Hulu kills off Mandy Patinkin's Death And Other Details

Answering, pretty definitively, the question “What happens if they threw a murder and nobody came?” Hulu revealed today that it’s canceling its pulpy Mandy Patinkin mystery show Death And Other Details after a single season on the streaming airwaves. And since this news broke after 3 p.m. in Hollywood on a Friday afternoon, it’s time for our favorite recurring feature here at the A.V. Club Newswire: The Friday Night Murder Pile, where networks and streamers throw shows they want to get rid of with a minimum of fuss, and nobody asking any inconvenient questions.

In fact, “minimum of fuss” might be a good way to describe the response to Death, which failed pretty spectacularly to capitalize on its blend of Agatha Christie throwback details and Knives Out-esque depictions of death and depravity amongst the mega-rich. Patinkin and co-star Violett Beane both did their best with the material, which centered on a young woman (Beane) whose rich asshole benefactors end up at the center of a murder mystery, forcing her to reunite with the detective who failed to solve her own mother’s murder as a child. But Death was heavy on surface details—including lots of loving looks at its opulent setting and fashions—and light on real rigor, leaving audiences apparently unenthused. (Per Deadline, which reported the killing, the show never managed to crack even the generous barriers of Nielsen’s weekly streaming charts.)

Per standard FNMP protocol, Hulu didn’t bother issuing any kind of “Have a great summer!” press comment for the show, or to creators Heidi Cole McAdams and Mike Weiss, letting them know how happy they’d be to work with them again. (Also, take it as read that the question raised in the show’s final moments, i.e., “Who put all these severed limbs here?” will now never be addressed, unless Death And Other Details had a vibrant fan-fiction community nobody was bothering to tell us about.)