Murder in Small Town X

I've already reviewed on this blog proprietary material from Whodunnit?, a mystery gameshow that was if nothing else an entertaining, rare mix of genres. But "rare" does not mean "only," and in fact Whodunnit? was preceded over a decade earlier by another murder mystery-based reality show: Murder in Small Town X.

The show takes place in the fictional town of Sunrise, Maine, where a person who has dubbed themself the Sunrise Killer has set off a panic by murdering a family in their home. The Sunrise Killer informs the police that they're one of 15 locals (very considerate of them), and ten amateur sleuths are brought in to track down the culprit. (It wasn't clear to me if the Sunrise Killer demanded that they be brought in, or if the police were just super desperate, or what. But the story is already ridiculous so I didn't really care.)

This is a game show, so the group can't just have a straightforward investigation. Instead, they're forced to investigate along the contours of "the Killer's Game," which operates in three-day cycles. First, one player is selected to be the "Lifeguard" and lead the group for the cycle. For the first two days, the group will have two or three leads to investigate. The Lifeguard decides who investigates which lead, while they safely stay in HQ.

The third day of the cycle is where the game really heats up. First, the killer delivers two envelopes, one red and one black, to the group. The red envelope contains a question related to something the group has investigated. If the group answers the question correctly (by sending the answer to an anonymous email address), the killer confirms the innocence of one of the suspects. The group then selects two candidates for elimination: everyone but the Lifeguard votes for the first candidate, and then the Lifeguard selects the second candidate. The black envelope contains two locations. Each elimination candidate goes to one location, and one gets ambushed and killed by the culprit while the other finds a new and important clue. In this way both the investigator and suspect pools get whittled down as the game goes on until we're left just with a handful of people for the grand finale.

One of the reasons the Lifeguard position and staying in HQ is important is because whenever an investigator is alone in the field, they can be targeted and killed by the murderer... in theory. While this rule is established, nobody is ever actually eliminated this way. (It turns out the producers initially intended for this to be an actual mechanic, but decided to abandon it partway through shooting after seeing how invested the participants were in Sunrise.) A lot of times a suspect will approach someone and say "I have something to tell you, so I want you to meet me alone tonight," and this "rule" just adds a lot of fake tension to the decision of whether to go or not.

A minor point, but each time the two elimination candidates went out it was supposed to be suspenseful which one would be killed, yet it becomes obvious during the second half of the show. The two locations are always a plot-relevant location and a random location, and the killer is always at the random location and the clue at the plot-relevant location. I actually think one of the participants caught onto this pattern, based on their reactions to the last couple of elimination rounds.

So, as a gameshow, it's a bit janky. The gameshow and mystery elements of the show are pretty discrete; in Whodunnit? eliminations were based directly on the participants' mystery-solving ability (or lack thereof), while you could use Murder in Small Town X's elimination structure for any competition whatsoever.  The mystery is also not particularly compelling. It definitely gets better over time, and there are a couple of legitimately cool ideas, but, as a game show, there is a much greater focus on the participants and their drama than the suspects and crime.

I found the way the story and structure intersected just stupidly hilarious. The game in Whodunnit? made sense to a certain extent since the group was isolated within a mansion. But Murder in Small Town X takes place in (as the title suggests) a small town, and the investigators are supposed to be actually working with the police. So having the police go "Yup, we know the killer is going to be at one of these two locations, where they're planning to kill one of you, but there's just absolutely nothing we can do about it. Sorry about that, best of luck" is unbelievably ridiculous. It got me every single week when the host would just casually discuss the Sunrise Killer murdering one of the contestants, as if it wasn't a big deal and there was no choice but to just let it happen.

The biggest issue holding back the show, I think, is time. They purportedly filmed 14,000 hours of footage; you're obviously going to lose a lot when you distill that down to five and a half hours. (Each episode is "one hour," but that means only 40 minutes of actual runtime.) That's only five and a half hours to cover 15 suspects and 10 contestants—about 13 minutes per person. Each episode covers a 3-day cycle, meaning there's 14 minutes to cover the entire events each day. No matter how you slice it, there just isn't enough time to fully develop everyone. Naturally there's an uneven division of focus, but that just means that a large swath of the cast gets very little development. It gets better near the end as the cast dwindles, but especially near the start it feels like an unfocused whirlwind.

There are other places this massive distilment affects the show. For instance, the way the show is cut implies that the host gave the participants pre-set investigation topics, while (apparently) the reality was that each day the participants had a lengthy de-briefing and discussion to come up with the investigation targets themselves. It also felt like a lot of Sunrise's participants would just suddenly give the investigators their whole life story, creating cheesy and artificial exposition. While I'm sure part of it is the fact that these people were actors hired to eventually give the investigators this information and not true suspects in a murder investigation, I also think the show cut out all the socializing and chatting that lead up those moments.

Murder in Small Town X is not great as a gameshow, since the "mechanics" of the game are simple and luck-dependent, while as a mystery, as I've already discussed, there just isn't enough time to develop everything and everyone that needs to be developed. The fact that at the end of the game there's so few suspects and no decisive evidence makes it almost feel like we're supposed to randomly guess the answer rather than actually deduce it. And yet... there's still a certain amount of charm. I think it's because the mystery, while designed, is not scripted. There's no detective going down a path set by the author to correctly arrive at the solution; the participants need to investigate of their own accord, and this true amateur element gives Murder in Small Town X something unique among mystery fiction.