Is Hulu’s New Whodunit Series the Next ‘Knives Out’?
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.