nina Bloomgarden). Emma and Noah set out to solve the mysteries that lie within this abandon Razr, while flashbacks to Sam and Violet in 2007 give viewers a glimpse at what really went down.

To give the past scenes a more authentic feel, The Resort‘s creative team littered them with throwback technology. In addition to the sleek silver Razr at the heart of the show, characters use a hot pink Razr, an iPod Video, an iPod Nano, a Nokia 6700 slide, and more. In intertwining long lost tech with modern-day storylines, the show offers a rare, exhilarating viewing experience. I was so high on nostalgia and starry eyed at the sight of these devices that ruled my middle school that I reached out to The Resort‘s co-showrunner Allison Miller to chat about the show’s brilliant relationship with old school tech.

In a phone call with Decider, Miller shared that creator Andy Siara had already written Sam’s Razr into the script by the time she joined the project. She had a Razr in college and feels the phone marked a major moment in pop-culture, so it’s a perfect device to base the series around.

“I think there’s something about technology that has design moments, like the creation of the iPod. Apple has done it time and time again, right? These iconic technological advances paired with great design become these things that are burned in our minds. Razrs are definitely one of them. I feel like everyone who had the phone loves it,” Miller said.

Curious how The Resort got access to a bunch of Razrs in our year 2022? The show’s prop master went on eBay. “It’s funny because my niece is at home as we speak watching the show, and she’s instantly texting me, ‘Who had all these Razrs sitting around? It’s the magic of television,'” Miller said. “And I was like, ‘Well, it’s the magic of eBay. [Laughs.] You can buy anything you want from your entire past on eBay.”

Miller went on to explain that Hannah’s (Debby Ryan) pink Razr arrived new in the box, which gave her a chance to reacquaint herself with the device before filming. “I sat and played with it in Video Village, because I was really curious to see the resolution of the photos and what we could actually frame. Like would you be able to see Oceania Vista in the photo? I started running through plot points,” she said, noting the phone was “super fun” to play with.

Though you may be jealous of The Resort stars who got to reunite with old tech on set, Miller revealed that one downside to showing existing devices on screen is they often can’t be used operationally due to software copyright.

“You can’t actually show the Razr software on the Razr screen, so we had to create our own wrap around image and burn that into the phone, which means placing it digitally in, because we weren’t able to get the rights to that software piece,” she said. “It’s funny because you can use the tech, but you can’t use the software. So it was just trying to find something that felt as close as possible but didn’t violate any copyright laws. It did [look very close, though]. Our designer did a really great job at hand creating all of these screens for us.”

Perhaps the most memorable, masterful depictions of old school tech on The Resort are Sam and Violet’s texts. The messages — complete with classic 2007 text lingo and <3 hearts — are displayed on screen in a font nearly identical to Razr’s signature aesthetic. It’s so close to the original that the show should issue a warning to former Razr owners. A simple “Caution: You may be flooded with youthful memories” will suffice.

“There’s a nostalgic feeling you get when you see that font. It’s almost like a Minecraft font, right? Because it’s like built out of bricks,” Miller said. “But yeah, that was so much of our lives. When you think about what messages you received in that font from maybe your first crush, your best friend, or whatever, during those teenage years it’s just kind of subconsciously burned into our brains. This tells the story of our lives, essentially.”

The Resort‘s team strove to be as accurate as possible when recreating Sam and Violet’s world, but one piece of modern-day tech accidentally slipped into a 2007 flashback. When Sam is listening to his iPod on the plane he’s using more advanced EarPods, which feature a volume control and redesigned ear pieces that fit better into ear holes, rather than old Apple EarBuds. The problem? Apple didn’t release EarPods until 2012, so unless Sam’s a time traveler he wouldn’t have them yet.

“It’s funny, we went through a whole thing when we realized that those [headphones] might not be right. The iPod comes with headphones, they just don’t have the microphone. But [the one we bought] accidentally had a microphone,” Miller explained. “We were going to digitally take them out at one point. But part of this is testing all of our knowledge about what we had and didn’t have, which I kind of love.”

In Miller’s mind, technology has become sort of a scrapbook for people, which is one of the reasons it’s so crucial to the show. While the first three episodes delivered a delightful does of nostalgia, fans haven’t seen the last of throwback devices. “There’s definitely more to come. Another surprise is going to be unearthed. I’ll just leave it at that.”