So the full title of this series is so long that I decided to shorten it for the title of the post, BUT the full title is Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party/Gala for Friends Potluck. Go ahead. Take a breath. I have no idea how many takes it took Sean Persaud to get it to sound the way it does at the beginning of every episode, and if he got it in one take - props to you, sir!
This is not the first series that Sinéad and Sean Persaud of Shipwrecked Comedy have created about the Gothic Writer. They also created A Tell Tale Vlog, which is an answer to the question "what would it look like if Edgar Allan Poe had a vlog?". But let's talk about this fantastic dark comedy!
There are eleven episodes total, and each provide something different and exciting. For me, I didn't feel the need to try to figure out how it was all done before the series was complete and I liked that. I would compare this to the 1985 film Clue. But the fact that all of the suspects and, to an extent, murder victims are literary icons - that just makes it all the better!
The literary names, besides Edgar Allan Poe (Sean Persaud), are as follows: Charlotte Bronte (Ashley Clements), Emily Dickinson (Sarah Grace Hart), Oscar Wilde (Tom DeTrinis), Earnest Hemingway (Joey Richter), HG Wells (Blake Silver), George Eliot (Lauren Lopez), Fyodor Dostoevsky (Clayton Snyder), Mary Shelley (Whitney Avalon), and Louisa May Alcott (Tara Perry). With brief guest appearances of Agatha Christie (Margie Mintz), Jane Austen (Laura Spencer), and Anne Bronte (Emma Chandler). And we cannot forget about our non-literary characters who play huge parts in this series: Annabel Lee (Mary Kate Wiles), Lenore (Sinéad Persaud), and Eddie Dantes (Ryan W. Garcia).
The way the scripts were written was fantastic! It was engaging and entertaining. I can honestly say that I was not exactly expecting what happened in the first episode that gets the whole series rolling, but nothing in the series seemed out of place. If it ever did, it was only for a moment and something else happened that helped it all fit together.
The camera work was wonderful! Every shot had a purposeful sense to it, if that makes sense. I liked how the "flashback" sequence in, I think, episode ten was brighter than the overall series. The coloration fits in really well as Poe is known for his dark stories and the episodes all have a dark tone when it comes to color. But it's no so dark that you need to have the brightness on your screen up in order to see what's going on.
I did enjoy the different Clue easter eggs throughout the series. Whether they were intended or not is an entirely different story, but the whole splitting up bit had a couple. When a certain visitor is murdered, it has similarities to when the cop is murdered in Clue. There are seriously so many similarities and if I say any more I will probably spoil the whole thing. So just take my word for it and go check it out.