Review: The Afterparty Offers Up More Creative Genres in Season Two

by Christopher James

How often can one person stumble into a murder? This question plagues the comedy Only Murders In The Building, though it has the conceit of a murder podcast to justify it. Season one of The Afterparty has a similar problem to solve but it won many fans thanks to its multi-genre Rashomon style while capitalizing on the murder mystery craze of the moment between The White Lotus and Knives Out. Still, the modular design of the show - changing tone every episode - kept it from being a runaway success like its fellow murder mystery projects.

Season two presents a brand new mystery, but the same episode structure. Does it work better the second time around?

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Sharp Objects: Episode 7 "Falling"

previous recaps
1 "Vanish" Spencer
2 "Dirt" Nathaniel
3 "Fix" Ilich
4 "Ripe" Murtada
5 "Closer" Chris
6 "Cherry" Nathaniel 

Major series SPOILERS after the jump (and throughout Episode 7) so get caught up before reading more... 

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Sharp Objects: Episode 5 "Closer"

Previously: Episode 4 "Ripe"

by Chris Feil

This week’s Sharp Objects installment opened with its morphing opening credits turned into an ominous cooing, as if from the lullaby of a captor. And this week was similarly barbarous with its flailing comforts. “Closer”, its chapter title promises, describing both our discovery of the mystery and the shows encroaching brutal intimacy. This is the most contained episode yet, taking place over the course of a single day and mostly set on Eudora estate with all of the players brought together. It’s been a show built on a backbone of knowing glances, and “Closer” stacks several atop one another at once. Everyone has eyes on them, and no one feels fewer than Amy Adams’ Camille...

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Sharp Objects: Episode 2 "Dirt"

Previously: Episode 1 "Vanish"

Go report somewhere else. Let these people be"

by Nathaniel R

Team Experience has decided to pass the baton each week on Sharp Objects for different perspectives / takes on the show. Two episodes in I think that seems fitting. While the show is focused on one woman's perspective, albeit not in a first-person narrative way, its shard-like editing is disorientingly multiple in feeling, as if Camille (Amy Adams) can't shake any of her past selves but also can't just be in any moment with herself. The communal self, the incestuously local population of depressed sweaty Wind Gap, Missouri, isn't any easier for her.

The second episode "Dirt" revolves around the funeral of Natalie Keene, a young girl murdered by an unknown killer. Detective Willis (from Kansas City... and our dreams) fears it's a serial situation given a similar early crime in Wind Gap. Willis and Camille do their own individual digging while Adora (Patricia Clarkson) continually bristles at her daughter Camille's reporting...

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Sharp Objects: Episode 1 "Vanish"

By Spencer Coile 

It’d be easy for audiences to tune into Sharp Objects with considerably high expectations. It stars Amy Adams and Patricia Clarkson, is the latest “prestige” piece of television from HBO, and is directed by Jean-Marc Vallée – who is coming off of a fantastic year with the success of HBO’s 2017 phenomenon,Big Little Lies. Add in source material from Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn, and you have yourself an unsettling, binge-worthy summer series to watch. 

Yet, while Big Little Lies was fantastic, those drawing comparisons between it and Sharp Objects are evaluating HBO’s latest all wrong. Its first episode, “Vanish” demonstrates this perfectly by introducing a story and a leading lady who are so detached, so cut off from reality, that it’d be difficult to compare it to anything else. 

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