I try going into series without expectations, but sometimes you can’t help yourself. Before I’d even started watching, I was holding “Death and Other Details” up against one of my favorite movies: “Clue”. Perhaps it’s the trailer trying to look like too many other things, but I was surprised that the show comes through so strongly on its own merits.
Imogene has joined her best friend and corporate bigwig Anna on a cruise. Anna’s family has raised Imogene after the murder of her mother, and the family’s corporation is on the brink of a major deal with a corporation owned by the Chuns. The cruise is a way for the two families to celebrate that imminent deal. That doesn’t even cover a governor, political kingmaker, streamer, ex-journalist, lawyer, and various family members who all become suspects when one very rude rich man is harpooned in his suite. Except he may not have been rude, or rich, or even existed as who he claimed to be before that cruise.
Luckily, has-been detective Rufus Cotesworth is on board. Once dubbed ‘the greatest detective in the world’, he’s a shadow of his former self…unless that’s what he wants others to think. Imogene hates his guts – the man who tells stories over dinner about never having failed a case once abandoned his investigation of her mother’s murder. Yet when Imogene becomes the prime suspect in the harpooning, the pair are forced to work together to prove her innocence.
In my “Clue” comparison, what I was looking for wasn’t necessarily the same type of zany comedy. What I want out of an Agatha Christielike as stylized as this is a sense of theatricality to find its way through. I want to feel in some sense that I could be watching them on stage – not for the acting or look to be stagy, but for the energy and spontaneity to make it feel like what’s happening is evolving before my eyes.
For an idea of what I mean, consider a British mystery like “Poirot” against a David Fincher film like “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” or “Gone Girl”. They’re all mysteries, but we watch them completely differently. “Poirot” is very cinematic in places, but its dialogues always focus on staging, blocking, and set. How two characters’ positions relate in a scene can portray or betray power. How fine china is positioned, the sight lines from a window seat, all the little details of staging matter. “Poirot” finds those moments to bring a strength of the stage into a TV series.
That quality of theater refers back to seeing the stage in different ways. Depending on which side of the theater you’re seated when watching a play, you’ll pick up on eye lines in different ways, you’ll notice positional relationships another doesn’t, you’ll quite literally be more on-side with one character than another. Clues can be more or less obvious depending on where both the characters and we are positioned.
Compare this to a Fincher film full of exacting uses of cinematography and editing that surprise and shock, and we’re all watching a single, driven vision. The focus isn’t so much on how our perspectives inform what we see, but on how Fincher’s perspective overrides our own to guide what we see the way he wants. That removal of ourselves in order to watch through someone else’s perspective feels less like spontaneous events transpiring, and more like we’re being told a story. It’s more curated – neither better nor worse, but lending itself to a singular vision rather than the variation of perspectives you’d find across an audience.
For something like “Death and Other Details”, I want that theatrical sense of variation to find its way through. No matter how many times I’ve seen “Clue”, it feels spontaneous, as if it’s evolving right there before me. I want the auteur to subside and treat their way of seeing things as secondary to the audience’s experience of discovering things for themselves.
“Death and Other Details” doesn’t achieve this like “Clue”, which treats every room like a set. It’s much more cinematically inclined, but there are other ways to convey that sense of theatricality and each series like this has to find its own. Here, it’s the editing that does it. I’d normally hate a show that feels the need to rely on flashback this much. We’ve all seen the trick where an adult character talks to another while also walking through one of their flashbacks. But have you seen the flashforward to a flashback inspired in the character witnessing someone else’s flashback inside of their own flashback? Sounds annoying and needlessly complex, but “Death and Other Details” communicates moments like this with masterful simplicity.
The series becomes a stage of flashbacks that characters occasionally wander through. It asks us to build a chronology of all these characters on the ship as well as their historical backstories even as Rufus and Imogene build these to solve the case. It takes moments throughout time and treats these as the sets, the fungibility of memory allowing characters to witness, participate, and even redesign and redirect how they remember something. Some moments they’re the performer, some the director, and in others they’re the audience, and the limits of their perspective and biases introduce variation that may or may not be accurate. There’s tremendous opportunity for both playfulness and consequence in this.
Violett Beane is a find as Imogene. She gets the opportunity for a lot of closeup acting, and as a blunt, assertive character her face doesn’t lie to the audience – even when she’s lying to the character in front of her. That’s a fine line to get right, but the show goes one better, mixing this theatrical irony in with code-switching and even code-mixing where two codifications in how someone communicates are switched on at once. A lot of work that involves code-switching tends to forget that people often have to navigate with two or more ways of communicating switched on at the same time. “Death and Other Details” finds ways to fuse this into the ironic tradition of communicating opposite ways to audience and in-story character. They don’t even use asides to do it, and it’s fairly brilliant to witness.
My suspicion before watching is that I’d find Mandy Patinkin’s Rufus Cotesworth tiring. This was tipped on its head the moment the show offers him to us as a washed-up drunk who Imogene despises. That in itself is a cliché, but it’s one he uses. Everyone else finds him incredibly tiring, and Cotesworth’s ability to play into that and catch others off guard with it immediately won me over. If Cotesworth wants me to find him tiring, I’m not falling for that, and both the show and Patinkin know it.
