A FEW THOUGHTS ABOUT LAST NIGHT’S TERRY WITHERS MYSTERIES
First of all, check out our new opening titles for some excellent slo-mo acting and running (and the visual debut of Noah Forman in the title sequence!)
Second, last night we had a super fun show which featured the kind of mind-blowing moment that would make any audience member justifiably assume that our show is partly scripted.
Terry never knows who’s gonna be in the show, even from our regular supporting cast. Last night, Molly Lloyd wasn’t able to be there to play Terry’s wife, Deb, and so instead, Terry arrived home to discover Sebastian Conelli as “Frank The Snitch” baby-sitting Terry’s underage son & girlfriend (shotgunning beers with a couple of his pals). We usually tell Terry the gender of the killer, but that’s it. If we ever have two killers, we’d probably tell him that, but other than that, Terry is sequestered in UCB’s back hallways for 30 minutes before the show, while the rest of the cast is in the green room.
I’ll be honest: for about 5 seconds, I considered whether we should tell him that last night’s killer was British. The thought crossed my mind: would it be revealing too much? Should we tell him? Ultimately, I decided not to, because I figured it would be way more fun for Terry to be totally shocked when he walked on stage for the Big Interrogation Scene to discover that the killer had an English accent.
Our killer was the very funny and talented UK comedian/actor Tom Bell, whom you’ll be able to see later this year in Julian Fellowes’ adaptation of Trollope’s Doctor Thorne (alongside Alison Brie, Ian McShane & Tom Hollander) but Terry had no idea. He NEVER knows who the killer is. And he certainly didn’t hear it from any of us, because only a few people knew Tom was doing the show, and none of us talk to Terry about it in advance.
For those of you who haven’t seen the show (my god, you read this far?), it begins with J.D. Amato & I building a “crime scene” with the help of the audience. We used to bring a big bag of random items for the audience to place on the stage, but as the show developed a following, they started bringing in evidence of their own to donate to the show, which is way more exciting.
The show begins and in the very first scene, Terry and Noah investigate the crime scene, analyzing the clues and developing Terry’s theory of the case. One piece of evidence was an “I Love Bacon” mini-calendar, which Terry picked up and began speculating about, out loud. He said that it was open to the month of June, and noted that June 6th was “the Queen’s birthday.”
Terry took a moment and then declared, “our killer is British!”
This was in the first 4 minutes of the show.
In the tech booth, J.D. and I looked at each other. We looked at head tech Alex Adan. Did Terry really just SAY that? Wait, did someone tell him? Did Terry KNOW?
Noah knew, but he had done nothing to hint at it-- there hadn’t been time to, the show had only just begun, and Terry had already basically GUESSED that our guest was British. Although not really, because all Terry was really doing was pimping whoever our guest killer was into maybe putting on some kind of British accent. Perhaps sensing that he’d done this, I think Terry started building in other aspects the character-- that there were maybe TWO killers working together-- it was as if Terry was throwing in a few touches in case our special guest wasn’t able to do a British accent.
Terry didn’t actually know that Tom Bell was really British until AFTER the show was over. We asked him what made him say it, and Terry said it was just the first thing he thought of when he saw that June 6th was the Queen’s birthday.
So much was made of it during the first 3 scenes that I knew that there was no way the audience wouldn’t think we told Terry in advance. I mean, how could they think anything else? That’s what I would’ve thought, if I were watching. “Oh, I guess they told him the secret guest was British.”
But no. The simplest explanation is also the craziest one: that, on some level, Terry Withers really IS the World’s Greatest Detective.
