REVIEW: The Afterparty – Season Two [2023]

Rating: TV-MA | Episodes: 10 | Runtime: 35 minutes
Release Date: July 12th, 2023 (USA)
Studio: Apple TV+
Creator(s): Christopher Miller

She was busy with silence and alcohol.

I really liked the first season of “The Afterparty”. It had a great cast, great concept, and great comedy. Making it the aftermath of a high school reunion wherein no one had really seen each other in years added so much too because it meant everything was on the table. Grudges. Jealousies. Or it could have just been a heat of the moment thing that had nothing to do with the past.

Announcing a second season was therefore a bit of a shock. This wasn’t a Knives Out situation where the Poirot character was all you needed to keep going. Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) was objectively not the lead. That distinction went to Aniq (Sam Richardson). His integral help in solving the murder while also being a suspect made him the most important piece to the puzzle. Add a blossoming romance with Zoë (Zoe Chao) and you suddenly have three recurring roles to consider. So, the hoops to hope lightning might strike twice seemed infinite.

To creator Christopher Miller and his team’s credit, however, they do find a way to at least have a shot. By making said event Zoë’s sister’s (Poppy Liu’s Grace) wedding to a multi-millionaire crypto groom (Zach Woods’ Edgar), they both made it personal (this will be Aniq’s first time meeting the family) and supply a means for which Danner can arrive as a consultant before a real investigation commences. Because if Edgar is the victim, the last thing his wealthy mother (Elizabeth Perkins’ Isabel) would want is a reason for any skeletons to come out too soon.

Where things go off-the-rails isn’t necessarily the plot, but the gimmick. What worked so well before as genre-specific “mind movies” specifically built around each witness/suspect finds itself stretched so thin here that the concept becomes about aesthetic instead. Maybe it’s the amount of bad generative AI work populating social media these days, but making entire episodes “Wes Anderson” and “Alfred Hitchcock” proves quite lazy and obnoxious. You can homage twee and noir (which, funnily enough, they also do this season). You can’t simply mimic.

I did like the inclusion of a “video” episode, though—one where we get to see what “actually” happened as a means for extra comedy considering how much everyone embellishes or tones down their individual retellings of the weekend. It’s still from a specific perspective (Zoë’s father’s, as played by Ken Jeong, company’s social media manager, as played by Zack Calderon), but that layer of verisimilitude is a perfect contrast to the high-style writing and production design of the rest.

Richardson, Haddish, and Chao stay grounded to bring their characters back to life, but the rest tend to go super far into caricature. Whereas the reunion saw real people imagining fictitious versions of themselves, the wedding makes those fictitious personas into the real people and simply projects them onto different backgrounds each episode. They’re all way more over-the-top as a result. Paul Walter Hauser’s Travis plays this season’s Walt as a veritable cartoon. Anna Konkle’s Hannah is Margot Tenenbaum even before becoming Margot Tenenbaum.

I still had fun overall, though. I figured the culprit out early (both thanks to Glass Onion and the fact that things are much more obvious this time around). And while it’s only one more episode than the previous season, it does feel a lot longer. I guess that happens when the entertainment is less gossipy and more familial. The histories here seem to be built solely to bolster the story rather than the characters—a noticeable difference that proves just how good Season One truly was.