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?
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.
There is a mix of both throughout the show, especially in the Irene Adler The Woman episode. You already know she is behind a few criminal things from the start. There is also another case within that same episode where someone died next to a river, and one of the draws of the case is that Sherlock figured it out instantly, but doesn’t want to tell anyone what the answer is. It is slowly revealed in bits over the episode of what he figured out.
I may give Columbo a shot since it’s an older show I have put off trying. And Monk has also been sitting on my list.