Netflix's 'Murderville' Review: A True Laugh-Out-Loud Surprise
It’s improv—and not so different from the kind of goofy scenarios you’d often see on something like Who’s Line is it Anyway? but here it is merged with just enough familiar genre tension to elevate implausible scenarios into laugh-out-loud comedy.
Written by Tom Knoblauch
TV-MA - Comedy, Crime (33 minutes)
________
Starring: Will Arnett, Haneefah Wood, Lilan Bowden, Philip Smithey
“Eccentric detective Terry Seattle teams up with clueless celebrity guest stars to investigate a series of murders in this improvisational crime comedy.”
— Summary
Tony Kushner justified his obsession with the playwright Bertolt Brecht because Brecht was a master of the relationship an audience has with art, “privileging that moment of belief and disbelief so that you’re in it and out at the same time,” where “[a]t the end of Hamlet, everybody’s dead on the stage, but at least two of them have had a sword fight, so they’re panting hard. But if it’s a great production of Hamlet, you’re kind of annihilated at the end emotionally. And that doubleness of complete investment in a reality that you know to be artificial is critical consciousness.” It’s common to nitpick anything that feels unrealistic or contrived in popular art even though, on some level, we’re constantly aware that nothing we’re watching is particularly real. We want to be manipulated while understanding that it’s happening as it’s happening. What commonly gets lauded as the best art is the most effective at fooling an audience into full investment into the unreality presented. If this all seems offputtingly intellectual, let me comfort you: this is a review of a show where one episode culminates in a big fart joke.
Murderville, the new Netflix procedural show starring Will Arnett as Senior Detective Terry Seattle, makes no attempt to fool its audience--or to really inspire much investment in its characters and weekly murder mystery. Instead, it leans hard into its own artifice for inspiration and the results are absolutely hilarious. Its central conceit draws from the standard procedural template of a detective solving a murder but mixes it with a sometimes reality show-like improvisation and contest structure, where each week sees Terry Seattle (who is very real in the world of the show, mourning his dead partner and working through the final stage of divorcing his boss) teamed up with a new detective-in-training. Each trainee is a real-life celebrity (this season it's Conan O’Brien, Marshawn Lynch, Kumail Nanjiani, Annie Murphy, Sharon Stone, and Ken Jeong) playing himself or herself with no real attempt to explain why they would apply to become homicide detectives. Over the course of an episode, Seattle guides each celebrity guest star through a crime scene, interrogating witnesses, and supplying enough clues to identify the killer. All of the supporting characters are actors following some degree of a script with Arnett, but the guest has no idea what is going to happen and has to improvise through the whole case. At the end of each episode, the trainee must identify who they think the killer is and explain the logic, Hercule Poirot style, as Chief Rhonda Jenkins-Seattle (Haneefa Wood) barges in to either confirm or correct before walking the killer off in handcuffs.
The crimes themselves are all ridiculous—like the founder of a social media site being killed when someone threw a CD into his neck or a magician sawing his assistant in half for real—and Arnett leans into the absurd whenever possible by being often completely unhelpful or actively obstructive for petty reasons. In fact, most of the time, the mischievous actor in him seems to be trying to get his co-stars to break character while he hides his own smirks as best he can under his mustache. The guests frequently crack up and try to regain composure as serious detectives in a serious business. This is the show’s magic: its tension between reality and unreality as Conan O’Brien eats scoop after scoop of unreasonably spicy sloppy joe meat while trying to interrogate a suspect or when Kumail Nanjiani is coached by Seattle into a “cool walk” where he bounces up and down with his head cocked to one side like no human has ever intentionally walked before. The laughs often are huge here, leaning into the incompetency of the authorities and satirizing the procedural genre in the process—a fairly disturbing cultural comfort watch.
In a frantic moment where Seattle realizes that the one-way mirror in an interrogation room has been replaced with a huge hole in the wall, he convinces Marshawn Lynch to mirror the suspect (Rob Huebel)’s every move to keep up the illusion of a mirror as Seattle intends to observe the questioning. Lynch, who often conveys simple bewilderment at the weird requests thrown at him, takes a beat to try to insist that there is no planet in which this could possibly work as Arnett screams “We don’t have time to discuss the plausibility of this scenario!” and they go for it. It’s improv—and not so different from the kind of goofy scenarios you’d often see on something like Whose Line is it Anyway? but here it is merged with just enough familiar genre tension to elevate implausible scenarios into laugh-out-loud comedy. The tension each guest brings as someone who has no real skillset for the job, which is immediately compounded by the senior detective’s ridiculous methodology, is palpable.
Murderville may not annihilate you the way a great performance of Hamlet can, but this improv procedural is absolutely elevated into the stupidest, funniest rendition of Brechtian art you’ll find on Netflix.