The Afterparty creators dare you to try and solve its mystery before its detectives
If you’re ever struggling to decide what to watch, you could always let The Afterpartydecide for you. The Apple TV Plus comedy, which kicks off its second season this week, is a different show every time you watch it. Each episode is done in a different genre style — in the second season, you can expect a film noir, a Wes Anderson pastiche, and an ’80s erotic thriller, to name a few — but what each episode in a season has in common is the murder mystery that kicks off in the premiere.
In the show’s second season, the murder being solved is that of Edgar (Zach Woods), an eccentric crypto-millionaire poisoned on the day of his wedding to protagonist Zoë’s (Zoë Chao) sister Grace (Poppy Liu). Much like the first season, which was set at Zoë’s high school reunion, The Afterparty season 2 is meant to be a murder mystery that you can solve, if you’re so inclined. And, if you’re not, it’s still fun as hell.
“The goal is to do a proper Fair Play mystery where, if you’re paying enough attention, the clues are there, and it can be solved,” says creator Christopher Miller — one half of the Lord Miller production team responsible for Across the Spider-Verse, among other things. “But if you are just a casual viewer who likes a fun murder mystery, or a fun comedy, you can just enjoy it as a character show. Or you can have conversations about whodunit without poring over each little detail.”
According to Miller, the show’s cast and crew go above and beyond to make The Afterparty the ultimate mystery comedy, appealing to casual viewers just looking for good jokes and genre parodies to Reddit super-sleuths “who really freeze-frame it,” hiding additional puzzles and clues in the set design “for the real obsessive nerds.”
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