TV Talk: Genre-hopping ‘AfterParty’ returns for vineyard wedding murder mystery
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Trib Total Media TV writer Rob Owen offers a viewing tip for the coming week.
PASADENA, Calif. — Apple TV+ generated buzz with the first season of comedic murder-mystery “The AfterParty,” so a sequel season was inevitable.
Season two, streaming Wednesday, begins with Aniq (Sam Richardson) and girlfriend Zoe (Zoe Chao) attending the wedding of Zoe’s sister, Grace (Poppy Liu), where her new husband, Edgar (Zach Woods), turns up dead the day after the wedding. Aniq phones Det. Danner (Tiffany Haddish), who’s quit the police force to write a book about the events of season one, to help investigate this latest murder.
Season two newcomers include John Cho as Zoe’s Funcle (that’s “fun” and “uncle”) Ulysses and MVP Elizabeth Perkins (“Weeds”) as Edgar’s frigid mother, who can’t be bothered to meet newly arrived wedding guests, peering at them ominously through a window instead.
“My mother says, ‘Hello,’ ” Edgar says. “She wanted to be here but she was busy with silence and alcohol.”
Series creator Chris Miller said when deciding which season one characters to bring back it was clear early in the development of season two who would make the cut.
“Zoe and Aniq were really the emotional heart of the first season, so it felt cruel to not bring them back,” Miller said in January at a press conference during Apple TV+’s portion of the Television Critics Association winter 2023 press tour. “And Detective Danner is the Poirot of the series. It seemed like it’d be fun to get them to work together this time to solve a murder at a wedding. And then we just worked at trying to think of some funny characters, some interesting stories, some interesting twists.”
As in season one, each episode of season two presents one character’s point of view of events leading up to the murder in a different genre style. The first episode is a rom-com sequel to Aniq’s season one episode. The second episode, focused on Grace, features a Jane Austen-style period drama genre with all the women in corsets.
Miller said other episodes are done in the style of film noir, a twee indie film, a ’90s erotic thriller and a Hitchcockian ’50s thriller devoted to Perkins’ character.
“It really all comes down to the characters and what their story and what their point of view is and how the characters see the world and what seems to fit for them,” Miller said of pairing each character’s POV with a different genre. “It’s sort of this weird chicken-and-egg thing where you’re figuring out how can each character tell a distinct story in a distinct style?”
Another challenge making a season-long murder-mystery is making sure all the pieces of the mystery come together in a logical manner, particularly when showing the same moments from different points of view in different genre styles.
“With this type of show, the whole season has to be fully formed and crafted before you can start shooting a single thing,” Miller said, “because you’re seeing the same moments (from) multiple points of view, and the whole thing has to work together like a little jewel box. So, when the actors came aboard, we gave them all 10 scripts for the season so they could understand what was real and true, and then they could craft their performance based on that.”
As for which characters might return if the show gets renewed for a third season, Miller said it’s “the Jessica Fletcher problem” if Aniq and Zoe are always near where a murder takes place, referencing the Angela Lansbury character of “Murder, She Wrote.”
“Should we be so lucky to have a season three,” Miller said, “it would be very suspicious if they were present for another murder.”