Review: FOUL PLAY is Fun Improv That Needs Better Pacing
A few weeks ago, the new interactive murder mystery series Foul Play was launched. The series comes from TBD Theatricals and each part of the 5-part anthology series features different actors including Gaten Matarazzo (Stranger Things) and Michael Urie (Ugly Betty) participating in a different themed murder mystery. In addition, each episode is loosely improvised to create some great comedic moments. The next episode to release is The Dark Curse of Savion Sunguard on May 12 with a live premiere at 9 PM EDT. The Foul Play team was kind enough to give me access to the first episode Murder at Vanguard Mansion and I wanted to share my thoughts about the experience and I’ll do my best to keep spoilers to a minimum.
When the case begins, all of the suspects will be together in one room just minutes before a murder is about to occur. Once they disperse, Foul Play becomes an interactive game, giving the viewer full access to surveillance cameras in four rooms, each with three different camera views, allowing them to click around, follow different suspects, listen to conversations, and collect clues. Foul Play is loosely improvised and every sneaky conversation is happening in real time, so the viewer is encouraged to stay eagle eyed and follow the story threads that are the most suspicious. Or, they can just click around and follow their favorite character - it’s totally up to them!
In Foul Play, each episode appears to have a prepared outline for what is going to happen, but then the different actors are given free reign to improvise most, if not all, of their lines and some aspects of their characters. For example, after the murder occurs in Murder at Vanguard Mansion, a detective shows up, announces his name as something close to Bibble D. Bop and it becomes a running joke because of how ridiculous that is. It seems that the other actors did not know that would be his name. I do not have a problem with this format and overall it works really well for story telling providing highly comedic moments.
Another plus for Foul Play is that the actors are all good at what they do and very capable. For the most part, they’re able to stay in character and I never felt like any of them were bad actors. In fact, you can tell that everyone involved had a good time and they seemed pretty friendly toward each other which is especially good in improv in my opinion.
Unfortunately, there were a few aspects that really hurt Foul Play in my opinion. First, the episodes (or at least Murder at Vanguard Mansion) are way too long. I believe it came in at about 90 minutes and it just felt slow. One of the keys to improv in my opinion is speed, but when you spend about 30 minutes getting to the murder of a murder mystery party, it feels like everything has been dragging. Then, it takes about an hour for them to solve the murder which, again, feels very slow given the format. I think keeping it to a much tighter 45 minutes (1 hour tops) would have greatly improved my experience. In the same vein, there were a couple of moments where not everyone seemed on the same page. There’s a moment where a character goes around telling everyone it’s time for the talent show and then about 5 minutes later they have to go back and tell everyone again that it’s time for the talent show. Something like this is easier to look past for me when the show feels much tighter, but it was just feeling slow.
Another aspect that I wasn’t a fan of was the ways in which you interact with the show. Basically, you as the viewer can choose at almost any time which of the four available rooms you want to be watching and inside each room there are three camera angles to choose from: one that follows whoever is speaking, one that is basically a wide shot of the room, and then a third black and white camera that is at a different angle. I found this interactivity mostly useless in all honesty. This means that it’s very easy to miss out on potentially key moments and there are also several times where you can see the other cameras (but not hear them) and you see a person just sitting there basically doing nothing. I can understand what they were going for. They wanted it to be a thing where you choose where you have to go and weigh the risks of who to follow, but once again, because the show felt so slow I didn’t really feel like I was missing much. The idea is that you have to click around to see the various motives for characters to help you solve the mystery, but I personally didn’t feel like it did a good job of keeping me engaged. The additional camera angles were also something that I almost never used because whenever I did use them, there was nothing new to be gained.
I would’ve liked the interactive elements to actually feel more interactive in all honesty. There’s also a button labeled evidence, but it doesn’t do anything until the detective is actually solving the case at the very end and listing all the evidence. I wish there had been a notepad I could have used to keep notes on the different characters, or a checklist of things to look out for, or basically anything.
After watching Murder at Vanguard Mansion of Foul Play, I wished that there had been no interactive element and I wished that it had been about half the length. I liked the characters. I liked a fair number of the jokes. There’s a character who thinks that the cult should be worshiping Kelsey Grammer instead of Henry Winkler and that was legitimately funny to me. The show just merely lost steam because it is improv which thrives on speed and they drug it out.
