(no subject)
Dec. 28th, 2023 10:13 pmAlthough I often enjoy detective novels, I have something of a block on procedural television; I've never been able to do a Law & Order or a CSI, and have difficulty on my own making it through even more character-driven shows like Psych or Miss Fisher. Nonetheless, I watched several murder-related television shows in their entirety this year:
Poker Face, in which Natasha Lyonne, on the run from an unhappy casino owner, accidentally solves a variety of crimes at her under-the-table gigs due to her ability to tell when people are lying
The Afterparty, in which Tiffany Haddish is a detective interviewing suspects around a murder at a high school reunion afterparty (and, in season two, at a fancy wedding), with each episode framed as a different genre depending on how the interviewee narrates their own life
and Only Murders in the Building, in which Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez are neighbors in a fancy New York apartment building who start a true crime podcast together around the other deaths that occur in the apartment building
oh! and also Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and Miss S, which I wrote up previously. FIVE murder shows!
(Well, I had actually watched the earlier seasons of Only Murders when they aired, but never got around to writing them up.)
Of the three, The Afterparty -- despite being extremely gimmicky -- I think turned out to be my favorite. First of all, the gimmick is fun and commits to the bit, and I'm an easy sell, especially when the show gets really into using the cinematography to tell genre jokes (the noir episode and the Wes Anderson episode are both I think absolute standouts for this); also, I ended up really enjoying Tiffany Haddish as the kind of social-skills-focused detective whose primary methodology is around building rapport, putting people at ease and letting them underestimate her, in a way that seems flighty but is in fact explicitly strategic.
But also, generally speaking, I think a murder show that takes a full season to deal with one murder works better for me than murder-of-the-week; it provides much more scope to explore the murder victim as a human person whose loss has a human impact than in something like Miss Fisher, where the murder is much more of a plot/puzzle engine and any long-term emotional consequences have to be sorted out by the end of the episode. Both The Afterparty and Only Murders generally start out with murder victims who seem purely unpleasant in the first episode when they meet their fates and then work backwards to add more nuance to their characterization and make the viewer feel quite sad about the fact that this was a human being who died, which is a model that I appreciate a lot.
Poker Face, which is a murder-of-the-week show, gets a little bit at this as well by spending the first part of each episode embedded in the life of the victim and the circumstances around whatever tragedy is going to happen, and getting you to care about the victim as a person before they die. (I appreciate this but it did made it quite stressful viewing for![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
genarti, who always cheered up once we were over the stressful bit of waiting to see what horrible thing was going to happen to them and back onto Charlie Cracks the Case.) I was particularly interested in this one because I had heard that as a show it was particularly interested in the experience of short-term and contingent labor, which is I think fair to say; the fact that Charlie is on the run and constantly desperate to find new under-the-table gigs has a huge impact on the people she meets and kinds of stories she gets involved in, and the ones that are most like this (like the gas station episode or the barbecue episode) I think tend to be stronger than the ones that are a little further afield (the two separate episodes about high-drama elderly show-business couples.) I also like that -- because Charlie is living off the grid herself -- the show does not have the basic assumption that many other murder shows do that the involvement of the cops/arrest of the perpetrator will lead to the repair of the fractured world. Sometimes the episode ends with an arrest, but equally often the perpetrator's victory turns to some other form of dust in their mouth, and there's not necessarily a sense that the world will be repaired at all; Charlie may get a victory, but the shape of loss remains.
(Ben Bratt is also there as the henchman who spends a season pursuing Charlie, which I mention only because in the final episode he gets several speeches that are the most Austin Walker-esque monologues that I've ever heard on television.)
Poker Face definitely has the highest melancholy-to-humor balance of these three shows -- the others are primarily comedies, and quite funny ones, but I think all of them do have the same sense that a death leaves a hole in the world. My favorite part of this season of Only Murders in the Building (which broadly speaking was sort of a mixed bag for me) was the callback to last season's victim, and the episode framed from the point of view of her best friend, who is still missing her.
Poker Face, in which Natasha Lyonne, on the run from an unhappy casino owner, accidentally solves a variety of crimes at her under-the-table gigs due to her ability to tell when people are lying
The Afterparty, in which Tiffany Haddish is a detective interviewing suspects around a murder at a high school reunion afterparty (and, in season two, at a fancy wedding), with each episode framed as a different genre depending on how the interviewee narrates their own life
and Only Murders in the Building, in which Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez are neighbors in a fancy New York apartment building who start a true crime podcast together around the other deaths that occur in the apartment building
oh! and also Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and Miss S, which I wrote up previously. FIVE murder shows!
(Well, I had actually watched the earlier seasons of Only Murders when they aired, but never got around to writing them up.)
Of the three, The Afterparty -- despite being extremely gimmicky -- I think turned out to be my favorite. First of all, the gimmick is fun and commits to the bit, and I'm an easy sell, especially when the show gets really into using the cinematography to tell genre jokes (the noir episode and the Wes Anderson episode are both I think absolute standouts for this); also, I ended up really enjoying Tiffany Haddish as the kind of social-skills-focused detective whose primary methodology is around building rapport, putting people at ease and letting them underestimate her, in a way that seems flighty but is in fact explicitly strategic.
But also, generally speaking, I think a murder show that takes a full season to deal with one murder works better for me than murder-of-the-week; it provides much more scope to explore the murder victim as a human person whose loss has a human impact than in something like Miss Fisher, where the murder is much more of a plot/puzzle engine and any long-term emotional consequences have to be sorted out by the end of the episode. Both The Afterparty and Only Murders generally start out with murder victims who seem purely unpleasant in the first episode when they meet their fates and then work backwards to add more nuance to their characterization and make the viewer feel quite sad about the fact that this was a human being who died, which is a model that I appreciate a lot.
Poker Face, which is a murder-of-the-week show, gets a little bit at this as well by spending the first part of each episode embedded in the life of the victim and the circumstances around whatever tragedy is going to happen, and getting you to care about the victim as a person before they die. (I appreciate this but it did made it quite stressful viewing for
genarti, who always cheered up once we were over the stressful bit of waiting to see what horrible thing was going to happen to them and back onto Charlie Cracks the Case.) I was particularly interested in this one because I had heard that as a show it was particularly interested in the experience of short-term and contingent labor, which is I think fair to say; the fact that Charlie is on the run and constantly desperate to find new under-the-table gigs has a huge impact on the people she meets and kinds of stories she gets involved in, and the ones that are most like this (like the gas station episode or the barbecue episode) I think tend to be stronger than the ones that are a little further afield (the two separate episodes about high-drama elderly show-business couples.) I also like that -- because Charlie is living off the grid herself -- the show does not have the basic assumption that many other murder shows do that the involvement of the cops/arrest of the perpetrator will lead to the repair of the fractured world. Sometimes the episode ends with an arrest, but equally often the perpetrator's victory turns to some other form of dust in their mouth, and there's not necessarily a sense that the world will be repaired at all; Charlie may get a victory, but the shape of loss remains. (Ben Bratt is also there as the henchman who spends a season pursuing Charlie, which I mention only because in the final episode he gets several speeches that are the most Austin Walker-esque monologues that I've ever heard on television.)
Poker Face definitely has the highest melancholy-to-humor balance of these three shows -- the others are primarily comedies, and quite funny ones, but I think all of them do have the same sense that a death leaves a hole in the world. My favorite part of this season of Only Murders in the Building (which broadly speaking was sort of a mixed bag for me) was the callback to last season's victim, and the episode framed from the point of view of her best friend, who is still missing her.
