If you tuned into Apple TV+’s ‘The Afterparty’ for its first season, you likely were sucked into this comedic whodunit’s unique way of telling a story. Essentially, the show surrounded the murder of a colorful and confident rock star (played by Dave Franco) and when a detective arrives on the scene (Tiffany Haddish), she tries to recall the night through a series of interviews with each character to figure out just what happened.
And it’s through those conversations that the plot really takes off with each person remembering their version of events differently, and through different genres. There’s Aniq (Sam Richardson) whose evening plays out as a rom-com with Zoe (Zoë Chao), while Zoe’s version is an animated recollection. And through other characters, we see the evening unfold through the lens of a suspenseful thriller, a high-speed action plot, a musical recollection, and even a police academy-esque storyline.
In Season 2 of the show, which just premiered its first two episodes on the streaming service, audiences are once again thrust into another mystery, this time following Aniq and Zoe to Zoe’s sister’s wedding, where Aniq is finally meeting her family for the first time. When the groom is murdered, questions are raised and Tiffany Haddish’s Detective Danner is once again called to the scene to conduct interviews, each with its own genre lens.
What has expanded for the sophomore season of the show is the world, or so, that’s how the show’s creator Chris Miller and executive producers Phil Lord and Anthony King see it.
“In Season 1, we never really left that night in the storytelling and in Season 2, we’re already telling the story of a weekend instead of just one night. And then people’s stories gave us a lot of backstory. Sometimes years in the past or as children, even. We really took that and ran with it,” says King.
The writer and producer also noted that the backstory expansions give audiences more depth into who these characters are, with each episode really allowing a person to tell their story from their point of view. “So to just embrace that and be able to kind of do more with it felt natural,” he added.
In Season 2 of ‘The Afterparty’, Zoe’s sister, Grace (Poppy Liu) is set to marry Edgar (Zach Woods). The ceremonial weekend is planned at Edgar’s wealthy family’s estate and we soon meet his sister Hannah (Anna Konkle) and mother, Isabel (Elizabeth Perkins), plus Zoe’s father, Feng (Ken Jeong) and mother, Vivian (Vivian Wu.)
Other guests invited to the wedding are Grace’s eager ex-boyfriend, Travis (Paul Walter Hauser), ambitiously mysterious uncle Ulysses (John Cho), plus Edgar’s seemingly suave business partner Sebastian (Jack Whitehall.) In this season, the story takes us down the routes of a Jane Austen romance, a Hitchcock psychological thriller, a film noir, a quirky indie take and even a social media-inspired format (that Ken Jeong just knocks out of the park.)
The genres have seemingly gotten more detailed, and that’s in large part due to the expansion of the story.
“The main lesson [from Season 1] is that the audience went there in ways that maybe we didn’t expect. They embraced the different genres and enjoyed being surprised every episode, but they also really participated in the mystery,” explains Phil Lord.
Chris Miller added, “What we ended up doing is just leaning in more to the thing that made the show unique and we pushed the genres even farther. I don’t think we would’ve gone so far as to do a Jane Austen-type of storyline in the first season where everyone’s in period costumes, because it seemed like maybe that was beyond the reality of the show. But the fact that everybody sort of went along with it and really appreciated that aspect of it made us confident to go more extreme and to really have extra fun with the styles of cinema that we were using for telling each individual perspective of the story.”
Season 2 of ‘The Afterparty’ opens with a sequel to Aniq’s rom-com episode in the first season, and he wants to make a good impression on Zoe’s family. And like any good film of the genre, it doesn’t really go as planned—but it sets the story up for a lot of twists and turns to happen throughout the wedding weekend.
“Zoe and Aniq are really the heart of the show,” says King. “I think another thing that is unique to this show is when you think of so many of these murder mysteries—like ‘Colombo’ or any of the Agatha Christie Poirot kind of stories where one recurring character is the detective, you don’t also have this kind of beating heart and relationship that you care about. And so we wanted to lean into that.”
And as you could imagine, getting to build that romance into another season with another murder (which hasn’t lost its irony on the logical thinker that Aniq is), the minds behind crafting this mystery for Season 2 enjoyed diving once again into very different cinema storytellings.
“I really enjoyed the film noir one because it was very specific,” says Miller. “[There was] very specific dialogue that in anybody but Paul Walter Houser’s mouth would sound ridiculous. And being able to do something like that was sort of a dream come true. But all of them are really fun.”
“The Hitchcock three-strip technicolor look, that was really challenging to pull off,” remembers Lord.
“And I remember I was really worried about whether we would be able to pull off the Jane Austen one. Because it could be that people in period clothes either feel stiff or it feels like an SNL sketch,” finishes King. “But Anu Valia directed that and she did such an incredible job capturing not just its period, but also the energy of those Jane Austen movies. I remember the first day on set, seeing the first scene that she shot and being like, oh, this is gonna work.”
Catch new episodes of Season 2 of ‘The Afterparty‘ every Wednesday on Apple TV+
