Episode of the Week: ‘Whodunnit?’ season 1 finale
Who says that the Episode of the Week has to be a scripted show? While we’ve had a ton of good ones ever since we started this feature earlier this year, we’re not stretching the truth at all that in looking back at everything we’ve seen in the past week (which includes the season finale of “True Blood” and the summer finale for “Teen Wolf”). The episode that still stands out the most is the one featuring a made-up mystery about “dead” people and a crazy but fun butler front and center.
Yes, we’re talking about “Whodunnit?” over on ABC. We recognize that if you go back and watch the entire first season with the knowledge now that Cris is the killer, you’ll probably come up with some new criticism about this or that. None of that really matters to us. Instead, this was just all about fun. The contestants played their role well all season as “fearful” participants in the game, and Gildart Jackson to us established himself as one of the top five reality hosts with his commitment to a character who could have easily felt just like Wadsworth from “Clue” all over again.
We don’t necessarily think that the finale was perfect in its execution of every little riddle, but the ending still felt very satisfying, and well worth all of the time that we spent covering the show. Much of the reason for that was just trying to see if we could beat the contestants to the punch to finding out how each murder happened, and seeing through some context clues if we could figure the killer out. We never could. The first guess was Don, and then we switched to Lindsey and then Melina to close out the season.
But, we had some summer fun at the end of the day watching this show, and sometimes, that is really all that you can ask for. TV is a social experience sometimes, and this is one of the few non-“Breaking Bad” shows out there that you really wanted to talk about! We appreciated that, just as much as we appreciated Giles’ inflection, the bizarrely silent maids, and the idea of a trained monkey escaping with a murder weapon.
In a summer season where so many other shows (“Big Brother”) proved to be disappointments, this reminded us that there can be entertaining and fresh ideas. We just hope that more viewers check the show out if a season 2 happens