Two Famous Jamaica Hotels Just Launched Their Own Micro-Drama Series

Two of Negril’s best-known hotels are taking a different approach to telling their story, turning their properties into the setting for a new Jamaican-made comedy series.

Rockhouse Hotel and Skylark Negril Beach Resort have launched Soft Summer, a dark comedy micro-drama filmed entirely at the two Negril properties with an all-Jamaican cast and crew.

The project follows three characters whose work trip to Jamaica begins to unravel, with the story moving between Rockhouse’s cliffside setting on Negril’s West End and Skylark’s beachfront home along Seven Mile Beach.

It’s part hotel campaign, part Jamaican television project, with the properties using the short-form series as a platform for local actors, writers and filmmakers rather than producing a conventional travel advertisement.

The first nine episodes are already live on Instagram, with the remaining five episodes set to begin rolling out daily on Aug. 23.

The cast includes Zuri Marley, the DJ and granddaughter of Bob Marley, along with Jamaican actor Sheldon Shepherd, who has been building a growing international profile following appearances in Sky TV’s Possession and the 2024 film Bob Marley: One Love.

Jamaican writer and filmmaker Summer Eldemire created and wrote the series, co-directs it and also appears on screen.

The production team also includes co-director Anna Pollack, who is of Jamaican parentage, and Jamaican director of photography Rochena Murray.

The series centers on three characters arriving in Negril for work before their trip begins taking a very different course. The hotels themselves become a major part of the story, moving the characters between two distinctly different sides of the Negril experience.

Rockhouse has long been one of Jamaica’s signature boutique hotels, built into the cliffs of the West End with villas and rooms scattered above the Caribbean Sea. Skylark, its sister property, offers a different Negril experience directly on the sand of Seven Mile Beach.

Putting both into the same fictional world gives the series two of Negril’s defining settings: the cliffs and the beach.

The project is also the latest extension of the hotels’ longstanding connection to Jamaican culture and the arts. Rockhouse and Skylark have regularly incorporated Jamaican music, design, food and creative work into their identity, while the Rockhouse Foundation has supported education initiatives in western Jamaica for decades.

With Soft Summer, the focus is specifically on Jamaican storytelling.

Rather than simply using Jamaican scenery as the backdrop for an international production, the series puts Jamaican talent behind and in front of the camera, from Eldemire and Shepherd to Murray and the wider production team.

It also comes as hotels across the Caribbean are experimenting with new ways to reach travelers through social media, particularly as short-form video becomes an increasingly important part of how destinations and resorts are discovered.

Rockhouse and Skylark’s answer is effectively to make a show.

And Negril is more than scenery in the series. The premise is built around the idea of the destination changing the people who arrive there, with each character emerging from the increasingly chaotic trip differently than when it began.

The complete Soft Summer series will comprise 14 episodes, with the final five installments beginning their daily release on Sunday.