NIKKI INDELICATO
Assistant Life & Arts Editor
*Contains Spoilers*
On Feb. 3, Netflix added the latest addition to its ever-growing original series list: “Murderville.”
“Murderville” is your not-so-typical cop show. This new “who done it” style show makes you feel like you are at murder mystery party with elements of “Saturday Night Live” all in the mix.
“Murderville” stars Will Arnett as Senior Detective Terry Seattle and every episode he is partnered with a new celebrity partner to solve their way through a scripted murder. But there’s a twist! With each incoming celebrity, they aren’t handed a script. With the help of Terry Seattle, they have to improvise their way through each case to figure out who was the cold, hard murderer. It is the celebrities job in the end to see if they figured out who committed the crime.
The star-studded cast that lead the first six episodes of the series included Conan O’Brien, Marshawn Lynch, Kumail Nanjiani, Annie Murphy, Sharon Stone and Ken Jeong. One of the many highlights of going through this show is seeing how the celebrities react to everything that is happening in the murder investigation. Nanjiani, Stone and Jeong both fell victim to breaking character and laughing their way through solving the case in their respective episodes. There are other cases, like in Murphy’s episode where she gets right into the character of being a detective trainee.
Throughout the Nanjiani’s episode, he and Seattle had to solve the murder of one of Seattle’s former high school classmates at his reunion. Whenever they are identifying the body and figuring out how the victim was killed, Seattle tells Nanjiani, “If you’re such a smarty pants, did you check his mouth?” This leads Nanjiani to look very confused at the question. The forensic scientist adds on “You didn’t check the mouth?” Nanjiani, with a chuckle, opens the mouth of the dead body and finds a note that was written by the murderer in question. If you watch really closely, you can also see the actor who is playing the victim start to laugh as well.
A similar instance happened in Stone’s episode where she was examining a body of a doctor who got murdered and Seattle started messing around with the body. Trying to hold in her laugh, Stone was able to stay in character and play along smoothly with what shenanigans Seattle was causing. The murder victim, on the other hand, was defintely having some trouble.
Jeong was the celebrity who probably had the hardest time trying to stay in character without laughing.
His laughter and enjoyment of being there made his episode one of the most entertaining and enjoyable of the season. Jeong was assigned with multiple undercover tasks while Seattle was throwing different impersonations and accents for him to do on the spot. He did accents from being Irish all the way to pretending to be the President of Finland.
The hardest episode to get through this season was Murphy’s. While she had some iconic moments and fun parts during her adventure, she took things very seriously. The character of Terry Seattle is not your typical detective. He was one who always cracked jokes with a serious face that would cause his partners to start laughing. Murphy didn’t take any of the jokes and really tried to focus on the task at hand. There were instances that you did see her start to break character at the outlandish things Seattle was having her do. Overall, it kind of gave the audience the sense that she either wasn’t comfortable with improvising or she didn’t really care to be on the show.
This is the type of show where you don’t need to watch all of the episodes in order to understand what the show is trying to accomplish. If there is a certain celebrity you like that was on an episode, you can just watch a single episode in enjoyment. However, there is a small overarching plot that follows Seattle as he is dealing with going through a divorce with a fellow cop and the murder of his fomer partner Lori, which is a picture of Jennifer Aniston.
“Murderville” is set up in a way that allows the audience to try and see if they can figure out who the murderer is. At the end of every episode, they ask the celebrity to guess who they think the murderer is and what clues they base them on. Believe it or not, the celebrities didn’t always guess the right suspect. But that just makes the show more fun. Hopefully, there are more seasons in the future, and the audience will get to see what other celebrities will join Seattle as “they punch a one way ticket to Murderville.”