1 out of 5

A worthwhile idea… realized in such a way as to completely hamper any continuing interest.  The bumper before an episode states that that week’s celebrity guest will be placed inside an “immersive” environment for 24 hours.  The guest then comes out and repeats sort of the same, with the added details that they’ll be part of a murder mystery, and they have no idea what’s going to happen.  It’s like televised dinner theater then, though with the “star” playing their part without a script and thus their co-stars have to improvise loosely to nudge things in the right direction.  This is worthwhile, especially when the immersive environment is a ham-fisted pulp noir with Tom Davis grumbling tough guy silliness at every opportunity.

But let’s continue.

After giving this speech to the camera, the celebrity guest star turns and walks down a day-lit path… over which a nighttime computer background drops and a billboard is transformed into a “Welcome to Successville” sign.  Sure, it’s a clever way to raise the curtain on the play, so to speak… but it also somewhat kills the immersion.  You enter into a play and the lights dim and music plays and then the stage lights go up… there’s a bit of easing us into the reality that’s being presented, whereas this opener is a slap in the face.  True enough, the sets used for any interactions are all practical, but the linking material from set piece to set piece uses this same faked digital look.  So how immersive can it actually be?  The 24 hour claim seems questionable, but that aside – were they just walking from stage to stage which were only ten feet away?  My point being that it’s hard to imagine that everyone stayed in character for long enough for this to ever be very convincing for the stars, or at least the way it was arranged couldn’t have encouraged that.  And maybe I’m wrong.  But then you should show us that.  By over-stylizing (and refusing fiction by have actors doing celebrity impersonations as the murder suspects…) and boiling things down to a brief 30 minutes (again, from a claimed several hours…) the “thrill” of seeing these guest stars as fishes-out-of-water dissipates.  It’s way too safe.  This is simply a problem in design: ideally, they could’ve one-roomed the mysteries and made it a strict hour of straight improv.  Unfortunately, I can understand how this wouldn’t have been as clear on paper as it was in execution.  And I should add that the first episode is funny.  It’s entertaining.  You don’t know where it’s going.  But by the second episode – and this is a big reason for the tanked rating – it’s clear that the mysteries are going to follow the exact same design, each and every time.  You clearly see the lines between script and improv.  I hung on through six episodes to see if things ever really got back to an off the cuff feeling, but nope, the structure and writing remains excruciatingly tame the whole way through.  So maybe it wasn’t a “simple” problem in design, but rather a lack of ability to write a strong mystery, and so instead we add filler and dumb celebrity impressions.

There’s an idea here.  Think it through next time so that it’s sustainable for more than an episode.  (Or cherry pick your guests better.  The best episodes – the first and the last – succeeded because the celebrities legitimately got into the roles (it seemed), thus supporting how the immersion aspect makes or breaks it.)