The Afterparty Review: Christopher Miller’s Apple TV+ Whodunnit Series Plays With Not Only Your Expectations but Also the Genres (LatestLY Exclusive)

The Afterparty Review: I would keep saying this that if Disney might have stuck with the cult duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, Han Solo could have been the lead in perhaps the best Star Wars movie in recent times. This might be a presumption from my end, but just look at their strong body of work. Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, 22 Jump Street movies, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse... they had even backed one of last year's best animated movies, The Mitchells vs the Machines. Now Chris Miller has gone solo as a director for Apple TV+'s The Afterparty, though Lord is involved as an executive producer and writer for one of the episodes. The Afterparty Trailer: Dave Franco, Tiffany Haddish’s Apple TV+ Series to Premiere on January 28.

And going by the first three episodes that are streaming on the app, looks like Miller has delivered another winning product, with the duo's trademark irreverent sense of humour, love for meta jokes, plenty of clever and subversive writing and of course, excellent direction all intact here, without us feeling they are repeating themselves.

The Afterparty revolves around the mysterious murder of a popular but vain celeb Xavier (Dave Franco), falling from his beach clifftop-side mansion. That he dies during the after party he arranged following a school reunion, brings quite a few suspects among his old friends, or rather just chums he once knew.

Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) is investigating the case, and taking statements from the witnesses present, wary of the fact that one of them could be the killer. Her presence itself at the scene is questionable, as her senior only wanted her to take statements, and let a yet-to-arrive officer take charge of the investigation. The suspects are varied, from a lovestruck Aniq (Sam Richardson) to his over-enthusiastic bestie Yasper (Ben Schwartz) to the alcoholic Chelsea (Ilana Glazer), and more.

Watch the Trailer:

But The Afterparty doesn't move into a regular whodunnit format, albeit with humorous elements. While the influences of Rashomon, Clue and The Last of Sheila can't be ignored, Chris Miller turns The Afterparty into quite the jovial thing it is by how he makes each episode roll in to a different genre, when each witness Danner interviews make their version into the movie format they want as per their own personality. Looks like when Danner said, "We're all stars of our own movie,", they took her literally!

The first episode get into romcom territory, with Aniq (Sam Richardson) - who is presently the prime suspect - reuniting his recently divorced childhood crush Zoe (Zoë Chao), and trying to win her affections while also competing with Xavier and Zoe's ex-husband at that. Brett (Ike Barinholtz) is Zoe's ex-husband, an irresponsible, burly man-child, whose version features in the second episode, where he fancies himself as some sort of spy. The third episode takes the musical route, where Parks and Rec fame Ben Schwartz's skills are put to great use, as we see why the jovial A/V entrepreneur might have a grudge against the murder victim with a couple of enjoyable musical setpieces added in. Ryan Gosling Astronaut Movie Gets Phil Lord and Chris Miller as the Directors; Both Will Also Produce the Space Film.

What is to be liked the most about The Afterparty is how it uses the Rashomon technique to cleverly drop some nice surprises that actually develops certain characters from being cliques. Like for example, Brett, who might across a dislikeable bully, but as his story progresses, we discover nuances that we missed out on the previous hearsay (or he could be lying, who knows!). Even in Aniq, played by the very affable Richardson, whose self-perception is of being the straight man in the story,we could see some clinks in how he seems to miss there's something bothering his object of affection.

Even the other characters are interesting like the two pregnant bffs sharing the same name Jennifer (Tiya Sircar and Ayden Mayeri) - the third episode ends with a twist about one of them - the Indian Jennifer's prankster husband Ned (Kelvin Yu), an avant garde enthusiast Indigo (Genevieve Angelson), and the immensely forgettable Walt (Jamie Demetriou), whom none of his schoolmates seems to remember. Not to mention, the hilarious cameo of a couple who keeps going at it in every episode at different places. Even more curious is Danner's persistent involvement in the case, and going by the penultimate episode, it is named after her. The pieces are all leaving the mark, just hoping that the chessboard delivers a fantastic resolution and more interesting genre diversions in the process. From what I hear, one of the episodes goes into horror territory and another into animation. Abed from Community would certainly be proud of what Miller is doing here!

Yay!

- The Format, The Direction, The Writing, The Actors

Nay!

- The Start Felt a Bit Insipid, But The Show Rockets Ahead With Aniq's Story

Final Thoughts

I really have my fingers crossed that The Afterparty continues the same momentum, or even better it, and deliver a cracker of a series ahead. The first three episodes have already raised the benchmark as high enough as where Xavier's crazy mansion is located. They are smartly written with some good humour and more engaging character progression, fascinating whodunnit material and captivating execution. Here's Miller proving once again why he and his partner-in-crime are such darlings among the geeks. The Afterparty is streaming on Apple TV+.

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Jan 31, 2022 03:13 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).