After the Party

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The ending left me with more questions than answers, characters I didn't expect to be instrumental to the missing character and Lizzie to my mind with the wrong person.

It’s not true that there is a house style to New Zealand television drama, but there are some threads that show up quite often. There’s the fusion of high stakes with comic elements, well-executed in previous Robyn Malcolm projects like Outrageous Fortune and Far North from earlier this year. This is likely both a natural outflow of the material and an attempt at going broad, understandable in a small market like ours. Less forgivable is a tendency toward caricature, roles reduced to heroes and villains – a pernicious issue that infects plotting and scripts and flows out into performances that leave our fine actors grasping like the soap stars they once were. The second season takes place the day after a wedding, following the same formula of each guest's perspective of the preceding after-party and the events leading up to it.Petski, Denise (November 11, 2020). "Tiffany Haddish, Sam Richardson, Zoë Chao Among 9 Cast In Apple's The Afterparty". Deadline Hollywood . Retrieved November 11, 2020. After the Party is another mesmerising thriller of secrets and lies from the author of The Girl Upstairs.Praise for The Girl Upstairs:

There are places where Connolly could be more incisive: there's much to-do about minor things (the 'event' at the party, for example, just doesn't have the significance that the blurb promises) but I like that she doesn't overstate. For example, she resists introducing either Mosley himself directly into the story or Diana and Mitfordiana - and the book is better for that restraint.At 60% into the book, yes I was reading on a kindle, I couldn't put it down, so keen to know where the missing character was and why still no murder. The story raced along but with no clear clues or motive it kept me gripped for hours whilst I tried to find out more. Meszaros, E.L. (January 19, 2022). " The Afterparty: Lord & Miller's Murder Mystery Comedy Series Was Almost a Movie". CBR.com. In conclusion, though this was well written and I did mostly enjoy it just don’t be expecting to be enamoured by the characters involved as they were to be frank a pretty unlikable bunch and yes that included the perfect Lizzie. I voluntarily reviewed a copy of After The Party.

While TVNZ should be very proud of the bet it has placed on After the Party, there are troubling signs that it’s not the start of a new golden age. The show came out of Te Puna Kairangi, a Covid-era government fund that has lapsed, and the powerful rebates underneath it will also be scrutinised by the incoming coalition. Some have also questioned TVNZ’s ongoing commitment to drama after it recently disestablished a key commissioning role. Well-read local screen newsletter Shownews asked pointedly, “if, a little over a year ago, two people were required to do the job, what’s changed at TVNZ that they now only need one?” It suggested TVNZ’s state ownership meant it could run at a loss. I'm gonna say, I had some real high hopes for this one just by the synopsis but sadly it just didn't work for me. I really struggled reading this one and it wasn't because it was slow. It was the fact that Lizzie drove me nuts. She reminded me of a whiny high schooler dealing with her obsession of unrequited love with Dean. I will say this had such real potential and writing was really well done, but a lot of redundancy in it that made it difficult. Keke Palmer as "Danner" (season 2), an actress cast as Danner in Danner's film X Marks the Murder Spot Although there were elements of After the Party I very much enjoyed, overall I was left with a slight sense of disappointment, the feeling that the book was less than the sum of its parts. For example, the ‘moment of weakness’ referred to in the blurb seems a minor misdemeanour on Phyllis’s part and one in which she is not really the most guilty party or responsible for what follows. Yet it seems to weigh on her conscience for the rest of her life so much so that she treats her draconian imprisonment as justified punishment. Later Phyllis experiences what she views as a ‘betrayal’ but which did not really to amount to anything like that, it seemed to me. I learned a lot from reading After the Party but wanted to feel more enthusiastic about the story than I did.

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The book isn’t particularly fast paced, particularly at the beginning but it is very intriguing and if you are interested in this period of history I think you will enjoy this book. From the beginning the reader is aware that something bad happened which Phyllis got sent to jail for but when this was revealed I have to confess I was a little disappointed as I thought it would be a much bigger event. The author does such a great job of building the tension and intrigue leading to the moment that I expected something really awful to have happened. That said I think the event was quite realistic in the way it happened which does add a depth to the story, making it seem more believable. The author is a skilful writer; I especially liked the imaginative descriptions and quirky similes. A few of my favourites: Thank you to NetGalley, Harper Collins UK l, One More Chapter and Georgina Lees for letting me read “After the Party”in exchange for an honest review. And then there’s Dean who was hardly the prize of the century. He really didn’t come across at all well in all of this and because of that I totally didn’t like the ending we arrived at here Lizzie should definitely have chosen differently. Zach Woods as Edgar Minnows, [12] [16] Grace's newlywed billionaire husband who is the murder victim [14]

The rest of this psychological thriller follows Lizzie as she tries to help with the investigation. Miller conceived of The Afterparty in the early 2010s, where he wanted to make a murder mystery showing the different perspectives of the murder from its witnesses, inspired by his love of the murder-mystery genre and Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon. The high school reunion aspect was added after Miller attended a high school reunion himself, thinking it would be a unique setting for such a concept. [29] Miller initially wrote it as a feature-length screenplay on his own while he was making Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street with Lord. In June 2013, the project was set-up at Sony Pictures as a film titled The Reunion, with Miller as sole writer and director, while producing the film along with Lord, Jonathan Kadin, and Hannah Minghella. [30] However, the film never came to fruition due to commitments with The Lego Movie and 22 Jump Street. Lord and Miller were still optimistic in making The Reunion while promoting The Lego Movie, [31] so when Miller considered making the project in later hears, he made the decision to make it as a mini-series. Miller felt that expanding the concept into a series would allow him to properly develop the characters. Doing so also gave Miller the idea to present each version of the event as a separate genre in line with the respective POV's of each witness. [32] Wow, what a wild ride this one was! The story centers on Lizzie, who has been in love with her coworker Dean for years and is just waiting for him to reciprocate. When she finally gets up the nerve to tell him, he beats her to it by telling her that he is in a serious relationship with one of her friends. That friend just happens to go missing later that night, and the rest of the book is focused on trying to figure out what happened. The story is told in linear fashion and solely from Lizzie’s POV. And what about Diana’s fellow inmates: many of whom were women, whose ‘crime’ was to make tea for fascists and type up their membership lists? What other lists of names might they have typed up if their beloved leader had come to power? What might they have done and should they have been imprisoned for what they might have done? This is the great achievement of After the Party, to take as unsympathetic a group of people as British fascist women and make them vividly alive, even sympathetic, while the horrible facts of history still hang over their actions. We are forced to understand and forced to make some kind of judgement. Let me preface this by saying I've never read a novel by Georgina Lees before, so when I speak about her writing skills, it's only with this book in mind. This is a rare situation where I felt like Lees showed she can write her cheeks off, but the content itself was too on the safe side. GEORGINA IF YOU'RE LISTENING I, an irrelevant reader, would love to see you write a character-driven contemporary fiction with a lil side of mystery. You've got da skills girl, don't settle for mainstream thriller content.Weintraub, Steve (January 29, 2022). "Chris Miller and Phil Lord on The Afterparty and Having Every Episode Tell the Story Using a Different Visual Format and Genre". Collider. Danner questions Brett, who tells his story in the style of an action movie, in which he casts himself as a ne'er-do-well hero who is committed to his family. Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Aniq and Yasper look through the garbage to find a discarded note written by one of the partygoers. The only thing worse than finding that out comes a few days later when lo and behold, that girl is missing. Who knows what happened? She is a bit of a drunk so it stands to reason she ran off or hurt herself by accident. But the cops are looking at the people in her life. Who did this and why? Will it bring her closer to getting what she wants or taking it away forever?