The Afterparty ought to be better than it is. In theory, Apple TV+’s comic murder-mystery about a high school reunion gone awry has a lot going for it. It has an Apple budget. Its creators are Chris Miller and Phil Lord, who previously gave us the brilliant The Lego Movie. It has a cast of superior comic actors. How does something with such sparky potential come to feel so strangely flat?
The body of Xavier (Dave Franco), a Justin Bieber-esque singer clad in a purple suit with no shirt, is found dead on the rocks below his seafront mansion. Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) arrives to investigate, where she finds a party still going on. This is the dregs of a high school reunion, some of whose attendees repaired to Xavier’s house after the school part. Cue a kind of live-action Californian millennial Cluedo, as Danner interviews the guests and tries to work out what befell their host. They are a mix of comic archetypes, like the nihilistic writer-type Indigo (Genevieve Angelson), forever with a martini in hand, and more believable figures, like Yasper (Ben Schwartz), who once upon a time was in a band with Xavier but now sells audiovisual equipment.
