Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * * *
Cast: Violett Beane, Mandy Patinkin, Lauren Patten, Angela Zhou, Hugo Diego Garcia, Pardis Saremi, Linda Edmond, Jack Cutmore-Scott, Karoline, Jayne Atkinson, Rahul Kohli, Jere Burns, Lisa Lu, David Marshall Grant, Annie Q. Riegel, Sincere Wilbert, Tamberla Perry, Michael Gladis, Leslie Kwan, Christian Svensson, James Pizzinato, Sophia Reid-Gantzert, Byron Noble, Edem Nyamadi, Paul Yu, King Lau, Mauricio Romero, Sofia Rosinsky, Adrianna Olson, Nathan Parrott, Kharytia Bilash, Jeff Gonek, Ana de Lara, Doralynn Mui, Georgia Waters, Andril Zhebrovskyi, Alyson Bath, Takuma Behjatnejad.
Murder has had to become inventive in order to still appeal to those whose little grey cells work overtime to solve the cases before them. No longer a simple case of why, the amateur sleuth is deluged with back breaking, pain staking reels of television sleight of hand in which to draw them into a narrative that confounds and bewilders, but which also leaves them wonderfully exhausted by the conclusion and the intense reveal.
Murder requires more than a circumstance, it must utilise every possible deception at its disposal in order to confound, to put the sleuth off the trail, and in what better way than to have a criminal become the detective, the ultimate noir but captured in glorious colour and fine detail.
Death and Other Details might well become in time recognised as the most deliberate and fantastically original series to hit the television screens of the decade, and in a world of the super-rich, the acknowledgement that the so called upper classes are proved beyond a shadow of doubt to be the most corrupt force that humanity has to offer, that our lives are nothing but play things in their hands, the death of one person on board a luxury liner at sea can cause a tsunami of exposure, and that one person who is close to a family but an outsider can be the one to bring it all out into the light; this is the outrageous cool that comes from a series absolutely at the top of its game.
Artistic to the extreme, punchy, unequalled in its delivery, Death and Other Details is a performance of the intricate and the intended deceit, a stylish affair in which Violett Beane and Mandy Patinkin are considerably adept at portraying in their respective roles as the thief Imogene and the proscribed greatest ever detective Rufus Coatsworth, and that the plot that reunited them after the death of her mother seventeen years before is an ever changing canvas of the extremes of sex and dishonesty, of a cruel and bitter harvest sown in the sweat shops of China, and the luxury built on lies…this is the reality of a genre expanding itself to keep the viewer entertained and pushing the boundaries of sleuthing.
An instant classic, ten episodes of detective perfection, Death and Other Details is modern noir’s pinnacle.
Ian D. Hall