SERIES REVIEW: Death And Other Details (S1)

Rian Johnson, you have a lot to answer for.

The American writer and director has, it seems, refreshed that venerable evergreen, the locked-room whodunit. What began with Christie almost a century ago never really went away, but it’s now back in fashion with a younger generation. Thanks to the likes of Johnson’s Knives Out and Glass Onion, and the recent A Murder At The End Of The World, we’re getting American takes on the sub-genre that feel familiar and even at times ape Christie, but very much their own animals.

These new iterations – especially the Johnson ones and pertinent to this 10-part series – also feature the hero detective archetype, a throwback to Poirot. Like Poirot, Benoit Blanc had his affectations and idiosyncracies, but both were brilliant, unimpeachable detectives. Here, in Death And Other Details we also get what seems like a hero detective, the avuncular Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin) who helps to narrate the story and is the man charged with getting to the bottom of the mystery.

So what is the mystery? We meet Imogene Potts (Violette Bean), first as a little girl, witnessing her mother get blown up in a car outside the rich Collier family home, the family her mother works for. The Colliers raise Imogene like one of their own, but since her mother’s death she’s been behaving erratically, and Cotesworth – his superstar detective reputation preceding him – has been drafted in to find out what happened to Imogene’s mother, and who killed her. Despite forming a close relationship with the young, traumatised girl, he leaves the investigation unexpectedly and unresolved.

Fast-forward a couple of decades or so, and Imogene is part of the Collier entourage as they hire a cruise ship to help finalise a merger with a Chinese company, headed by members of the Chun family. While at sea around the Mediterranean for 10 days, one of the passengers, Keith Trubitsky (Michael Gladis), is found harpooned in his cabin. Cotesworth is also onboard, working for the Chuns.

At first, Imogene is appalled to see Cotesworth again – he left her and the investigation into her mother’s death in the lurch, just as she thought they had a genuine friendship. Cotesworth was astounded by her own remarkable deduction skills, while she thought they were a team and he as a mentor. So at first, things are prickly between the two when they reunite on the cruise ship, but soon they realise they must work together to solve Trubitskys murder – both of them think they have unfinished business as Kira Scott’s murderer has never been found, and they see this new murder linking back.

It’s a murder on a cruise ship, so not entirely an original concept but it does provide the opportunity for us to engage in a locked-room (or single-location) whodunit, and who doesn’t love one of those? And not only that but a single-location mystery featuring a hero detective and an amateur detective. Death And Other Details really has all the ingredients to make it a success.

But.

Near the beginning of the series, during his narration to us the viewers, Cotesworth supposes that we want to skip to the final scenes to find out who the murderer is and almost implores the audience to instead stick with it and watch the whole thing. I kind of wished I had skipped to the end, because what took place in between was extraordinarily muddled. Tonally it was all over the place. Like Knives Out et al, there was a retro feel and look to it all, when it fact it wasn’t at all. Sometimes there was high comedy and farce, sometimes it was deathly serious. Additionally, each episode tended to lurch from one flashback to the other, making each instalment an exhausting watch. And, even though it references the Golden Age and Christie (there are cod English accents everywhere), there really is no class or light touch on show here – we’re talking about inelegant, sledgehammer storytelling, with far too much gratuitous sex and bad language on show (I’m a fan of both by the way, but each has a time and a place). And, and, and… because Cotesworth and Imogene are working through each key member of the passenger list (from wannabe Collier CEO Anna (Lauren Patten) to senior members of the ship’s crew, to various lawyers, a priest, and the Chun family) we have to go into everyone’s back story. We also get some needless, pointless diversions, like a refugee story strand and even a few scenes on Malta.

Ten episodes, each lasting 45-50 minutes. It’s a lot.

What these diversions and constant back-and-forths do is take away from the intensity of the single-location mystery until you get to the point of not really caring. Each episode is a chore, rather than a pleasure.

And yet, there are moments where Death And Other Details excels. Episode seven, for instance, is by far the best of the series, because it stays in one timeline for the most part – it’s almost exclusively told in flashback and employs some really innovative and effective storytelling techniques. It also has a focus that much of the series lacks.

Another reason it didn’t quite jive with me was that I didn’t like any of the characters. They were all pretty unlikeable – they were either shagging each other, double-crossing each other, or killing one another. Even our hero detective turns out to be less than a hero.

I understand that the writers were perhaps trying to subvert this character archetype, but still. And yes, there are reasons that I shall not reveal why the cast of characters are all rotters, but still. These approaches make the series difficult to watch for large periods.

It’s all a bit of a muddle and a mess, and yet…I stuck it out until the end precisely because it was a whodunit and I wanted to find out who the killer was (even though the reveal of the culprit (and the culprit itself) will have its doubters – I’m not sure I swallowed it whole).

It looks as though there might be a second series of this, so I hope the writers have learned their lessons – absolutely work to the mantra of less is most definitely more, infuse storytelling with more class and sleight-of-hand, and try to have characters who anchor the story that we like and care about, even if those around like are arseholes.

Paul Hirons

⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 2.5 out of 5.