Murderville Season 1 review: Will Arnett’s parody whodunit has to be the most uninspiring show streaming now

1.5/5

Story: Homicide division senior detective Terry Seattle is saddled with a new partner each on six murder investigations. The trainee detectives are celebrities, who have to play along and figure out the culprit from a suspect pool without the help of a script. Season 1 gets Conan O’Brien, Marshawn Lynch, Annie Murphy, Kumail Nanjiani, Sharon Stone, and Ken Jeong as celebrity guests.

Review: Let me be honest here, I wanted to watch and review Murderville solely because it has Will Arnett on board and, for some strange reason (Arrested Development), I expected it to be fun. I couldn’t have been more wrong. This one is just terrible from the word go.

The premise is simple, Detective Seattle has to partner up with a celebrity guest to solve a bunch of murders. Everyone except the celeb has a script to follow, so, the humour is supposed to come from them improvising along the way to every situation. Every episode has three suspects and, at the end, the trainee detective/celeb has to figure out who did it, with Seattle’s boss and ex-wife Chief Rhonda Jenkins-Seattle (Haneefah Woods) springing in with the details about why they are right or wrong.

With two comedians and a talk show host with supposedly the gift of gab, you’d expect at least those episodes to evoke a chuckle or two. Well, maybe Kumail did, but there’s really nothing to write about the rest of them, with former NFL star Marshawn Lynch and Schitt’s Creek actress Annie Murphy the weakest links. I am not sure how much of it is Arnett’s own improvisation, but it would be difficult to come up with a decent response to most of the inane lines he comes up with, so there’s no scope for a cracker of a punchline.

But that’s not all. No American comedy show is complete without some toilet humour. I cannot, for the life of me, fathom why some perfectly normal bodily functions should be source for laughter. Everyone takes a sh*t and passes wind, get over it, okay! But no, apparently it is funny that back in school, Seattle was only known as the guy who’d faint and then fart, so much so that everyone called him Terry Fartner. Groan!

Verdict: Skip it, alright! Murderville is just so lame a**, I dozed off in between. The end credits, though, mention that it is based on a British show called Murder in Successville, which ran from 2015 to 2017 and I suspect that as has been the case with most series adapted for American viewers, Murderville too lost the plot and missed out on an opportunity to reproduce something good. What a waste of time this was.