Elise (Amy Poehler) stands under a canvas awning on a Greek dig site in a leather tool belt, one hand on her hip, and lays down the law for a crew of young diggers: nobody feeds the stray dogs, ever. Two students try to interrupt, and she repeats the word over the top of both of them until the last “ever” comes out as a shout. It is a funny way to open, and an efficient one, because in roughly a dozen seconds the trailer has established who runs this place, who is not listening and what kind of comedy this is going to be. Peacock released the first trailer for “Dig” on Tuesday, October 27th, and the ten-episode comedy, co-created by Poehler and Michael Schur, arrives on Monday, November 23rd, with every episode available at once.
The official synopsis describes “a team of dedicated archaeologists (and less-dedicated college students) who spend their summer working on a dig site in Greece”, and promises that the discovery of a rare artifact “sends them on the adventure of a lifetime.” Neville (Hugh Laurie) is the head of the dig, while Dylan (Geraldine Viswanathan), Clare (Antonia Thomas) and Patty (Fina Strazza) round out the four women at the center of the series. It is adapted from Kate Myers’ 2023 novel “Excavations”, and the trailer sells the comedy of its crew at least as hard as the premise. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for everything shown in the “Dig” trailer.
It is a funny way to open, and an efficient one, because in roughly a dozen seconds the trailer has established who runs this place, who is not listening and what kind of comedy this is going to be.”
Taken in order, the footage cuts from the dog rule to an aerial of a hillside harbor town, with the words “Peacock Original” floating over the water. Then it moves to Neville at a wooden desk in a book-lined study, speaking into a microphone on a stand. “Good morning, young people. Another beautiful day in southern Greece. So turn to your fellow comrades and extend a hearty hand”, he says, and the picture answers with a white villa with pink flowers over its wall, a maroon SUV in its courtyard and a pair of hiking boots stepping down from the running board. Clare looks up from a table in a room full of floral curtains, two women laugh on a hillside over a bottle of beer, and two figures sit on a pebble beach in low light. Then comes Gary (Jon Pointing), a man in a bucket hat whose face and arms are a vivid red from sunburn, holding a glass while a voice says “The arms just got absolutely cooked out there”. After a wheeze, he leans back clutching at Dylan. A card closes the stretch over a green meadow with sheep and a maroon van crossing it, reading “From the creator of The Good Place.”
The trailer then settles on Neville, who in a long cream robe studies a large sheet of paper in his study, one hand pushing at his glasses, and describes himself as “the face of this archeological dig” and Elise as “its beating heart.” An aerial of the whole camp, all tents and trenches, covers the compliment, and the cut after it finds Elise lowering a pair of sunglasses with a grin. Back in the study, Neville sits hunched forward in a cream shirt while Elise waits in a leather armchair, and he says “I have come to a decision” before telling her “I’m retiring, Elise.” She answers “This is not the first time that you have said that you were going to retire.” In the next scene Neville, now in a cream suit, flings his arms open in the lodge with Elise seated nearby, and the announcement is “I’ll stay one more year!” A crowd of young diggers at long tables in the dining room cheers and applauds, and Elise folds her arms and closes her eyes with a small smile. A card reading “This Fall” then lands over an aerial of two dark vehicles on a cliffside road above the sea.
Before the minute mark, the trailer goes underground. A kneeling figure in jeans brushes soil from around two pale objects in a shallow oval cut. A wider shot finds Elise standing in the pit, Dylan at the lower left of the frame, as a voice says “Nothing like this has been found for hundreds of years.” An overhead shot shows a ladder, a gray tarp and two small pale objects that look like statuettes set in the packed earth, and a cut back to the lodge finds the crowd still applauding as a voice rules out telling Neville. The reason, “He’ll get the credit like he always does”, starts over Elise smiling into the camera in a plaster-walled hallway and runs into a darkened frame of two figures standing in the pit. Dylan, in a plaid shirt over a tie-dye tank, stands against the dirt wall of the trench and makes the other half of the pitch, “But if we dig it up ourselves, you’ll get the credit.” Elise says “It would be worse than Watergate”, asks Dylan to tell her she knows what Watergate is, and when Dylan insists she has read it, Elise has to explain that “It’s not a book” and that “It was a crime.” It is the best-written exchange in the trailer.
Shovels stand planted in the sand, and Elise then says what she wants, “I’ve been wanting to take over this dig for a very long time”, over a mallet driving a stake beside a wall of sandbags and an aerial of the whole site again, with its tents, trenches and a blue truck. What it will take, “This may be our only shot”, opens a quick montage of the crew being assembled. Patty, in a braid and rust-colored overalls, stands in a storeroom beside a clay jar, and Clare, in a striped headband, smiles back at Elise. Dylan lies in bed with her hair tangled while Elise, in a denim shirt, holds out a bite of food with wide eyes, and three of the women end up together on a path, Clare now in a white strapless gown. “We’re all in this together, like the Three Musketeers” gives way to “Plus another one” on a frame that holds all four of them. Then a title card appears in white, angular letters over churned red earth and says “History”, and the trailer spends the next six seconds in a glossier movie. A white mansion sits at the end of a palm-lined garden path. Dylan, in a green satin dress, and Elise, in black, walk toward the camera past a blue station wagon as a voice warns “This is illegal.” A police officer with an arm raised stands by a white police SUV with Greek lettering. “You have to report this find”, a voice adds over a young woman hauling a rolling suitcase along a walled road, and Elise then talks with Stavros (Kayvan Novak), a long-haired man in an open white linen shirt. A shot inside the station wagon shows all four women, Elise at the wheel and a blue-and-white vase on the back seat, and the card finishes its sentence, “History is a dirty business.”
