I’ve watched shows, movies, read comics or listened to podcasts where there is a lot of build up around a mystery, only for the end to be lackluster. In these the journey itself was more riveting than where we ended up. What are some instances where the answer lived up to the hype?
Most Brandon Sanderson books.
The man from earth (2007). Low budget but a great movie, particularly if you know nothing about it beforehand.
And whatever you do, don’t watch the sequel. It’s quality is the exact opposite of the first movie.
Basically every episode of Columbo. The mystery isn’t the crime, but how he’s going to solve it.
The subgenre Columbo falls under is a “howcatchem” or an inverted detective story, as opposed to the more typical “whodunnit”.
Just in case OP likes that setup and wants to keyword search for more. One I like and has a second season in works is Poker Face starring Natasha Lyonne.
The closest I’ve watched in the last decade to something like this may be BBC’s Sherlock. Does that fall in the same category?
It’s been a while for me and I never did watch all of them, but no, I think Sherlock is a whodunnit, heavy on the drama, plus the twist of some narration from Watson’s blog.
The first episode opens with several people seemingly taking a pill to commit suicide. But someone is making them do it somehow. We don’t know who, we don’t know why. Who did it? Whodunnit genre.
Where if it were a Howcatchem genre, the identity of the baddie is revealed up front and the episode is about how the detective figures it out and nails them. How did the detective catch them? Howcatchem.
Monk, if you ever saw that one, would sometimes do whodunnit episodes and sometimes howcatchem episodes.
Not sure the genre or trope, but Poker Face (and 6 Feet Under), the additional subgenre for me is “who’s gonna die in the first scene”.
Yeah, I would call that a “killer of the week” format. There is a new crime/murder every week. Sometimes there is a season-long story as well (Natasha Lyonne’s character running away from the Vegas baddies) and sometimes it’s just the killer of the week story. Murder, She Wrote is a good example of the latter; you can watch MSW episodes in pretty much any order, it doesn’t matter because each episode is basically self-contained. Any story external to the killer of the week is just to service actors being replaced or setting Jessica Fletcher in different locations beyond her hometown so she can face a new killer of the week. MSW is a whodunnit and also a killer-of-the-week show.
Maybe not the best example, but The Prestige was very fun. I thought the reveal was worth waiting for, it sort of felt like a whodunit.
