A locked-room murder mystery anchored by an eccentric detective, The Afterparty is one of many comedy-mysteries to surface in the wake of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out. But the Apple TV+ series sets itself apart with a distinctly meta sense of humor that’s typical of creator Christopher Miller and producer Phil Lord’s work together. When Tiffany Haddish’s excitable Detective Danner moves into investigative mode, she imagines each person’s testimony as a pastiche of a different movie. Think Rashomon meets Mad magazine.
Where Johnson’s Glass Onion brought back Daniel Craig’s Benoit Blanc for a new adventure with a brand new cast of characters, the second season of The Afterparty both retains its central sleuth and brings back two characters from the previous season, Aniq (Sam Richardson) and Zoë (Zoë Chao). The two friends stumble upon a new murder, this time at a wedding between Zoë’s sister, Grace (Poppy Liu), and Silicon Valley mogul Edgar Minnows (Zach Woods), who doesn’t survive the night. And when snooty Minnows matriarch Isabel (Elizabeth Perkins) accuses Grace of the crime, the now ex-detective Danner is Aniq’s first call.
Aniq’s over-the-phone explanation gets the season to Danner off to a notably rocky start. Danner imagines Aniq as starring in a rom-com sequel, and she constantly cuts in to explain how his bumbling attempts to impress Zoë’s mother (Vivian Wu) and father (Ken Jeong) fit right into a movie about meeting the parents. The resulting back and forth is tedious, suffering from an indistinct target of parody (the humor and visual style of a romantic comedy isn’t, after all, particularly far removed from the show’s default comedic mode). Furthermore, it suggests that the series hasn’t quite worked out the kinks of its prior season, which struggled to balance elaborate pastiches with the basic demands of building an effective mystery.
As Danner and Aniq continue to question witnesses, though, The Afterparty gets into a much more confident and streamlined groove. Its wedding locale is much simpler than the prior season’s unwieldy high school reunion, with the majority of the suspicious guests having some kind of family connection to the bride or the late groom. On the whole, the story requires less stage-setting and fewer scenes of characters investigating in parallel with Danner, allowing each episode to focus more closely on the genre-hopping witness testimony.
Much like the first season, the success of each episode here depends entirely on the subject of parody as well as the actor at its center, and this time around the series boasts a much stronger stable of performers in more visually distinct segments. One early standout is Paul Walter Hauser’s Travis, a Reddit-addled ex-boyfriend whose fedora marks him as a natural candidate for a black-and-white detective yarn. Even the weaker episodes are immediately recognizable compared to the bland season opener: Grace relates her romance with Edgar in a costume drama reminiscent of Jane Austen adaptations, while Edgar’s adopted sister, Hannah (Anna Konkle), stars in an obsessively symmetrical pastiche of Wes Anderson’s style.
Apart from a lazy found-footage episode, the only thing that derails The Afterparty once it picks up steam is its difficulty balancing laughs with intrigue. Each episode needs to sprinkle just enough breadcrumbs to lead to the next interviewee without leaving the viewer too eager for the series to get on with the story, and some episodes—one an erotic thriller and another about competitive dance—feel tenuously connected to the plot and kill some of the season’s momentum in the process. Despite some improvements that streamline the storytelling, there’s still a sense that The Afterparty is trying to do a little too much all at once.
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