REVIEW: ‘Death And Other Details’ Is A Tried An True Whodunnit

You can’t beat a good whodunnit. Hulu’s Death and Other Details knows this deeply. It takes a tried and true formula and tries to stretch as far as it can go across ten episodes. But with that, it rests on its laurels. The series is directed by Marc Webb, David Petrarca, Alrick Riley, Yangzom Brauen, James Griffiths, and Dinh Thai, written by Mike Weiss and Heidi Cole McAdams, and it all is set to solve a murder on a boat.

Death and Other Details, a ten-episode series, is driven by Imogene Scott (Violett Beane). She is brilliant, restless, and extremely observant, thanks to some childhood trauma. Set in the glamor of the global elite on a lavish ocean liner in the Mediterranean, Imogene is in the wrong place at the wrong time when a man is found dead. A locked room murder mystery, Death and Other Details casts every rich, terrible person on the lavishly restored Mediterranean ocean liner as a suspect, and the exhausted servers too. To clear her name and prove her innocence, Imogene must partner with a man she despises—Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin), the world’s greatest detective.

As has been noted repeatedly when a new murder mystery premieres on TV or film, Knives Out reignited a love of the genre. While last year’s Poker Face was a closer take to murder mystery icon Columbo, Death And Other Details comes across as something closer to the 2019 film, using everyone’s frustrations with the rich and distrust of absolutely everyone around them. There are some elements of exploring class in this show, but they lack the real bite to leave an impact.

Like many of the current murder mystery stories coming out, Death and Other Details features a cast that carries the limited series, even when its writing begins to get in its own way. It stars Violett Beane and, more importantly, Mandy Patinkin as the center of the story and features Lauren Patten, Rahul Kohli, Angela Zhou, Hugo Diego Garcia, Pardis Saremi, and Linda Emond as supporting cast. While there is no weak actor in the bunch, the work they have to do to keep a script that doesn’t trust its audience to find the details themselves before explaining them doesn’t always save the limited series.

Death and Other Details puts in a lot of effort to tell the audience who everyone is, and then, through Rufus Coteseworth, tells the audience everything else. We hear “world’s greatest detective” so much that you begin to question it. Especially as Imogene enters a delicate dance with him to prove her innocence. Ultimately, if Rufus had been played by anyone other than the iconic Mandy Patinkin, he would have faded into the background of the story. But Mandy, as always, is a substantive delight.

There is nothing revolutionary about Death And Other Details. It is on the tried and true path of the whodunnits before it. This isn’t an immediate critique since the whodunnit formula can succeed even when it doesn’t exceed expectations. However, the series doesn’t trust the viewer nearly enough to build the mystery up as grand as it could be.

This means that throughout the 10-episode series, it feels that some scenes are just there to fill a runtime. Sometimes, they’re increasingly twisting the mystery in odd ways. Others, there is too much exposition with too little impact. To put it simply, it wastes the endless potential of Mandy Patinkin as the world’s greatest detective. And still, Mandy is worth watching because he does the most he can, which is always the highlight.

There is something great in Death and Other Details. If it had been a shorter series or a feature film, maybe the issues with pacing and over-explanation could have been solved. But as it stands, there are too many episodes, too much exposition, and not enough detail to make the series more than something you put on just for the cast.

Death And Other Details is streaming now, exclusively on Hulu.