Murder most mirthful

The new Apple TV+ series The After Party is the latest in a noticeable string of recent US whodunits that focuses on laughs rather than tears in solving murder mysteries.

Starring Tiffany Haddish as a police detective tasked with investigating the death of an Instagram influencer pop star after he falls to his death at the after party for his 15-year high school reunion, it’s a comedy-star studded affair.

Created by Phil Lord and Chris Miller — the team that brought the world the Lego Movie and the animated action comedy Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse — The After Party just about distinguishes itself from a spate of recent crime dramedies by stretching the now familiar device of using episodes to explore its suspect’s back stories through the use of smart genre-mashing that sees each of its episodes taking on the characteristics of a range of genres from romantic comedy to musical and animation.

This kind of lighthearted approach to grisly murder in which the suspects and the cops provide comic relief through their eccentricities has been a staple of British television for some time in lightly comic shows like Midsummer Murders or Father Brown. But it’s a new development in the US television and film universe and it looks, thanks to the success of similar shows such as last year’s smash hit Hulu murder comedy Only Murders in the Building, like it’s here to stay.

You could argue that the ensemble whodunit is at least as old as the works of its acknowledged pioneer Agatha Christie, who set the rules of the wide-ranging-suspicious-group-of-nastily-murder-motivated-characters-in-one-place-with-a-master-detective-present genre, back in the early 20th century when she first introduced the public to Hercule Poirot. The success of her formula is proved by the fact that Christie’s works have remained in print for over a century and proved constant favourites for film and television adaptations.

Kenneth Branagh’s star-packed 2017 lush, big-screen-spectacle version of Murder on the Orient Express proved hugely popular at the box office — in spite of Branagh’s shaky accent and preposterous moustache — and spurned a second film Death on the Nile, which after some tricky problems arising from allegations of sexual misconduct against one of its stars, Armie Hammer, will finally be released next week.

Christie adaptations, while certainly demonstrating good doses of witty one-liners and sly PG Wodehouse influenced satire of the British class system, tend to remain overall devoted to the idea that, ultimately, murder is no laughing matter.

A film like 1985’s Jonathan Lynn-directed board game adaptation, Clue, is perhaps a better pick for an antecedent for the present black-humoured, high-jinks approach to the subject. There’s a brief wisecrack that acknowledges Clue’s influence in the profitable and more recently influential comedy whodunit Knives Out, released in 2019, directed by Rian Johnson and starring Daniel Craig as a Southern-drawling, cigar smoking private detective named Benoit Blanc, who finds himself at the stately home of a dead crime writer, having to negotiate the snake pit that is the family to figure out who done what.

So popular was Knives Out with audiences that Netflix paid a handsome $469m for the rights to produce two Craig-starring sequels, the first of which is due for release this year.

Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building stars long-time friends and comic collaborators Steve Martin and Martin Short and pop star turned actress with 300-million Instagram followers, Selena Gomez, as a disparate trio of crime podcast-obsessed residents of a swanky Manhattan apartment block who, when a murder is committed in their building, quickly become amateur sleuths and hosts of their own true crime podcast. The result has been a huge success for Hulu becoming the network’s most watched comedy show in the US and earning a no-brainer thumbs up for a second season order.

This week also sees the release of Murderville on Netflix — a US version of the British show Murder in Successville — in which Will Arnett stars as an over-the-top eccentric homicide detective who each week is assisted in his investigations by a new celebrity partner. The twist is that these weekly partners are not given a script and forced to improvise before being asked at the end of the episode to solve the murder. Arnett’s guests for the first season include Conan O’Brien, Sharon Stone and Kumail Nanjiani and the results are often hilariously silly entertainment that plays down murder’s foul nature in favour of the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the investigators.

Though all of these new spins on a reliable favourite genre may play for laughs they still, thankfully for mystery fans, haven’t forgotten about the basic pleasure of the genre: the puzzle and its solving. As bbc.com writer Clare Thorp points out in an article on the new comic trends in screen crime: “Episodic television offers something films cannot — the chance for fans to share their theories — in person, on social media or on Reddit — as the show progresses, building excitement and anticipation.”

In the age of social media and weekly recaps, the classic whodunit episodic show has perhaps become the closest thing we have to an interactive form in which we test our grey matter as much as the detectives we’re watching.

We may not always figure out whodunit but we’re having plenty of fun trying to and these days, laughing all the way to the morgue because if you don’t laugh, you’ll probably die.