Critics’ Conversation: Winter TV’s Wicked Games

DANIEL FIENBERG Artificial lines defining the parameters of “Winter TV” can be drawn between the Dec. 19 finale of FX’s A Murder at the End of the World, in which antisocial-but-brilliant Darby Hart (Emma Corrin) resolved a murky series of deaths in a frigid Icelandic outpost drained of daylight, and the Feb. 18 finale of HBO’s True Detective: Night Country, in which antisocial-but-proficient officers Danvers and Navarro (Jodie Foster and Kali Reis) resolved a murky series of deaths in a frigid Alaskan outpost (filmed in Iceland) drained of daylight.

In between, every weekend has felt like a visit to TV’s narrative morgue. There was a two-week period in which we had straightforward murder mystery adaptations (Fool Me Once), pseudo-adaptations (Monsieur Spade), animated murder mysteries (Grimsburg), and murder mysteries with almost every imaginable accent and time period solved by people with almost every imaginable eccentricity. And if that wasn’t enough, Hulu’s Death and Other Details, a locked-room mystery on a luxury cruise ship, felt like a self-conscious omnibus of every murder mystery ever written, filmed or told around a campfire.

Angie, did you have favorites from this winter’s whodunits? Or, put differently, what recent TV shamus would you enlist to investigate your own demise? 

ANGIE HAN Those are two very different questions! I want Darby Hart to investigate my murder, because I’m probably going to die parked in front of the TV, MacBook on lap and iPhone in hand, and I suspect she’ll have better luck sorting through those clues than, say, Sam Spade, a man who’s never seen a computer. 

My favorite of these dramas is True Detective: Night Country. I never really got into previous seasons. But this one gripped me with its super eerie vibe and strong female leads who aren’t just bland, boring Strong Female Leads. By the time we were throwing around the word “corpsicle,” I was fully in for the ride.

Surveying the larger TV landscape, though, what strikes me is how unalike all these shows are. While they share the same basic premise of “brilliant detective(s) investigating impossible murder case(s),” they direct that premise to totally different ends. AMC’s Sanctuary: A Witch’s Tale uses it to demonstrate how hate can spread through a community. Showtime’s The Woman in the Wall deploys it as bait to deliver a heartbreaking drama about Ireland’s horrific Magdalene Laundries. Apple TV+’s Criminal Record wants you to think long and hard about the failings of law enforcement and the innocent people who get crushed in its gears. 

All this time, I’ve been wondering why there are so many dang murder mysteries this winter, but maybe — to borrow a move from True Detective — that’s the wrong question. Maybe the right question is: What is it about murder mysteries that makes them such an ideal vehicle for so many different ideas, tones, themes? 

FIENBERG It’s been fun to watch Night Country stir up the most True Detective buzz since the first season — a tribute to the distinctively depressing world creator Issa López built around the fictional Ennis, Alaska, and the intriguing study in female power traced by Foster and Reis.

As a Winter TV phenomenon, this particular rush of murder mysteries has felt like a wrinkle in the resilience of closed-ended, Dick Wolf-vein procedurals that still populate much of broadcast real estate (and that have returned in earnest after the strike-based production shutdowns). Some people clearly still believe that institutions can mete out justice equitably. But just as many would rather put our fate in the hands of a tough-talking Clive Owen (Monsieur Spade), an amusingly inscrutable Mandy Patinkin (Death and Other Details) or even the homespun vigilantism of Juno Temple’s Fargo character.

It’s indeed notable that many of these mysteries don’t have wholly satisfying solutions, whether they require the deus ex Alfre Woodard of Monsieur Spade or the careful mediation of reality TV cat-fighting orchestrated by a bekilted Alan Cumming on Peacock’s Traitors.

HAN The solutions might not always be satisfying, but the fact that you can generally count on there to be one can be comforting. Real life is often overwhelming and confusing, with no straightforward answers. By contrast, few TV mysteries end with “anyway, we don’t actually know what happened” or “turns out there was no killer and the person just slipped and fell” — not none, but it’s rare. 

One that kind of does, though? Expats. Its kid-goes-missing premise sounds like the setup for a crime drama. But no resolution ever arrives. The Amazon series is much more concerned with how its characters deal with that uncertainty, and the grief and guilt accompanying it. And it has no answers for those questions, either; rather, the grace it extends is acknowledging that sometimes, there is no answer. You just go on because you have to.

