The detective and his former client are the stars of this whodunit Hulu series.
“Pay Attention. Details matter. If you want to solve a crime, any crime, you must first learn to see through the illusion,” as said by Detective Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin), is how the new Hulu series “Death and Other Details” begins.
Created by Mike Weiss (“Chicago P.D.”) and Heidi Cole McAdams (“The 100”), it’s a whodunit that almost plays like a splice between “Knives Out” and “Death on the Nile.” Two episodes were given to us viewers, and while I have some reservations in terms of its multiple suspects, it still has a certain kind of style and charisma that keeps us guessing on who the killer is.
The show’s main heroine is Imogene (Violet Beane), whose mother died in a car explosion as a child, and Cotesworth, who used to be labeled “the world’s greatest detective,” couldn’t finish the case. This resorted in their estranged chemistry throughout the years, and she’s less than happy to see him when they’re both on the same cruise.
He comes out of retirement to solve a murder mystery on the boat. The murder of a total jerk named Keith Trubitsky (Michael Gladis). But can it somehow be connected to her mother’s death? That’s when Cotesworth and Imogene must collaborate to investigate.
Suspects include Imogene’s wealthy best friend Anna (Laura Patten), her immature coke-head brother Tripp (Jack Cutmore-Scott), her wife Leila (Pardis Seremi), the boat owner Sunil Ranja (Rahul Kohli), the sexy security guard Jules (Hugo Diego Garcia), the crew manager Teddy Goh (Angela Zhou), her meek sister Winnie (Annie Q. Reigel), the soon-to-be retired businessman Lawrence Collier (David Marshall Grant), his wife Katherine (Jayne Atkinson), their family lawyer Llewellyn Mathers (Jere Burns), the Washington governor Alexandra Hochenberg (Tamberla Perry), the business icon Celia Chun (Lisa Lu), her daughter Eleanor (Karoline), the priest Father Toby (Danny Johnson), and his TikTok son That Derek (Sincere Wilbert).
So far, in our two episode introduction, there are a bit too many suspects for us to completely pay attention to, but maybe they’ll have us thinking more once we continue on to the next few episodes. But the real stars of “Death and Other Details” are Beane and Patinkin, who add style and timing to their characters, even in their compilation connections with each other. In fact, the way they handle their issues isn’t as generic or irritating as it probably would have been with different writers and different actors. There’s patience and reasons within them.
This Hulu series is behind “Only Murders in the Building,” but it is on its way to something that pay tribute to the whodunits of the past. A cruise ship, a perfect place for a murder to take place, and to questions the unusual suspects.
At the end of the second episode, the narrator Cotesworth asks who killed the show’s victim, and suggests: “You could skip to the end for that. But then, you’ll miss all the cover things I said. Better to take it page by page.”
Streaming on Hulu