I promise I won’t spoil Apple +’s murder mystery comedy series for you. In fact, I could actually discuss seven of the eight episodes in the first season of The Afterparty, and you’d likely still have no clue who the killer was (that’s how it went down for me anyway).
But let’s backtrack a little bit here. We meet up with a group at a fifteen year high school reunion, who afterwards all attend an afterparty at the lux home of class superstar, Xavier. The show opens with us seeing Xavier falling from his home up in the hills to the cliffs below, dying instantly. Obviously, everyone is horrified about what’s happened, but they also have no clue how it happens. Cue the entrance of Detective Danner. Technically, she’s not officially in charge of the case, but she’s going to try and solve the case before one of her former academy classmates shows up and pins the whole thing on likely killer Aniq.
Based on what I learned about Aniq, I had a hard time believing he was the killer, and so did Danner, but the evidence against him was strong. Each episode showed Danner interviewing one key attendee of the afterparty, and more interestingly, each episode was filmed in a different style to match the character being interviewed. For instance, Aniq’s story was presented as a rom-com, given that he was trying to impress his high school crush, Zoe. There was also a musical episode, a thriller one, an action episode, and even an animated installment! I really liked the creativity there! It’s hard for me to say which style I liked best, but it was cool to get all of them as part of one experience.
As each main character recounted the events of the actual reunion and then the afterparty up until Xavier’s death, you learned a little bit more about what all happened, but people’s opinion’s of others definitely skewed what I had thought in previous episodes. It’s clear that any one of them could have been the killer, but it was just a matter of paying attention to the details to really figure it out. Which, to be fair, I did not. I might have to pay attention to detail for my job, but it wasn’t good enough to find holes in people’s stories. While I think my opinion swayed towards one character each episode, I did have my firm opinion by the end, and as I said, was proved wrong.
I’ve got my sister and parents watching it now, so I’ll be curious to see if they catch anything that gets them closer to the right killer or not. Somehow my mom and sister are usually pretty good at guessing these sorts of things, but I’m hoping they’ll be led astray so it’s a surprise for them, too. A couple of weeks ago I learned this series got picked up for a second season. I was under the impression this was a miniseries, so I’ll be interested to see who they get for next season. I would have to assume that Tiffany Haddish’s Danner is the carryover character, but would love to see who she interacts with next season. It’ll be hard to top I think, because you had great comedic actors like Ilana Glazer, Sam Richardson, Ben Schwartz, and Ike Barinholtz this time around. I’ll wait in excited anticipation!