After that the trailer becomes a stakeout comedy. A woman in a wide straw hat sweeps across a café terrace, a dark-haired woman in a plaid shirt grins through camouflage binoculars from inside a car while Patty, in a red cap, looks alarmed, and a brown tarp lies stretched over the edge of a trench seen from above. “The deception, the intrigue” runs under those shots, and Dylan’s verdict, “Honestly, it’s kind of hot”, lands on a scowl, followed by a cut to a woman in a plaid shirt kissing a man in a tropical-print shirt in a cramped bedroom. The name cards then arrive in a quick run, one over each character. Poehler wears a green sweater and a red neckerchief in a sitting room with a fireplace and daisies, Laurie sits in a leather chair with his glasses on, and Viswanathan stands on a seaside hillside. Thomas rides in the back of a car, and Strazza wears a gray bucket hat on a coastal path. Clare, in a patterned top, says “I didn’t really know who I was” and, once someone interrupts with “We got to go”, finishes “And now I’m beginning to figure that out.” The picture answers with the four women in front of a large stone building, two people sprinting across a villa courtyard and a blue station wagon on a coastal road past a stone watchtower. A voice asks “Are these pictures of us?” as hands open a wooden cigar box of snapshots, the top one showing four women standing among trees, and a hand then fans through the rest. Another says “Someone has been following us!” over a startled Lambros (Jason Mantzoukas) in a yellow T-shirt. At a desk with binders, a snapshot shows Elise and a woman in a white shirt walking through the woods, and Clare interrupts the panic to say “I know this isn’t the most important part”, then complains that the angle and the lighting are such that “we look awful!” Elise commiserates, “Shooting us from below.” Only then does the title arrive, “Dig” in pale blue block letters on red earth, with “Peacock Original” above it and “New Series Nov 23” below.
The last stretch is the broadest joke in the trailer, and the one that will probably decide whether a viewer is in or out. Over a huddle of hands, a voice offers “If we tell the right story for the rest of our lives, we’re going to get through this”, and Elise taps her own wrist and holds out her arm to the line “Bite me.” Clare, in the white gown and a floral hairpiece, takes hold of Elise’s forearm in both hands and bites down while Elise screams. Elise’s arm then swings at Dylan’s face in a smear of motion. A woman in beige shorts presses a snub-nosed revolver against her own thigh, Patty runs and clenches a fist, and Clare screams with both hands clamped to her head. The wide shot that closes the sequence is the clearest picture of the show’s idea of teamwork. Clare stands in the dirt with her hands raised, Elise clutches her arm, Dylan is bent forward holding her face, and Patty is bent over her leg with a gun in her hand. Peacock’s own post calls the sequence “the biting, punching and shooting”, and Deadline says the four women are “maiming themselves for the cause” and that Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker” also backs the clip. A card reading “Only on Peacock” ends the trailer proper, and a static slate repeats the date.
Peacock’s key art, released alongside the trailer, puts the five leads at the lip of a trench, most of them looking alarmed. Broken painted vessels lie in the dirt below, and a line across the top reads “From the creator of The Good Place and co-creator of Parks and Recreation.” Michael Schur and J.J. Philbin are the co-showrunners and executive producers, and Poehler is an executive producer alongside them as well as a co-creator. Myers, who wrote the novel, is a co-executive producer, and the studio is Universal Television. Peacock’s pages name guest cast including Kayvan Novak, Jon Pointing, Bonita Friedericy, Max Greenfield, Jason Mantzoukas, Brennan Lee Mulligan, Noma Dumezweni and Dan Bucatinsky.
Poehler has called the setting “part summer camp, part mysterious uncovering of relics”, telling TV Insider “We thought it would be a really good place to make jokes and create characters that you like.” The trailer bears that out in its first half, which is a workplace comedy about credit and retirement, and complicates it in its second, which borrows formal clothes, stakeouts and a revolver from a different kind of story. FirstShowing writes that the series “plays like a wacky sitcom” but “also plays like an adventure heist thriller movie”, and the footage does move between the two more than once. The opening seconds carry a TV-MA tag, which fits a trailer with one swear word in the discovery scene and a revolver in its final sequence. Whether the series keeps that edge for ten episodes, or settles into the gentler rhythm of the early scenes, is something a trailer cannot answer.
What Do You Think? Is a comedy that opens on a rule about dogs and closes on a bite, a punch and a revolver the right kind of chaos for Thanksgiving week, or does the heist side of the story sound like too much? Would you rather the series stay on the dig with Neville and his crew, or follow the four women into the getaway cars and the formal wear? And with all ten episodes landing on November 23rd, will you watch them in one sitting or stretch them out?
See you on the next binge!
