The Afterparty creators Chris Miller and Phil Lord have had their share of successes, from the wildly popular The LEGO Movie to the Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Their latest production lives up to their reputation and then some. The Afterparty tells a murder mystery over the course of a season, with each episode presenting the night's events from the perspective of a different character -- and through a completely different genre. The result is a hilarious tour through action, thriller, romcom and musical stylings that brings viewers closer to catching the culprit.
Miller and Lord spoke with CBR about creating The Afterparty, including where the idea for the genre-defying, Rashomon-style series came from and its original conception as a movie. The creators also spoke about how the ambitious nature of The Afterparty didn't stop those who saw the pitch from being excited about the series and how important it was to work with talented comedians who are also creators to bring the show to life.
CBR: Where did the idea for The Afterparty come from?
Chris Miller: About 11 or 12 years ago, I had this idea to make a murder mystery in a Rashomon-style. The real genesis was growing up being obsessed with the murder mystery genre and reading all the Agatha Christie books, watching Columbo and Murder She Wrote and watching movies like The Last of Sheila and even Clue and stuff like that -- anything I could get my hands on. I just love that type of storytelling where it's an intricate puzzle and at the end you get surprised but are satisfied because you're like, "Oh, it was all right there in front of me, I should have seen that coming."
The idea was to take it but have each of the suspects tell their version of the night and have you only be able to solve it by sort of understanding what happened through everybody's point of view. It was a really interesting, just conceptual idea. Then I went to a high school reunion and realized that that was a really emotional place where there was a lot of old dynamics and history and regrets and feelings, both positive and negative. It seemed like an interesting place to set it and we wrote it as a movie. We got kind of busy making some other stuff with some LEGO and Jump Streets and Spider-Manses, but we ultimately had a moment to take a breath and thought, "Oh, maybe we should take a look at this thing again."
We realized that the format of a movie just didn't give enough time for each character's point of view; it couldn't dig into them as much as we wanted. So we thought, "What if we turn it into a series where we could have each character have their own episode and then we could really stylize it in the way they see the world." That really pushed the idea to go after this idea where everybody has their own film genre or style, that they see themselves as the hero of their own narrative and really lean into that idea. It really blossomed after that. So that's how it sort of evolved over the years.
Phil Lord: I am regretting that we didn't use Spider-Manses as the title for Spider-Verse.
Miller: That's right.
Lord: That is a big oversight.
Miller: I know, what are you gonna do?
Lord: The day has been filled with a couple of big regrets and that's, I'd say, number two on the list.
Was The Afterparty a hard sell to networks, convincing them to let you tell the same story multiple times over multiple episodes?
Lord: No, I think Chris did a really clever job of... I recently watched a movie that purported to be a Rashomon but every retelling of the events was the same events. In this case, it does a really good job of adding to the story every time and illuminating it and showing you things that you didn't already see and helping you get a closer look at all of the characters. I think television does such a good job of allowing you to spend time with characters. I think anybody who works in TV saw this pitch and thought that they had to have it because you want it beamed into your living room.
Miller: It wasn't hard to get people to sign on. It's an ambitious show, so it's not an easy show to produce -- it's not a thing you can just sort of shoot quickly over a couple of weeks. This is a very cinematic thing where every episode is its own little film and each episode required a totally different lensing, lighting package, costumes -- there are variations in costumes in every episode -- music, everything about it was like you're doing a bespoke thing for each one.
Then each had their own production challenges, like making an action movie episode where you have to do a car chase and a fistfight and then doing a musical episode where you're writing a bunch of songs and choreography and then doing an animated episode where you have to make all the characters animated caricatures of them and the environments that we're currently shooting in while you're trying to get that happening at the same time. So I think everybody understood the ambition of it. What was great was that Apple was really excited to get behind it as a piece of premium television and let it be as big and cinematic as it wanted to be.
Another thing that helped bring The Afterparty to life was the cast of incredible comedians that you brought on board. How important was it to bring this improv skill into your storytelling, and how difficult were they to wrangle?
Miller: Well, I wouldn't say difficult.
Lord: I object to the premise of the question.
Miller: I'll say that we love to have a very open and creative set wherever we're doing things because good ideas can come from anywhere. There was a reason why we hired these people: because of their superpowers as the some of the funniest people on the planet, but also a lot of them are showrunners, creators, filmmakers, writers in their own right. They really understand the whole series and the goal of the scene. So it wasn't like they're off being silly and we're like "Guys, guys, guys, back to the script!"
It was a thing where we were all very thoughtful about it. It was a very well planned out piece where the script was very...everything related to everything else, all the episodes are interconnected. That was really planned out like a piece of clockwork, but within that there's a lot of room to have fun and have the actors add their own spin and their own ideas because they understood the whole as filmmakers themselves. You're asking these people to play a character and then play it eight different ways -- it's a lot to ask someone, but they were all up for it. And we had a blast, right?
Lord: Yes. You just want to have great creative partners to go into the foxhole with and then you want an environment where they're rewarded for contributing something. That's why I was joking that I reject the premise -- that's what you're hoping for is that someone comes on and says, "Oh, I got an idea," or "Here's another spin on it." Because when you're in edit and this one joke that you thought was going to be great isn't landing, you're really glad you have options and not just four takes of the same exact thing.
Were there any genres that you didn't get to explore in this season of The Afterparty?
Lord: Yeah, there's tons, and hopefully the folks out there will watch and re-watch The Afterparty Season 1 so much that there will be opportunities to do maybe a few more.
Miller: We had such a blast making it and there are so many other styles of filmmaking out there that we didn't get a chance to do, that didn't fit into this storyline.
Lord: [laughs] Nope, there's only eight.
Miller: The eight only ways of telling a story.
Lord: Like tarot cards, there's just a few.
Miller: It was just such a pleasant experience, especially during a pandemic when everyone had been cooped up in their homes, just to be able to go to a space with a group of incredibly talented and funny people who are all really kind and liked each other and be able to make something was such a fun experience and rewarding for everybody that it would be a blast to think of a totally different one.
The first three episodes of The Afterparty premiere Jan. 28 on Apple TV+.