While the Apple TV+ series “The Afterparty” may be a comedic twist on the murder mystery genre, building the structure of the show was serious business.
Creator, writer, executive producer and director Christopher Miller revealed during a Friday TCA panel for the show that initially, crafting the structure of the series was mathematical in nature – and the remnants of that problem exist in the characters’ names. “It’s like it was a math problem at first,” Miller said. “That’s why all the characters’ names start with ABCD – WXYZ.”
Indeed, the main characters in the show – each episode of which is told from a different person’s point of view – are Aniq (Sam Richardson), Brett (Ike Barinholtz), Chelsea (Ilana Glazer), Danner (Tiffany Haddish), Xavier (Dave Franco), Yasper (Ben Schwartz) and Zoë (Zoë Chao).
Many of the main cast members, also present on the panel, had never put this together before and were visibly wowed by the added detail. “Now the show is amazing,” Schwartz quipped. “I was on the fence but now.”
Each episode of the series finds Haddish’s Detective Danner interrogating a suspect for the murder of Franco’s Xander at the afterparty for their high school reunion, and in each person’s retelling of the events the show takes on a different genre. “We were sort of looking at each character and thinking about how we can push the style of what their worldview is,” Miller said. “And then as we picked genres for each person, we had to adjust everything and adjust their characters to fit into the world of that style. So it did keep evolving back and forth, but it started with the characters of the mystery first, and then the genres sort of built out of who they were.”
The first four episodes of “The Afterparty” are currently streaming on Apple TV+, with new episodes releasing every Friday.
