As entertainment writers, we tend to hear about a lot of ideas for a lot of TV shows, many of them either a) bad, b) repetitive, or c) both. Hence our unmitigated delight at the premise and trailer for Will Arnett’s new Netflix series Murderville, which not only promises the possibility for some extremely goofy and novel fun, but, from the early footage, seems to deliver on it.
The idea, in (semi-) brief: Each episode sees Arnett play Detective Terry Seattle, who appears, for the most part, to just be Will Arnett in a mustache. Seattle is teamed up in each episode with a celebrity partner (with this initial season naming Annie Murphy, Conan O’Brien, Ken Jeong, Kumail Nanjiani, Marshawn Lynch, and Sharon Stone as its roster of guest-gumshoes) to solve a murder. The twist is that, while the show is, for the most part scripted—with different scenarios pre-written, and a pre-determined solution to the crime—the celebrity actor doesn’t get the script, and must instead improvise along with Arnett, and, ultimately, name who they think the culprit is at the end of the episode.
Look, just watch the trailer, it’s right up there.
In other words, this is essentially a big-budget, hyper-committed variant of murder mystery dinner theater, except instead of suffering through dry chicken and ad-libbed “clues,” it’s Annie Murphy being forced to go undercover with a big silly mustache, and without a script.
Could this be dire? Sure. Improv always carries that potential. But the trailer suggests that all of the celebrities are game enough (and Arnett is just as committed to fucking with them) to make the whole thing work. Also, watching Sharon Stone improvising herself through a hyper-messy autopsy while affecting an over-the-top German accent just sounds fascinating, frankly.
Murderville is being showrun and executive produced by Krister Johnson, lately of Medical Police and Children’s Hospital. The series is adapted from a BBC3 series, Murder In Successville. Murderville premieres on Netflix on February 3.
