“We are all stars in our own films. We see the same thing in different ways.” That’s what the policewoman, played loudly and amusingly by Tiffany Haddish, says in the first episode about the group of suspects and thus immediately explains the concept of the series. Detective Danner has just arrived at the expensive beach house where, as the title suggests, an afterparty went haywire. In the end, one is dead, fallen over a parapet, and lies shattered at the foot of the cliffs. The policewoman questions the party-goers, who experienced the evening very differently, each one trapped in their own film. And you love this shrill investigator for the way she enjoys listening to the different storylines and fishes a freezer bag with popcorn out of her jacket pocket.
The eight-part mini-series follows a wonderfully playful, entertaining comedy approach with many over-the-top gags and short, perfectly fitting punchlines. And the fact that it so solemnly discloses how it works right at the beginning in the speech to the police is one of them. “The Afterparty” is the first series from Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the creative team behind Movies like “The LEGO Movie” with its colorful, subversively original heroic story and the much-praised pop art trip “Spider-Man: A New Universe”. Together they have been writing funny, allusive screenplays with a lot of verve for years, which they then implement together – Miller as director, Lord as executive producer.
Here the two now try a classic whodunnit, just like the British crime queen Agatha Christie once devised in her novels: a murder, several suspects brought together in a small space, and a complex network of relationships with many feints and false leads. The premise of “The Afterparty” is another classic: a class reunion where, 15 years after graduation, a few archetypes of American high school dynamics reunite: the mild-mannered nerd, the loveable cool-girl, the aggressive football star, the snooty Tuschel girlfriends, the invisible guy no one can remember. One of them – and that brings us to the murder victim – has achieved some notoriety as a mediocre talented Auto-Tune singer and as an actor in a trashy safari film.
Every episode is new, every episode is different
So far, so cliché. The narrative trick of the series is that each episode is now told from the very subjective point of view of a different suspect. And that also has an influence on the staging: the series creators skilfully play with a different genre in each episode. Depending on the personality of the interviewee, we sometimes see a romantic comedy as a homage to youth film classics such as John Hughes’ “Breakfast Club”, and sometimes an action plot including “The Fast and the Furious” chase. There’s a musical episode with dreamy pop songs and elaborate flash mob choreographies, and a dark psychological thriller. Every episode is new, every episode is different, but always staged with a good aesthetic sense for the underlying genres. “The Afterparty” shows how much fun the creative team Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have playing with lighting and camera movement – and with the clichés, which they alternately exaggerate and then joyfully break.
With every new twist and well-timed gag, watching it also makes you a little sad that it Lord and Miller’s version of Solo, the half-wrought Star Wars spin-off about Han Solo’s early years, never made it to theaters and Lucasfilm instead sent the mediocre and, above all, humorless film by Ron Howard into the running. With “The Afterparty”, Lord and Miller once again commend themselves as representatives of a new, adventurous Hollywood comedy squad that takes on old concepts in a new way. And amidst the gag fireworks of “The Afterparty”, the narration from different perspectives also coagulates into a subtle commentary on the background of the stories we consume, which are always incomplete. Beyond such meta-thoughts, the series does one thing above all: namely, a lot of fun.
“The Afterparty” starts January 28 on Apple TV+, eight episodes