Two old friends kiss at a villa dinner table, and a holiday that was supposed to be relaxing quietly falls apart. That’s the spark for Two Weeks in August, the eight-part BBC One drama from Shrink Next Door writer Catherine Shepherd, which premiered on BBC One and iPlayer on 23 May 2026. If you’re wondering whether it’s worth your evening, here’s the honest version.
What’s It About?
A group of university friends reunite twenty years on for a Mediterranean holiday, filmed on location in Malta and Gozo. Zoe (Jessica Raine), a schoolteacher who’s spent two decades quietly holding the group together, is the emotional center. Her husband Dan (Damien Molony) is dealing with depression. Nat (Leila Farzad) is thrown when her gay best friend Jacob’s (Hugh Skinner) casual boyfriend shows up uninvited. Then that kiss happens, and the group splits into camps for the rest of the trip.
Underneath the group-holiday drama runs something odder: Zoe keeps seeing visions tied to Greek mythology, and they get stranger as the series goes on. It’s an ambitious swing for a show that’s already juggling six or seven main characters.
Does It Work?
Mostly, yes, though not everyone agrees on how well. The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan gave it five stars, praising how the mythological thread gives the story a timeless, almost universal quality. Cosmopolitan was similarly warm, and both outlets reached for the same comparison: this is Britain’s answer to The White Lotus, minus the resort and plus a rougher, more domestic kind of dread.
Radio Times was less convinced. It called the ensemble “superb” but landed on three stars, arguing the show takes on more than it can comfortably handle once you factor in the sheer number of characters alongside all that mythological weight.
That’s really the fault line running through the whole show. Jessica Raine is genuinely excellent as Zoe, a woman who’s spent her whole adult life managing everyone else’s feelings and is starting to crack. The ensemble cast, including Nicholas Pinnock and Antonia Thomas as another couple in the group, gives every character enough shading that you actually care who ends up on whose side after the kiss. When the show stays with the group dynamics, the tangled loyalties, and the resentments that surface after a few glasses of wine, it’s sharp, funny, and occasionally brutal.
The Greek myth thread is a bigger swing. Zoe’s visions and the recurring presence of figures echoing the Moirai (the Fates of Greek mythology) are visually striking, but they pull focus from the more grounded, relatable stuff. Whether that lands for you probably depends on your patience for a holiday drama that also wants to be a fable.
Who Should Watch It
If you liked the ensemble-holiday-gone-wrong setup of The White Lotus but want something more British in tone, less satire of wealth, and more mid-life reckoning, this is a solid pick. Fans of Jessica Raine’s work, or of BBC dramas that lean into ordinary people under pressure, will find plenty here. If you want a tight, focused story with no detours, the mythological subplot might test your patience.
The Bottom Line
Two Weeks in August is a well-acted, occasionally overstuffed drama that’s at its best when it just lets its very good cast argue, flirt, and fall out over a long Mediterranean holiday. The myth angle is a genuine swing rather than filler, even when it doesn’t fully land. Worth watching for Jessica Raine alone.
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