The Afterparty review: Going back to high school might kill you

It’s easy to appreciate AfterpartyA new Apple TV Plus series about two universal truths.

Christopher Miller will be the new comedian. Miller was famously known for being a collaborator with Phil Lord on movies like 21 Jump StreetAnd The Lego Movie. Just like the other projects. AfterpartyIt’s equally funny and inventive, with an all-star cast. This series, which spans eight genres, examines the same murder from eight perspectives. Each perspective is a different style. Its first three episodes — all of which are available today — hop from romantic comedy to action movie to musical, and part of the fun is seeing what the show will do with the next episode.

The basics are the same each time: It’s the 15-year reunion for the class of 2006 at a California high school. This reunion is a little more flashy than the others because Xavier, (Dave Franco), has made a name for himself as a pop superstar and will be hosting an afterparty at his home on the coast. Xavier falls to his death at the afterparty. Detectives Danner, Culp (Tiffany Haddish, John Early), are on the case. There’s sweet nerd Aniq (Sam Richardson), his best friend and still-aspiring musician Yasper (Ben Schwartz), the kind and bookish Zoë (Zoë Chao), former douchey bully Brett (Ike Barinholtz), popular girl Chelsea (Ilana Glazer), and odd wallflower Walt (Jamie Demetriou). All of them are suspects, and they all have a different version of the night’s events.

Photo: Apple TV Plus

Every one of Afterparty’s episodes is centered around one character’s account of the night, colored by the perspective they brought to the reunion. Aniq’s version is colored by rom-com sweetness, as he arrived in the hopes of reconnecting with Zoë, his former lab partner and crush. Brett, still under the illusion that he’s a hotshot, portrays the night with action-movie badassery, where he vaults over car hoods and gets into a very literal pissing match with Xavier, an actual famous person. Yasper recounts the event as a comic musical. This is Yasper’s first highlight. The series only really sags when a viewpoint character doesn’t quite gel with the genre their story is told in — one episode makes a valiant attempt at spinning the night into a thriller template, but a lack of stakes makes it fall flat.

Culp and Danner ground Afterparty’s antics, not because they’re less funny than anyone else, but because they keep track of every plot twist the show throws at viewers. That way, if you’re more interested in laughs than concocting fan theories, you can feel confident in not missing anything. The show, however, is You can also see it hereVery well constructed. Careful overlap of accounts and motivations. There are manyTo speculate.

It’s also a show that is less fragmented than its structure suggests.While every major character gets a showcase with Danner and Culp serving as narrative Dungeon Masters, Aniq — whose story kicks the first episode of Afterparty off — is determined to solve the case himself (he designs escape rooms, so he’s at least as qualified as a cop). Aniq recruits Yasper as a co-investigator to assist him in his parallel investigation. It gives Afterparty’s deep supporting cast even more time to shine when the flashback narrative doesn’t necessarily involve them, and for every episode to have a sense of momentum in spite of constant flashbacks.

Photo by Apple TV Plus

Here is the place. AfterpartyEffectively, it is the end Clue — you know, where Tim Curry runs around the entire mansion gesticulating through his conclusions? — stretched across an entire series. Only this time it’s Sam Richardson apologizing his way through a beachfront bachelor pad dragging Ben Schwartz behind him, and Ben Schwartz is kind of being his Parks and RecreationCharacter but not a LittleMore chill. It will not be easy to watch new episodes of this show if you find that appealing. Afterparty Each week.

The best thing about Afterparty doesn’t lie in genre trickery. It’s in how, with incredible economy, the show’s writers and performers build its characters out to stretch just beyond stereotype, where everyone is shaped by the things that hurt them when they were young. The highs of high school loom large, but perhaps it’s the lows that shape us most — something that becomes even more apparent when we’re telling our own story. We are the heroes of our stories, even if they end in murder.

These are the three first episodes AfterpartyYou can stream them on Apple TV Plus. New episodes are added every Friday.