How The Afterparty Nailed Wes Anderson’s Aesthetic, Taxidermy and All

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https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood...derson-episode

The first season of Apple TV+’s ensemble murder mystery-comedy The Afterparty made waves by switching genres every episode, a gambit that let it deeply explore each of its characters—an action-movie perspective for the bro-iest of bros, a musical for the guy who longed to be the star of the show, and so on. It also had a profound commitment to puzzles and codes, pushing its audience to decipher each hidden hint.

With the second season, showrunners Chris Miller, Phil Lord, and Anthony King have doubled down on both of their murder mystery’s distinctive aspects: “There’s a lot of stuff that’s still in there that they haven’t figured out yet,” Miller tells Vanity Fair of the show’s avid Reddit fan base, who have returned to pick through every frame of this season too. He’s up for the challenge: “There’s like twice as many formal puzzles and probably three times as many informal, hidden, other things. It’s crazy.”

After a somewhat sheepish pause, he adds, “It’s…really, it’s so dorky.”

As for the genres, the broad “it’s a teen movie!” “it’s animated!” strokes of the first season have gotten more specific. The new season opened with a sequel to Aniq’s (Sam Richardson) rom-com trope; subsequent episodes have been told through lenses of a Jane Austen–esque romance and a black-and-white noir movie. That one was focused on Paul Walter Hauser’s Travis, a conscious nod to those tenacious Redditors.

“They really are like Travis in that they chase some wild leads, but they also get a lot of things right,” Miller says.

Showrunner and writer King agrees: “So many things that they’re grabbing on, I’m just blown away. There are people that are listening to every number that a character mentions in the entire show, and things like that, that are just so far afield from what I thought they would actually commit to.”

Lord was impressed by how quickly audiences caught on to the puzzles in the first season, immediately snagging on things like code in semaphore that appeared in a handful of background photos. This season, the game is not only afoot—it has been upped. “It feels like the permission was granted from the first season to be more challenging, since you’re dealing with whomever is the very best sleuther for any individual clue.”

While you’ll have to decipher the clues yourself, we can talk about genre. This week’s episode, “Hannah,” leans into an incredibly specific (and accidentally timely, given TikTok trends and movie releases) trope: the Wes Anderson aesthetic.

When Zoe (Zoe Chao), Aniq, and Detective Danner (Tiffany Haddish) step into the yurt that Hannah (Anna Konkle) calls home, they’re stepping into another world, one overflowing—but tidily so—with meticulously arranged, incredibly eclectic collections. Here is a shelf of vintage typewriters, arranged just so. Another holds an array of carved wooden anchors. There’s a taxidermy corner and its attendant bell jars and shadow boxes, a chipmunk forever paused mid-munch. Hannah is dressed to match her burnt orange surroundings, draped with different textures and shades of goldenrod, down to the barrette snapped into her hair.

The showrunning team, Miller says, has a “murder first, then…cover it up” approach to plotting the season. They apply genre where it fits, rather than checking off tropes from a wish list. Though if there had been a wish list, a Wes Anderson–style episode would likely be on it.

“We’re all very huge fans of his work and have been forever, since the beginning,” Miller says. “When Phil and I moved out to LA in 1997, we would basically sit at home and watch Rushmore at least two or three times a week instead of going out and meeting people and having an actual life.”

Lord calls Rushmore one of the films he’s seen most in his life, “right up there with the Robert Altman Popeye—I had the tape when I was a kid and wore it out.”

Once they’d nailed the character of Hannah, the adopted sister of recently deceased groom Edgar (Zach Woods), they knew she had “a very specific and twee vibe,” Miller says. “It felt like an easy choice for her character to get really formalist with it.”

He calls the recent TikTok and Instagram trend of filming scenes in an Anderson style “a little bit lazy, to be perfectly honest. There’s a lot more going on with Wes Anderson as a filmmaker than symmetrical framing and pastel colors. There’s a lot of emotional forlorn longing in a lot of his work, and there’s an impish spirit. He’s always trying to do something stylistically unusual, and do things with a camera that haven’t been done before. That sort of formalism can be all that people see, but there’s a lot going on underneath that…. When you want to tell a real story with it, that’s when it becomes interesting.”

The look was important, with a saturated color palette and lenses swapped out to emulate Anderson’s style. But more than that was the approach: Anderson’s films highlight characters who, however alienated they are, aren’t alien. (With one notable exception in the recent Asteroid City.)

“Wes’s movies are fundamentally really sympathetic to the characters and humane. Even the bully in Rushmore is just someone who wanted to be in one of his plays,” Lord says. “So I think it actually is an interesting fit with the tone of the show, because [the show] is also trying to look at every single character with humanity and sympathy.”

Production designer Bruce Hill says that this episode was one that he was most nervous about, as well as most excited.

“The Wes Anderson one I was like, thrilled and also worried about, because we wanted to do it justice,” he says. He cites Fantastic Mr. Fox as one of his favorites, and says that from inspiration boards to the final shot, all the teams on the show have to be in lockstep to capture both the genres and the intricate puzzles the show is known for.

“We were trying to get as on the nose as possible without making specific reference to any actual [scenes]—we weren’t actually trying to recreate an actual scene from a Wes Anderson film,” he says. “We were ‘in the style of’ or ‘in the manner of.’ We were just like, How would this be if [there] were a Wes Anderson version of this?”

That, Miller says, is why you won’t be seeing any zebra wallpaper in this episode, no matter how much Hannah reminds us all of Margot Tenenbaum. It’s the difference between spoof and homage.

“So many times when they were like, Ah, that feels a little too much like a reference to this specific movie, we changed up the blocking or changed up the script so it didn’t feel like [that],” he says.

As for Anderson himself, the showrunners say they’ve met him, but aren’t on texting terms or anything like that.

“It may be after this we never will be,” Miller says with a laugh. “But I would hope that if he were to ever see it that he would appreciate it. But my guess is that he will never want to see it.”