REVIEW: Murderville
In the last three years, there really haven’t very many new comedies that I’ve enjoyed. There are one or two exceptions, but this week, I watched a comedy series that had me laughing all the way through. That series is Netflix’s Murderville. Based on a British series, the show is a quasi-improvisational comedy. The storyline features a homicide detective, Terry Seattle (who has never visited the city he shares a name with) who each week is paired with a different celebrity acting as his assistant. The actors playing the regulars and the suspects all are given scripts, but the guest celebrity detective does not, and therefore all of the guest detective’s dialogue is improvised.
Each of the first season’s six episodes follows the same format. Terry (a brilliant Will Arnett, who’s sometimes deadpan, always wacky, and consistently hilarious) voice-overs an introduction at the station. His boss and estranged wife, Chief Rhonda Jenkins-Seattle (Haneefah Wood), introduces him to his new celebrity partner and sends him off on a new homicide investigation. The duo view the crime scene, interview three suspects, usually with an extra silly adventure along the way, and then the guest detective must try to identify the killer from the three suspects. Sometimes the celebrity gets it right, sometimes not.
The guests Conan O’Brien, Marshawn Lynch, Kumail Nanjian, Annie Murphy, Sharon Stone, and Ken Jeong, and though all do a really good job with the improv, O’Brien and Jeong shine the best. The show wears its improv badge proudly, and frequent corpsing and chuckling and stifled smiles are kept in the show. The murders include a magic act’s sawing-in-half gone horribly wrong and a high school reunion turned deadly, among others, and it all culminates in Terry solving a fifteen-year-old cold case that’s quite personal for him.
The comedy is meant to be silly as possible, and it manages to be the kind of Police Squad! humor that sometimes seems dumb at first glance, and then a bit of reflection makes you realize how clever and well-crafted it really is. I never went longer than two minutes without laughing aloud.
Not since Ellery Queen has there been such a fair play crime series for solve-it-yourself mystery puzzlers. There are always three or four clues, and the alert viewer must find out which of the three suspects fits all the clues, some of which are incredibly subtle and shrewd. After the first episode, and I knew how the show worked, I managed to solve all the cases, but I usually missed at least one of the clues hidden in a quick shot or a barely perceptible line of dialogue.
Murderville is barely controlled lunacy and clever solve-it-yourself mystery. These are a few of my favorite things, and I hope the series continues for a long time. I highly recommend it.
–Chris Chan
Chris Chan’s first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released on November 3rd. His book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter was published by Level Best Books on September 7th. His first non-fiction book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there). It is also available in a Kindle edition.
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