Review: The Afterparty, "Aniq 2: The Sequel" & "Grace"
Welcome to Episodic Medium’s weekly coverage of The Afterparty, Apple TV+’s genre-shifting murder mystery comedy series. This first review is free for all, but future reviews will be exclusive to paid subscribers. For more information on the site and what else we’re covering, check out our About Page and our Summer Schedule.
The Afterparty is practically designed to be uneven. The concept, wherein a series of suspects in a murder case explain their alibi through a range of film genres, is so clever, but it necessitates that there’s a new main character every episode, as well as a new filming style. And episode to episode, those characters can be different amounts of compelling, and those filming styles can work or be kind of a mess. The first season, which examined the mysterious death of an obnoxious pop star at the afterparty for his high school reunion, boasted an absolute all star cast of millennial comedians, from star Sam Richardson to Zoe Chao to Ilana Glazer. Season 2 rejoins Richardson’s Aniq, now happily dating Chao’s Zoe, as they attend her sister Grace’s (Poppy Liu) wedding to tech billionaire Edgar (Zach Woods), only for the groom to wind up dead at the end of the wedding weekend.
It’s an interesting setup for this season, offering many new avenues for the show to explore. For one thing, these characters have much more intimate relationships with each other. Instead of people who maybe haven’t seen each other in ten years, these are family members, future in-laws, and, importantly, a couple in a long term relationship. Aniq may have anxieties about his place in Zoe’s family, but that’s part of his charmingly rumpled rom-com persona, and it shifts the dynamics of the show for him and Zoe to act as a team, and for the pressure to be off of him in terms of winning her over in the first place.
The first episode, which shows us our first run-through of the events of the weekend using Aniq’s rom-com style, handles exposition duties with a certain aplomb, helped by the fact that Richardson’s cheerful neuroticism as Aniq has always been the show’s strongest weapon. He has a real gift for expressing with a straight face such oddities as explaining to his girlfriend’s parents that the two of them are not going to be having sex that night. Despite that…brag(?), the episode takes the time to show us the happy ending of their romance, slowing down among the madcap antics a couple of times to let the relationship breathe and remind us that these two people have now been in a successful relationship for a year.
It also sets up an intriguing twist on the format of the first season by revealing that Tiffany Haddish’s Detective Danner has left the force to work on a book about solving the Xavier case. When Edgar’s mother and shady business partner indicate they want to settle some accounts before calling the police, Aniq springs into action and calls Danner in to help prove Grace didn’t commit the murder (and hopefully figure out who did). Danner’s new circumstances mean that there’s way less pressure on everyone since she’s not in law enforcement, and there’s a real possibility for shenanigans that the crawling police presence in Season 1 prevented.
Case in point: episode two’s humdinger of a closing scene, when Danner and Aniq catch Zoe and Travis, Grace’s ex boyfriend, manhandling Edgar’s corpse so they can activate the face ID on his phone. There’s a panicked silence, and then Danner tells them to just put the corpse back how they found it. It’s one of the best gags of the first two episodes, taking your expectations of what would have happened in this scene last season, and flipping them right over.
“Grace” generally has a slightly less sure hand than episode 1, but it’s still fun, and does a good job to establish (at least for now) that Grace and Edgar were a flawed but real love story. Do you miss most of the jokes if you haven’t seen the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice that I and every other millennial woman is obsessed with? Probably, but it’s still funny to see that the meme-ification of Matthew Macfadyen tensely (and sexily) clenching his hand due to the sheer eroticism of briefly touching Elizabeth Bennet’s hand has traveled this far. The joke starts to wear a bit over time—the show doesn’t quite have something to say about the rain soaked sexy proposal from that movie, for instance. But it’s an expedient way to establish who Grace is, and how she could have ended up with someone so different from her that her sister can’t help but ask if they’ll be happy together.
And it also works as a way to give us a glimpse of who Zoe will be this season. Chao is a gifted comedian, but it does no actress any good to be stuck in the ingénue role when her co-stars get to be ridiculous all the time. She’s basically the third co-lead in the season, so we need to know a lot more about her, and she can’t be the unattainable crush object that she was last time through. Her withering disdain for a certain kind of less than impressive man is a nice through line so far, and I actually want to keep watching her begrudgingly solve crimes with Grace’s ex, Travis. But flipping the corpse is a horrendous idea, and nicely brings her back down to earth as someone who, much like Aniq, doesn’t make the best decisions when they involve someone she cares about.
It’s all promising stuff for the new season, showing how The Afterparty can change and adapt its concept in interesting ways for new murder mystery scenarios. For now, the biggest problem is mostly that not all of the new characters have quite landed as types yet, but there’s ample time for that to get resolved. Next up: Travis explains why he’s been carting around a folder filled with clippings about Edgar.
Welcome to Season 2 of The Afterparty! I’m very excited to find out who killed Edgar with you all. And see what types of genres each of these characters end up fulfilling. I love reading people’s theories, too, so comment away if you’ve got ’em.
The credits are a fun way to try to predict what types of genres we’ll get this season, although for one of them I simply wrote down “summer camp?”
“My mother says hello. She wanted to be here, but she was busy with silence and alcohol.” Zach Woods got a lot of fun lines in the early going, which made me sad he’s the murder victim (unlike Xavier, who clearly always sucked). I hope every episode involves him (incorrectly) asserting that he likes jokes.
I really wish the camera had lingered just a second longer to let the skin tone joke with the tea cozy land. They sort of close the gaps with all the people thinking it’s meant to be Obama, but the cut is so immediate that it’s almost a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it comparison, and it’s a very funny and pointed concept. Weirdly, this moment is one of the press stills, so now you can appreciate the joke without the camera cutting away too swiftly.
“Hey, do you know anything about cryptocurrency?” “You know what, I think I’m going to try and change tables.” Very relatable response from Aniq here, although I’ll voice my first theory of the season here and say I suspect Travis was asking because he’s trying to figure something out about Edgar, who we know has some crypto stuff going on.
Really loved that Aniq’s escape room is praised as the “most confusing.”
I’m also excited to see Aniq and Danner work as a partnership. The moment where he tries to peer at her notes made me laugh.
I have no idea where things will go, but I like Edgar so far? He’s extremely weird, obviously, but he’s also by far the most welcoming to Aniq, and seemed like he was really trying with Grace, even if he wasn’t always good at it.
Very glad this show correctly read John Cho’s vibe: dashing world adventurer.
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