Nothing beats incredibly ridiculous television when you’re caught in the dreary February doldrums. It’s that time of year for goofy TV with no stakes, no mental exertion required, and no aim other than being exceedingly ludicrous, preferably in an uncontrollable way. Murderville, a new Netflix crime-solving improv programme, is your best chance right now for that precise experience.
Murderville’s idea sits perfectly in the middle of the Venn diagram between obvious and insane. It’s a remake of a British programme (Murder in Successville, which is available on Britbox). Will Arnett plays Terry Seattle, a hard-boiled noirish investigator, in the American adaptation. Every week, his police chief–slash–ex-wife, Haneefah Wood, introduces Terry to a new partner recruited to investigate the murder case of the episode.
The actors that play the couples are all famous. They, too, have no clue what will happen. While Arnett and a troupe of actors act out different ludicrous crime-solving sequences, celebrities such as Conan O’Brien, Marshawn Lynch, Annie Murphy, Kumail Nanjiani, Sharon Stone, and Ken Jeong watch
Play along while attempting to solve the case. Consider a murder-mystery dinner party with improv mixed in with the bizarrely sadistic games Ellen DeGeneres makes her guests do on her talk show, but with greater production quality and a reasonable prop budget.
Consider a scenario from Murderville’s debut episode, in which Arnett appears with celebrity collaborator Conan O’Brien. Terry Seattle brings O’Brien to a restaurant to question the magician’s former assistant (Alison Becker), who now works as a server, in the case of a slain magician’s helper.
She can only converse with them if they order and consume food. Seattle insists on ordering for both of them and orders the “sloppy jalopy-joes,” stating that O’Brien has never tasted a “wetter sandwich.” The waitress soon brings the sandwiches, and Terry Seattle lavishly douses O’Brien’s in hot sauce, which Conan then has to consume in order to go in with the setting. At the same time, O’Brien is attempting to question their suspect. “Is it true Captivating Keith replaced you with Sarah because he believed you’d become too old?” he attempts to inquire, his mouth full of sloppy jalape-joe.
Terry Seattle adds extra hot sauce to O’Brien’s sandwich while the waitress weeps over the magician’s brutality. He takes another mouthful. “I desire” Is the spicy sauce authentic? How much does O’Brien know about the scenes he’s meant to be in? Who can say? However, it is evident that the celebrity visitors are at least partly on the defensive. When he hears Arnett order the meal, O’Brien’s lips twitches, and he winces when Arnett describes the sandwiches as “like eating exquisite throw-up.”
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The surface-level game is watching the famous visitors struggle through the crazy improv settings, but the actual game is waiting to see when they break and when they manage to break Arnett. O’Brien keeps it together pretty well, but in one interrogation scene with a rival magician portrayed by David Wain, Arnett is so taken aback by a lousy magic act that he cowers in a corner, and it’s such a delight to see O’Brien completely lose it for a second.
Over the course of Murderville’s six episodes, there are a few distinct types of celebrity participants. Some of the guests, like Conan O’Brien, are comedians with more experience playing silly games like this, and it’s fascinating to see Arnett push them even farther into bizarre, uncomfortable situations. (In the last episode, for example, he makes Ken Jeong do a succession of horrible accents, and the whole thing has that euphoric sensation of two grown-ups goading one other into an expanding trap of goofiness.)
However, some of the visitors plainly have little to no expertise playing improv games, and Murderville changes into a different but equally amusing mode in this situation.
Murderville seems like it’s out to get the visitors when they’re used to it: it’s a series of weird events meant to make the guests break. When the visitors have no idea what to anticipate, as appears to be the case with Marshawn Lynch, the celebrity becomes more of a spectator stand-in. It’s hilarious to watch Lynch’s jaw drop in fear as Arnett quietly transforms Terry Seattle into the leader of a crazy, murder-obsessed company of actors.
The question is no longer “Will the visitor break?” but rather “Will all of the improv players be able to keep it together as the guest truly loses his mind?” It’s also worth mentioning that Murderville’s supporting cast includes some comedic actors.
Murderville works because of Arnett’s adaptability and humour, but it’s the superb celebrity casting that stops the show’s pretty obvious premise from becoming tedious. Murderville is as adaptive as its characters. Because each celebrity approaches the game differently, each episode has its own tone, and a viewer who may not appreciate Jeong’s joyful, confident play-along attitude may enjoy Sharon Stone’s weird, wonderful passion.
I loved both of them — this is my favourite Ken Jeong performance in a long time! — but I’ll admit that my mouth dropped when Stone marches into Terry Seattle’s office and does a nice acting technique where she closes his door backward with her foot.
Murderville isn’t one of those life-changing shows that everyone will be talking about for years; it’s thoughtless to a fault. That kind of stuff is sometimes precisely what you need.
