Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Platonic: Blue Moon Hotel’ On Netflix, Where Two Sisters Fall Hard For A Mysterious Guest To Their Family’s Hotel

Comedies that depict rivalries amongst siblings always have lots of family history to mine for laughs. That’s especially true if the siblings approach life and romance from completely different angles, like we see in a new comedy from Turkey.

Opening Shot: People are celebrating during a party, then they start running.

The Gist: Nezahat Atkaȿ (Ugur Demirpehlivan) runs the Blue Moon Hotel with her oldest daughter Gülten (Gupse Özay) and younger daughter Nedret (Öykü Karayel). She ran it with her late husband for over 30 years, but in recent years, the number of guests that are staying there at any one time have dwindled down to regulars like Emel (Feri Baycu Güler) and Avni (Ali Ipin), who gaslight Nezahat into giving them things for free.

Gülten, only 33, thinks she’s aging rapidly and will no longer be desirable to men. She goes so far as to visit a beauty consultant, who immediately dyes her eyebrows dark, tells her she’s beautiful, but then points out everything she sees is wrong. Nedret also wants to attract a man, but goes to a spiritual retreat to listen to a guru who talks about going through dimensional portals and finding the soulmate you’re together with in every parallel universe. She invites a couple who has achieved such an ideal coupling to stay at the hotel until the blue moon in a couple of weeks.

The hotel is about to get a guest, a real estate developer named Kaan (Kerem Bürsin); he has been offering Nezahat exorbitant sums of money to buy her hotel so he can raze it for a development project, but she refuses to sell. So he figures he can check in as a guest under an assumed name and convince her.

Nezahat is excited that there will be a new guest for the first time in quite awhile. Both Gülten and Nedret think he’s going to be yet another pensioner, but then they get a look at the handsome guy that’s their age standing in the lobby.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We think of Platonic: Blue Moon Hotel as similar to romantic dramedies like Diary Of A Ditched Girl, perhaps mixed with a more over-the-top show like Such Brave Girls. (If you’re curious, this series has absolutely no relation to Platonic on Apple TV+, the Seth Rogen / Rose Byrne comedy — but we have an inkling that Netflix secretly enjoys that some viewers MIGHT get the two confused.)

Our Take: The story of Platonic: Blue Moon Hotel is going to be pretty straightforward, isn’t it? The sisters will be vying for Kaan’s attention and romantic interest, not knowing that he’s at the Blue Moon to convince their mother to sell it to him. It feels like a lot of the season will consist of the sisterly rivalry coming to a head over Kaan’s affections, then the fallout when one or both of them eventually realize why Kaan is there in the first place.

Still, it’s an amusing show, mainly because Özay and Karayel embody the sisters so well. They’re very different, with Gülten more worried about her physical appearance and Nedret more concerned about her spiritual health. Both think that Kaan came into their lives using their own perspective, and that is going to inform their romantic approach.

Özay, who created the series, really has a handle on how poorly Gülten thinks of herself, and she definitely gets the funnier moments, like when she tells acquaintances at the beauty salon about a fake boyfriend with wide shoulders. We expect that Kaan will fill that role in at least one episode. Nedret takes things more ethereally, and she’s generally reacting more to the funny people around her, like the spiritual guru, her aggro sister, or the couple she lets crash at the hotel.

The show is in a semi-mockumentary format, which can get a little confusing. But the interviews also help us figure out where everyone’s motivations are, especially the sisters.

Sex and Skin: Nothing in the first episode.

Parting Shot: The sisters stare at Kaan in disbelief.

Sleeper Star: Mehmet Özgür plays Omer, a handyman at the hotel and an expert conspiracy theorist. He likes to shoot video of all the hotel guests on his phone.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I’m waiting to meet the husband I’m already married to,” Nedret tells her mother, trying to explain the multidimensional soulmate concept to her.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Platonic: Blue Moon Hotel is an amusing series about how two very different sisters approach love and romance, and how the object of their affection might be more in love with the hotel they run than anything else.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.