I suppose the new Hulu limited series Death and Other Details is hitting the streaming service at just the right time. As the country is experiencing a violent cold snap across the Midwest and continuing East, there’s nothing better than being able to hunker down with a cozy mystery series taking place aboard a sunny Mediterranean cruise that turns deadly. Audiences are showing a renewed interest in the nostalgic fun of the whodunit thanks to films like Knives Out and its sequel, not to mention Kenneth Branagh bringing Agatha Christie back for a new generation with three entertaining Hercule Poirot mysteries in 2017, 2022, and 2023, so it stands to reason that Death and Other Details already has a leg up on other new shows premiering in the early days of 2024.

And yet, while this show from television writers Mike Weiss and Heidi Cole McAdams has the required snap and procedural pace to help define it as a cleverly orchestrated locked-room murder mystery, it struggles with holding our interest whenever the central crime isn’t being investigated. A lack of compellingly eccentric supporting characters (what I wouldn’t have given to have a dotty psychic or narcoleptic wildlife photographer on board!) and the feeling that it’s alternately stealing or spoofing other detective outings begins to nag you with each successive episode.

A brief prologue introduces us to Imogene Scott (Violett Beane), taken in by the wealthy Collier family after her mom’s mysterious death and haunted by the feeling that her mother was killed for knowing something she shouldn’t have. Hoping to help Imogene assuage her fears, the Colliers hired world-famous detective Rufus Cotesworth (Mandy Patinkin, Wish I Was Here) to assemble the puzzle pieces and determine what happened. Years go by, the mystery remains unsolved, and Imogene grows to loathe the man positioned to be her savior.

Remaining the closest of friends with Anna Collier (Tony Winner Lauren Patten), Imogene is invited on a once-in-a-lifetime cruise with the Collier family across the Mediterranean on Sunil Ranja’s (Rahul Kohli, The Fall of the House of Usher) newly restored ocean liner. It promises to be a grand time for relaxing on the deck, drinking by the pool, and for Anna to broker a deal between her family and the Chuns, who seek to expand their business into America. With her father serving as the head of their company, sealing this deal will position Anna as his worthy successor. Other guests invited along due to their affiliation with the Colliers include an obnoxious wheeler-dealer (Michael Gladis, Terminator Genisys), priest (Danny Johnson), and governor (Tamberla Perry), and the Chun’s newest member of their personal security detail…Rufus Cotesworth.

The ship is barely out of port when a guest is murdered in their room during the night; it’s a room Imogene happened to be in shortly before their demise. Attempting to cover her tracks while finding the real killer, she runs into Rufus, already in detective mode and aware she isn’t the culprit. The mid-Ocean arrival of laced-up Interpol agent Hilde Eriksen (Linda Emond, The Unforgivable, sporting a Swedish accent so outlandish even the chef from the Muppets thinks it’s too much) ramps up the pressure to locate the killer before they can escape into thin air. Is the answer right under their noses, or are there additional solutions to consider and crimes to uncover the further out to sea they travel?

I must warn those with a weak disposition about some almost appallingly bad green screen effects that convince no one we’re in the middle of the ocean. It’s so bad that sometimes I doubted even the characters believed they had set sail to an exotic locale. While only eight episodes were released for early review (no, not even I know ‘whodunit’!), there is a chance these effects were still being worked on, but I tried to stretch out my watch as long as possible to account for any last-minute updates. Thankfully, when the action moves indoors, the production design kicks up a notch, and you notice the sharp visual delimitation between people and classes aboard the ship.

The pilot is directed by Marc Webb, who got his start in music videos before graduating to feature films with 500 Days of Summer in 2009 and the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man films in 2012 and 2014. He’s turned to mostly directing for television now, and while elements of Death and Other Details have a cinematic touch to them, especially in the pilot, despite the inclusion of questionable amounts of frankly unnecessary sex and nudity, there’s a conventional network TV aura surrounding the later episodes. Now and then, a burst of energy from a revealed twist will propel the action forward, and the show gathers speed it can’t ever seem to sustain for an entire episode.

Part of that has to do with the casting.  Patinkin is no Poirot, and he’s thankfully not trying to put his accent through the Daniel Craig/Knives Out syrupy drawl converter, though, like Emond, his dialect choice is bizarrely off the mark.  Even so, I entirely bought him as the type of detective he was presenting on film, and his chemistry with Beane is strong. While Patinkin has the exposition of the piece in voiceover, Beane plays most of it out onscreen, and with her severe bob and bangs, she makes a winning supporting sleuth. Patten was out of this world terrific in her Tony-winning role in Broadway’s Jagged Little Pill, but as Anna she can’t shake her theater roots with an overplayed performance that lacks subtlety.

More successful is Paradis Saremi as Patten’s nervous wife, convinced there is a conspiracy around every corner and the mononyms Karoline stealing almost every scene she slinks through as Patten’s former lover and now business rival. There are more characters I could speak about (we haven’t even discussed the crew!), but what makes these types of series interesting is to see who in the background might become necessary as the episodes roll out.

Multiple seasons of a show are never guaranteed, so I’m hoping that Weiss and McAdams tie up the loose ends by the finale of Death and Other Details just in case the appetite for another game of “Find the Killer” isn’t there right now and Hulu doesn’t greenlight a second voyage.  Consider saving a few episodes and watching several at a time, allowing you to create the momentum the show sometimes lacks. Any nitpicks aside, I’m glad shows like this are being made at all. If done with the right spirit, they can be the entertaining parlor trick programming you’ll find hard to stop watching once you start.  It may not be Christie-level material, but it’s cruising in the right direction.