Apple TV+ comedy The Afterparty returns for a second infuriating season Wednesday. Not even the presence of some of our best actors (Paul Walter Hauser, Mary Holland and John Cho among them) can focus the writing and direction of this show to the point where its gimmick makes sense or its performances seem calibrated to the design of the show.
Unfortunately, this genre-hopping misfire was spent before it was reloaded.
The Afterparty season two review
Season 2, episodes 1 and 2: It’s been many months since the murder of pop star Xavier (played by Dave Franco) was solved by detectives Danner (Tiffany Haddish) and Culp (John Early), with a little help from suspect Aniq (Sam Richardson). Danner has since retired from her job as a detective to become a writer. And though she’s sold her first book, as her agent (Mary Holland) hastens to remind her when Aniq interrupts their lunch, she hasn’t written a word yet.
Aniq is calling because there’s been another murder — and he needs help solving it.
Aniq was accompanying his girlfriend Zoë (Zoe Chao) to a wedding, having left her daughter with her ex-husband for the weekend. Zoë’s sister Grace (Poppy Liu) is marrying Edgar (Zach Woods). Or she was until he woke up dead on the day after the ceremony.
The suspect list is long. There’s Edgar’s business partner, Sebastian (Jack Whitehall), his mother (Elizabeth Perkins), his sister (Anna Konkle), Grace’s mother and father (Vivian Wu and Ken Jeong), uncle Ulysses (John Cho) and Grace’s ex-boyfriend, Travis (Paul Walter Hauser), to name just a few.
Apple TV+ comedy suffers from a tired gimmick and a personality crisis
Photo: Apple TV+
I don’t know what it is about The Afterparty that brings out the most awkward performance style in everyone. Sam Richardson, usually one of the funnier people on TV, is utterly defeated by the things he’s asked to do as Aniq. The character is defined by his awkward completion of every simple thing he’s asked to do.
There are only so many times you can make volunteering for, and then screwing up, every task funny. A few of the bits work, but most of them don’t — and they come fast and furious. They even have him do the ancient board gag where you swing a piece of wood and try not to hit people with it.
Other actors fare similarly poorly. John Cho‘s character is an underwritten stereotype of pompous holistic types, and you simply cannot tell a funny joke about them anymore. Ken Jeong has been funny, of this I’m certain, but people really seem hell-bent on never letting that happen again. Zach Woods is also usually very funny, but because his function here is to say things without emotion, playing up his character’s autism, he doesn’t get to do what he does best, which is wear insecurity on his face.
You see what I mean here? Why hire funny people and then strand them without any jokes or refuse to let them play to their strengths? John Gemberling has a walk-on, and even he’s not funny. Someone should go to comedy jail for that.
The Afterparty’s dialogue is all first drafts, dramatically and comedically, and no performer breathes anything organic into these lines.
Only one actor escapes the show’s deadly script
Photo: Apple TV+
Paul Walter Hauser‘s the only standout, but then he always is. (Need proof? See his award-winning work in the riveting Apple TV+ crime drama Black Bird.) In The Afterparty, Hauser makes his character — a caricature of a certain kind of bored suburban white guy — into something funny and understandable, rather than merely a thin construction. (In case you didn’t know what kind of a guy he was, he produces a Monster Energy drink from nowhere and asks Aniq about cryptocurrency.) Hauser makes the guy seem real, which is more than you can say for anyone else on the show.
All this doesn’t even take the show’s ostensible premise into consideration, because it’s just so plainly an afterthought. The idea behind The Afterparty is that every episode is meant to suggest a different genre. One episode is a romantic comedy, one a film noir, one a period romance, etc. And as always, the show seems written and directed by people who’ve never seen these types of movies.
The rom-com episode hits one beat — Aniq being embarrassed — over and over and over again. No rom. No com.
A spark of life, but that’s just not enough
Photo: Apple TV+
Thanks to Zach Woods, the Jane Austen-style portion of the second episode is at least a little funnier. But it has so little relation to the main story, or anything we understand about these characters, that it doesn’t exactly justify itself either. We’re asked to accept that it makes sense, at best, in passing. Someone made a choice, and we’re stuck with it, even if it’s completely random.
But I know when I’m licked. So, rather than drag Cult of Mac readers through week after week of me feeling actively rejected by this show’s creative team, and trying and failing to find something nice to say, I’m tapping out early and letting fans of the show enjoy themselves.
We are hereby honoring The Afterparty with The Hasselhoffs Memorial No Recap Prize, named for the ill-fated A&E reality series starring David Hasselhoff and his two daughters that only managed to get one episode to airtime before being canceled.
The Afterparty is over, at least for me.
★☆☆☆☆
Watch The Afterparty on Apple TV+
New episodes of The Afterparty season two arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