But, it’s not like mysteries were the only genre being redirected and rebooted to fresh purpose this winter. We also got Amazon’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which uses the high stakes of a spy thriller to explore the ups and downs of marriage. I found the chemistry between Donald Glover and Maya Erskine a bit lackluster, but it’s a clever premise — and a relatable one, if you’ve ever had an argument with your long-term partner that feels like life or death. 

FIENBERG The more I reflect on it, the more I love Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which inverts the sizzle-to-steak ratio of Doug Liman’s 2005 film in interesting ways; it turns all the explosions, murders and missions into amusing afterthoughts within a bittersweet love story about tiny betrayals and disappointments. I totally buy Glover and Erskine’s chemistry, and the guest stars — Parker Posey, Wagner Moura, Ron Perlman, Sarah Paulson — are terrific.

I appreciated Disney+/Hulu’s Echo along the same lines. It’s barely functional as a comic book adaptation but rather thrilling as a story about how disability and generational trauma can become their own brand of superpower. 

I like the audacity of these hybrids, especially when the alternatives are limited swings like Amazon’s Reacher and CBS’ Reacher-lite (aka Tracker); Paramount+’s Sexy Beast, which has none of what was distinctive about the film Sexy Beast; or the decent Disney+ adaptation of Percy Jackson and the Olympians, which aspires only to be more like the Percy Jackson books than like the two awful movies. 

Even attempts at historical drama have felt like they were trying to fit complicated things into familiar boxes. FX’s Feud: Capote vs. The Swans plays more like a season of Genius, and Nat Geo’s Genius: MLK/X plays more like a season of Feud. Apple TV+’s The New Look can’t decide if it wants to be Feud: Dior vs. Chanel or Genius: Every French Fashion Designer. At least Masters of the Air (also on Apple), which wants to nestle into the Band of Brothers formula, gives viewers the big-budget aerial exploits and deep on-the-verge-of-stardom ensemble its trailers promised. 

HAN The New Look is a great example of “trying to fit a complicated thing into a familiar box.” Its hook is that it’s a series about fashion, featuring a bunch of names you definitely recognize. But Dior’s sumptuous creations don’t amount to much more than pretty wrapping paper for what’s actually a World War II drama in which the main characters just kind of happen to be very famous designers. I think it’s quite a good version of that drama, to be clear, but I wonder if the bait-and-switch will frustrate more viewers than it entices.

Much as I’ve enjoyed watching some of these series figure out fresh ways to hook unsuspecting viewers, there’s something to be said for a show that is what it is and doesn’t worry too much about packaging. One of my faves of this year is Max’s Sort Of, a modest Canadian gem that just wrapped up its third and final season. It’s a Gen Z coming-of-age comedy but so much more distinctive than that label implies — funny when it wants to be funny, achingly poignant when it wants to be achingly poignant. It follows its nonbinary 20-something lead (Bilal Baig) through themes as big as romance, grief and family but understands that self-exploration doesn’t stop in young adulthood.

FIENBERG Sort Of is charming and, in Baig, has a lead like nobody else on TV. On the subject of under-the-radar gems with strong senses of their own identity, I’ve been telling people since December to watch Kat Sadler’s Such Brave Girls on Hulu. It’s a genuinely funny dysfunctional family comedy with far more laughs than your usual series about depression and trauma. 

Let me close by reframing my initial question: What non-detective character from the past few months of TV would you enlist to investigate your own demise? For me, it’s probably Haru from Netflix’s weirdly endearing stop-motion Pokémon Concierge. She knows how to get things done.

HAN And you laughed at me when I told you to watch Pokémon Concierge! Doesn’t seem so funny now that she’s the only thing keeping you from turning into a cold case, does it? As for me, I’ll go with Dr. Gamelli from Dr. Death, played with righteous fury by Luke Kirby. He’s got experience already in getting to the bottom of suspicious deaths. 

The real question here should probably be why you and I are making plans in the event of our sudden and violent ends. The answer is that Peak Murder TV has clearly warped our brains. Onward and upward, to the relatively peaceful pastures of … uh, Shogun? Ripley? Maybe the season of blood isn’t over, after all. 

This story first appeared in the Feb. 21 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.