There are many very good performances that work within the band of stylization demanded by a modern corporate mystery and art deco 1930s-ish mashup. I want to highlight Angela Zhou, given something of the Tim Curry role she embodies as Teddy. She’s the manager of the ship staff, who’s hired more than a few of her own relatives, and she’s always got a cutting remark or witty deflection on hand. She can exist within the upper crust and the staff ably, which lends her presence a sense of the meta. This may be aided by the fact she’s both cast and one of the show’s writers. In any case, her within-without ability helps the upstairs-downstairs class angle of the show.
I deeply appreciate that “Death and Other Details” isn’t constantly feeding me witty banter. The writing is often smart and its flashback heavy format means looping back to anchor lines of dialogue that immediately re-establish our time and place. A lot of writers would give in to the temptation of going overboard in terms of finding its characters oh-so-clever. They’d feed us laugh line after laugh line to the point of exhaustion. They stay their hand, though. “Death and Other Details” doesn’t lose its focus for easy wins. It keeps things geared toward the longer story arcs at play and finds ways for characters to be funny that feel more individually honest to each. Since they all find different things funny, that means the humor stays varied – sometimes charming or assertive, sometimes dry or even muted.
Imogene is quick with a cutting remark, her humor inflected with anger both at others and herself. Best friend, adoptive sister, and corporate shark Anna is self-serious. Set to inherit her father’s corporation, her interrogation sees her delivering company PR responses that visually segue into a commercial. Cotesworth’s humor amuses himself rather than us, but how amused he is with himself is amusing to us. Teddy’s meta edge floats above the fray, perfectly willing to select moments to throw someone under the bus or fight to protect them. The list goes on, the comedy in each character feeling fresh as the story rotates through them.
I’m at fault comparing this to something else, but I think in its own way “Death and Other Details” holds up well to that comparison. Read the comments on its trailer (always a mistake) and you’ll see a backlash before it even premiered that compares this to “The White Lotus” and Benoit Blanc detective films “Knives Out” and “Glass Onion”. It’s early days yet, with the available two episodes essentially covering the set-up and backstories, but so far I prefer this to the former and it has the potential to be on par with the latter. “Death and Other Details” is far less self-conscious than “The White Lotus” and despite being much more stylized, it feels more subtle and far less gimmicky.
Its focus on Imogene and Cotesworth – two very imperfect characters who are trying their best when they can manage the energy to, but make no claim to a moral center – means that the series isn’t targeting cultural satire so much as character comedy.
“The White Lotus” is a solid show, but it backgrounded people of color in ways that, as Vox’s Mitchell Kuga wrote, “replicates the very power structure it purports to satirize”. By comparison, “Death and Other Details” includes criticism of the white upper class, but it’s blunter, less cutesy, and gives people of color far more interesting and nuanced roles. In terms of satire, “Death and Other Details” takes fewer shots since it’s not primarily a satire, but it swings for the fences when it does.
The comparison to “Knives Out” is a little closer in the way that the outfield is close to home plate. Sure, they’re both in the same ballpark, but it’s going to take a moment to get from one to the other, and the game they’re playing has been around a hundred years before either. You could say it’s like “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” or “Midnight at the Pera Palace” or “Murder on the Orient Express”, too, and that’s just starting with the letter ‘M’. The comparisons are descriptive of a popular stylized take on a genre, but it’s silly to use one as a dismissal of another. There are many Agatha Christielikes that each inject enough of their own originality into the mix to have strong reasons for existing.
The jury’s out on some things. We’ve been given many clues and red herrings mixed together, and because only two episodes have premiered, we haven’t really seen how capable the show is at combining them into something complex, cogent, and interesting. Any mystery has to get that right.
The scenes that involve memory as a type of set may taper off. I hope they continue as strongly as they have, and involve other characters’ memories, because it really is the strongest single element of the show. It could be something that’s useful to the premise and isn’t used as often later, or it could be a consistent storytelling device that continues to elevate the show. I hope it’s the latter, but we’ll see.
The show has some misplaced moments of nudity that are perfectly fine if you’re like, “Hey, random nudity!” but that don’t feel like they serve a purpose other than selling the audience on the fact you’ve got some random nudity. I’m all for nudity, I’m all for no nudity, do what you want, but it’s an element of the show and like any element, if it feels too consciously thrown in so that it can meet a marketing angle, then that’s exactly what the scene will communicate.
Overall, “Death and Other Details” is immensely promising and surprising. The parts I thought might be cloying or tiresome turned out to have acid and verve to them, the writing is good, the acting interesting and characters nicely individualized, the design gorgeous, the camera active when we need it to be and still when the characters need it to be, and most of all there’s variation across all these different elements that keeps each fun.
“Death and Other Details” is on Hulu.
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Gabriel Diego Valdez 