- Network: HULU
- Series Premiere Date: Jan 16, 2024
Critic Reviews
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Hulu's Death and Other Details has all the makings of a great whodunit: entitled rich people living their best lives, an outsider who has infiltrated the inner circle, the working class that hates them all, and a disgraced detective trying to make a splashy comeback. So it's disappointing that, in reality, the series never quite pops.
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Overall, Death and Other Details isn't a groundbreaking murder mystery series. It does have a witty detective and a few unexpected reveals, but its lack of originality seeps through in certain narrative decisions and side character additions.
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I’d have preferred five genuinely complex characters to two dozen attractive chess pieces, which is Death and Other Details in a nutshell. Maybe 75 percent homage and 25 percent revisionist, Death and Other Details consistently stands out for doing the most, but rarely stands out for doing the best.
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There’s an old saying that the devil is in the details, meaning it’s the little stuff that can muck up a larger scheme. In “Death and Other Details,” by contrast, it’s the grinding nature of the whole exercise, rather than any individual aspect, that ultimately sinks a project that appears to operate on cruise control.
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The writing squanders some of the energy of the performances. Imogene’s cut-through-it bluntness rarely lands any actual laughs, and multiple scenes of Rufus coaching his protégé through the art of detection are essentially nonsense.
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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.
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Imagine a 10-hour version of “Knives Out” and you have some idea why “Death and Other Details” gets so frustrating, especially after the remarkably fun series premiere.