Death and Other Details is a long-form murder mystery with voiceover narration directly encouraging its audience to stay on its toes, keep on guard, be aware of the seemingly innocuous or practically invisible little clues that can eventually add up to a closed case. So it’s fitting, in a way, that the show generates so much suspicion. A little of that is directed as intended, toward the ensemble of potentially shady characters gathered on a private cruise where a murder occurs.
Most of the suspicion, though, funnels back to the program itself. It’s difficult to watch Death and Other Details without suspecting it of something untoward, if not necessarily nefarious: of smugness, of opportunism, of prioritizing attempts at cleverness over well-crafted characters. This material might have gotten away with these mild creative infractions as a feature film. As a 10-episode TV series, it doesn’t hold up to much interrogation (at least not through the first eight installments provided for review).
Capitalizing on fashionable eat-the-rich satire with all the sincerity of a boardroom meeting, the series focuses on the Collier family, who have arranged for a private Mediterranean cruise to help close a business deal. The whole enterprise is spearheaded by Anna (Lauren Patten), the hard-charging daughter hoping to be formally appointed to CEO. (She won’t be the only one with succession on her mind.) Anna brings along her paranoid journalist wife, Leila (Pardis Saremi), and her semi-outsider bestie, Imogene (Violett Beane), who has been a de facto Collier family member since the murder of her mother—a company assistant—nearly two decades earlier.
That case went unsolved despite the best efforts of Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin), once hailed as the world’s greatest detective. Now Imogene and Rufus are unexpectedly reunited on the ship, where they reluctantly reteam to investigate the murder at hand. The ostensible victim is a boorish millionaire who Imogene had already targeted for some petty revenge. But the case may tie in closer to her past than she initially realizes.
An older detective showing a plucky young woman the ropes on a knotty investigation unavoidably recalls Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, while the ensemble of outlandish personalities leans more toward its sequel, Glass Onion (as well as various Hercule Poirot tales). It’s an appealing formula for Beane and Patinkin to knock off, with his gravelly gravity and her stylish (and well-costumed) brusqueness. Unfortunately, the writing squanders some of the energy of the performances. Imogene’s cut-through-it bluntness rarely lands any actual laughs, and multiple scenes of Rufus coaching his protégé through the art of detection are essentially nonsense.
There’s a particularly confounding, drawn-out sequence about halfway through the series where the pair extract information from a younger passenger who somehow only remembers key actions when their promptings are just right (not too vague, not too leading)... even though she’s recalling something memorable that happened about 24 hours earlier. Even after a later episode takes a more overt journey into the recesses of memory (and further away from strict deduction), the show’s depiction of psychological turmoil often feels like a writerly convenience—a superficial gimmick without real observations about the nature of the mind.
As the case grows more complicated with backstories and hidden agendas, some of the surprises from creators Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss pack momentary punches of intrigue. But it’s hard for much of it to linger, with nearly every character either sketched thinly or painted with an impossibly broad brush, often communicating with a glib cutesiness that’s supposed to be sophisticated or, worse, righteous. “Only assholes punch down,” Imogene says in the first episode, like she’s looking to get approvingly quote-tweeted. Only in the fevered imagination of Hollywood writers does a journalist glamorous enough to marry a business scion self-identify with a self-loathing, on-the-nose admission like “I write clickbait.”
Granted, the show’s heightened approach to the whodunit is no accident. At one point, a character is shown watching a soapy drama series on her tablet, presumably meant as a sly commentary on this show’s own salacious excesses. The profanity, sex, and nudity aren’t envelope-pushing provocations; most of it seems intended as spice on an otherwise network-safe show, all in good fun. Yet there’s enough corporate backstabbing, clumsy class-consciousness, and talk of trauma to suggest that Death and Other Details has at least a glimmer of desire to be taken seriously. Which only feeds further suspicion, closer to certainty with each episode, that there’s not much going on in this protracted mystery beyond the limited fun of its contrivances.