Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Death And Other Details’ On Hulu, Where An Old Detective And A Young Woman Solve A Murder On A Cruise Ship

We’re big fans of whodunits; we were the nerdy kids in the ’80s that read Agatha Christie mysteries and watched Murder, She Wrote when we were teenagers. This means that we also know what goes into a good whodunit, which is well-defined characters and a mystery that’s complex but not so complicated that readers and viewers can’t play along and try to solve the case themselves. A new Hulu series capitalizes on the recent trend back to those old-fashioned whodunits, like Knives Out and Only Murders In The Building, but somehow misses what makes those other two titles catnip for mystery fans like us.

DEATH AND OTHER DETAILS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Two people run out of a massive house. “Pay attention. Details matter. If you want to solve a crime, any crime, you must first learn to see through the illusion.” Then a girl grabs the house and opens it up to reveal that it’s a doll house.

The Gist: The girl, Imogene Scott (Sophia Reid-Gantzert) lives with the Collier family in their massive mansion. They’ve called in the “world’s greatest detective”, Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin), to talk to Imogene, because she was there when the car her mother was in blew up. Imogene, though, tells Rufus that she doesn’t remember anything. He’s there, though, to help her remember, and see the details he knows she saw.

Eighteen years later, a grown-up Imogene (Violett Beane) is on a luxury cruise ship with her childhood friend Anna Collier (Lauren Patten), invited there because she’s been so close with the Collier family. A boorish man named Keith Trubitsky (Michael Gladis) screams at a cocktail waitress named Winnie (Annie Q. Riegel) and points to his watch to say it’s more than her salary. After telling Keith off, Imogene then goes to his room later that night, as he’s sleeping, steps on his watch and steals money out of his wallet. The next morning, a housekeeper finds Keith dead, attached to a wall with the spear gun he brought on board.

Going back two days, when the cruise began, Teddy (Angela Zhou), who manages the ship’s crew, briefs them on who’s on board. The ship was rented out by textile magnate Lawrence Collier (David Marshall Grant) and his wife Katherine (Jayne Atkinson) to celebrate his retirement. Anna, there with her wife and “retired clickbait journalist” Leila (Pardis Serem), is Collier Mills’ shark, and she’s negotiating with Elanor Chung (Karoline) to buy a chunk of the company. Chung’s family is also on board; their personal security detail is led by now-disgraced detective Rufus Cotesworth.

Imogene is horrified that Cotesworth is also on board, as she remembers how close she got to him while he tried solving her mother’s murder, then suddenly abandoned her and left when the Colliers stopped paying him, despite promising to see the case through. She confronts him at dinner; he claims not to know her, and she throws her drink glass at him. The Colliers and their entourage want to know why that “hack” is on board, working for the Chungs.

A security guard named Jules (Hugo Diego Garcia) pulls Imogene out of there, and the two of them party at the ship’s nightclub then sleep together in the security video room.

Then the incident with Keith, a guest of Anna’s cocaine-addled brother Tripp (Jack Cutmore-Scott), happens, and the bore ends up dead. Imogene runs into the security room (she remembers the code Jules punched in) and sees the time period where she was in and out of Keith’s room was erased.

Turns out that Cotesworth grabbed the footage. He indeed remembers Imogene, and he knows that in this locked-door murder case, that video evidence will immediately implicate her. He knows she didn’t do it, and knowing her eye for detail, he needs her help to solve the murder; he’s been put in charge of the investigation until Interpol boards at the next port. After all, as he wrote in his book, every great detective needs a partner to see things from a slightly different perspective.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Death And Other Details, created by Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss, has a very Knives Out feel, even using a similar font during its credits. It’s also reminiscent of Only Murders In The Building and the recent Apple series The Afterparty, and of course tips its cap to Death On The Nile, the Agatha Christie classic recently turned into a movie by Kenneth Branagh. (Both have “Death” right there in the title, after all!)

Our Take: We found it hard to engage with the first episode of Death And Other Details, because instead of crafting an actually intriguing whodunit, McAdams and Weiss spend too much time sneaking things into the first episode to gaslight the show’s viewers.

Take, for instance, the scene where Imogene and Jules have sex in the security video room. As we pan across the wall of monitors as the two of them lurch in an embrace around the room, the monitors are old-fashioned, individual CRT screens. But after the murder, when Imogene goes back in the room to find the footage of her entering and leaving Keith’s suite, she’s looking at a more modern bank of flat screen monitors, each with multiple camera views.

Instead of trying to pay attention to what was actually going on, we started wondering if we had seen the CRTs the first time around. It was a distraction that we didn’t need. But it also seemed like it might be a detail that’s significant later on. Or it won’t be, and like we said, we were being gaslit. Either way, it feels like the creators are being too cute for their own good. (UPDATE: A rep for the show sent a photo of the security room set that shows the CRTs on one side for live viewing and the flat screens on the other for viewing of recordings. So that explains that!)

We say that because while some details are being inserted as possible MacGuffins for viewers to get frustrated over, we don’t get a good sense of just how the relationship between Imogene and Cotesworth developed 18 years ago, and why she immediately fell in to helping him as he started his investigation.

There feels like there’s going to be a lot of twists and turns, and flashbacks to Cotesworth’s investigation into the murder of Imogene’s mother. Imogene might get involved with Sunil (Rahul Kohli), who sold everything to buy and renovate the ship they’re on. There are lots and lots of suspects, ones we haven’t even mentioned yet, like Washington governor Alexandra Hockenberg (Tamberla Perry), Collier family attorney Llewellyn Mathers (Jere Burns), and others.

It feels like a lot, to the point where we’re not sure we want to follow it along for ten full episodes. Whodunits like this really need viewers to pay attention, and it’s especially important in a show that wants to throw tiny details at viewers and hope they stick in their minds. There might be too much going on here, however, to keep viewers engaged on those details.

We like Beane as the strong-willed Imogene, but we’re still trying to figure out what accent the usually-excellent Mandy Patinkin is using to play Cotesworth. Maybe that’s another detail that we’re supposed to track as the series goes on.

Sex and Skin: A brief sex scene with Anna and her wife Leila has nudity that feels a bit incongruous, given the type of show this is.

Parting Shot: After recalling a twisty detail about Cotesworth from his time investigating her mother’s murder, she confronts him as he announces to the suspects that he’ll be interviewing them, and says “me first.”

Sleeper Star: We enjoyed Michael Gladis’ oafishness as Keith, and we hope to see him in more flashbacks as the season goes along.

Most Pilot-y Line: Seriously, we really want to know what accent Patinkin is using as Cotesworth. Is it British? German? A cross between the two?

Our Call: SKIP IT. While there are elements of Death And Other Details that have the potential to be entertaining, the show feels overstuffed and too interested in messing with the viewers to sustain what is a very complex whodunit.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.