The easiest way to describe The Road Trip would be to call it the TV equivalent of an airport novel. Perhaps that is because it is. Beth O’Leary has long kept the WH Smith industrial complex alive, with bestselling novels including The Flatshare, which sold more than 1m copies. That book was adapted into a six-part TV series in 2022, and followed two roommates thrust together by the fact that they rented the same bed – cleverly twisting the hellscape that is the London rental market into the stuff of a fluffy romcom. This one follows Dylan and Addie, a pair of exes thrust together by the fact that they have to use the same method of transport to get to a wedding 1,000 miles away. Like a rat, a potential love affair is never more than 6ft away in O’Leary’s world.
This time, our star-crossed, claustrophobic pairing are Dylan and Addie, who are on their separate ways to the wedding of their friends Cherry and Krish. In the book, the nuptials were in Scotland. But this is TV, so it has been relocated to lush, mountainous Spain. Addie and her sister Deb – plus an uninvited guest named Rodney – are driving in a camper van from Bristol to catch a cross-channel ferry. Up the road, Dylan and his best mate, Marcus, are on their way to the airport, in a Porsche. Marcus (David Jonsson), in a role with shades of his much-missed Industry character Gus) crashes the Porsche – his dad’s – into Addie’s camper van. Although the RV sounded like a dying animal long before that, it becomes Dylan and Marcus’s only hope for getting across the border, leaving our fivesome lumped together.
But wait – why have Deb and Marcus been told two completely different stories about the breakup? And will Dylan and Addie get back together – or even get back on speaking terms – by the time they reach the Schengen area? It is a romcom setup by numbers, with the added risk that car-sick Rodney (Angus Imrie), might puke on them all at any moment.
Emma Appleton does her best as Addie, a defensive cipher of a woman with self-proclaimed Daddy issues, to whom the writers occasionally throw a bone. There is good, sometimes spiky sisterly chemistry between her and Deb, (Isabella Laughland) but her redemptive arc comes largely through scenes set during the self-described “hot girl summer” two years earlier, when she met Dylan (Laurie Davidson, also giving it his all, despite the material).
Addie worked as a housekeeper for Dylan’s rich friend Grace in the Spanish villa to which they are now returning. Dylan was the posh boy “finding himself” in his gap year before joining his dad’s business (he goes from dressing like a Deloitte employee to wearing Birkenstocks and sporting an earring, in case we are in any doubt that there has been a time jump). O’Leary is a Jane Austen fan and it shows: even being treated like a servant by Dylan’s friends doesn’t make Addie do the logical thing and sprint to the easyJet website. She must stay … she must prove that she belongs … she must have sex with him in the van where, one day, they will find themselves miserably trapped together!
By the end of the three episodes released to reviewers, there is barely any romance in the air between the reunited couple, but we have watched Addie reverse down a hill, while a Spanish man shouts loudly in Spanish, and tries to calm down the bull he is transporting (we stop short of a flamenco concert, or a pitstop for paella). The romcom element comes more from the flashbacks, where we see Dylan and Addie’s first date. Even then, that weird upstairs/downstairs dynamic leaves me feeling yucky; the date is just an extension of work drinks with Dylan’s overlords, and it feels as if he might ask Addie to shine his shoes, or text her the next day asking her to cover her share of the drinks.
In the words of Miss Jean Brodie, for those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like. There will be loads of people who really enjoy The Road Trip, and will gulp it down greedily like their Christmas leftovers. For the rest of us, it is probably best avoided. If you can, that is. As the rise of O’Leary proves, you can run from love, but it will hunt you down and find you – at your home, your workplace, and even in your car.
• The Road Trip is on Paramount+ now.
