[Editor’s note: The following contains spoilers for Who Killed Santa? A Murderville Murder Mystery. Do not read until after watching!]
“We wanted the whole thing to feel like a surprise party, where just one thing after another happens,” showrunner Krister Johnson says about the newly released Who Killed Santa? A Murderville Murder Mystery, a special episode of the Netflix improv comedy series where the chaos of Season 1, released last February, gets amplified to a whole new level.
In the special, hard-nosed and mustachioed Detective Terry Seattle (Will Arnett) is joined by not one, not two, but three clueless celebrities as he attempts to solve a murder; there are additional guest stars sprinkled throughout the double-length episode, along with plenty of other surprises.
“The show was really well received when it came out, and I feel like people appreciated it for the same reasons that I did,” Johnson says. “Obviously funny stuff happens, but the world has a very kind of unpredictable kind of chaotic feeling to it, where ideally you feel like you’re on a train that is barely staying on the tracks and occasionally hops right off. Which I enjoy. I like it feeling like you really aren’t sure what’s going to happen. And I think it’s one of the reasons I’m so, so pleased with how the special came out, because it was more than anything we did in Season 1.”
The idea for the special, Johnson tells Consequence, came about earlier this year. “We’re still trying to figure out if we’re doing a second season, but Netflix wanted to do more,” he says. “And so the idea was suggested to us, by them, to maybe do a special. I think we started talking about it at the beginning of the summer and we quickly focused on a Christmas special, just because it felt right for the show.”
Once Johnson and Arnett came up with “sort of the general idea, we pitched that to Netflix and, and they said, yeah, that’s great. And from that point on, it was kind of stomping on the gas pedal because by that point it was mid-summer.” Shooting the special happened at a breakneck pace, Johnson says, because after getting the greenlight in late June 2022, they immediately had to leap into writing, production, and casting — then, after the two-and-a-half day shoot in September, it became a scramble to finish up a cut by early November.
“The timeline was very compressed in order to get it ready for the holidays, and so it was a blur,” Johnson says. “Luckily, I did have a good sense of sort of story-wise how I imagined the special going. And also conceptually, we were all in agreement that wanted to up the stakes a little as far as the chaos, and that it would be fun to have more than one celebrity guest being thrown into the case.”
Enter Jason Bateman, whose connection to Arnett goes back to Arrested Development, as the first “trainee” brought into the investigation. “Jason had been someone that we almost had on Season 1, I think, and then schedules didn’t align basically. But obviously he and Will are really good friends and they have a great rapport, and so it always felt like a good fit to to have them paired up together.”
The second guest, Maya Rudolph, enters about halfway through the episode, to both her and Bateman’s surprise. “Maya had been on our list of, ‘Oh my God, could we possibly get her?’ from the start of the show. She’s just incredible. She’s naturally funny and a wonderful improviser. Both of them bring, I think, the best approach to the show, which is, ‘I’m going to jump into the whole thing.’ When it comes to stepping up and just going for it in whatever ridiculous situation they’re in, they don’t hesitate.”
Part of that, Johnson says, was the fact that not only did they have no idea what was going to happen, but that they didn’t know other celebrities would be showing up. “It was always a surprise to them when someone walked on set, which was very important to us. We had all these protocols to keep them sequestered in their trailers, which I’m sure annoyed them on the day, but hopefully they appreciate what it brought to the show.”
The choice to spotlight just comedians in the special wasn’t a deliberate one, Johnson says. “We have a bunch of different lists — obviously actors and comedians make up the majority of it, but we have a list with athletes, and with musicians and I would love to have the backgrounds be more diverse if we have a chance to do more. We were honestly going for ‘Who are people going to want to see in this sort of more event thing?’ And so we really wanted names that people would go, ‘Oh, I want to see that. I definitely want to see that.’ But again, a lot of it is, you know, are we lucky enough to get this person on this particular Wednesday in September? Because they’re all very busy.”
After deciding to escalate things with multiple guest stars, Johnson says that the order in which they were introduced came about organically. “As we started to lock it in and knew we had Jason, that gelled, for us, some of the stuff we wanted to do with him. And mostly, I just feel like having Maya Rudolph unexpectedly walk onto the set in the middle of a murder case was a fun way to go. I love Jason’s reaction because he truly had no idea and he was so excited. I don’t think they’d ever met before, so you even get this moment where they’re sort of like, ‘Hey, oh wow. Big fan.'”
According to their filmographies, Bateman and Rudolph have only crossed paths a few times over the years on screen, most notably in an episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Bateman. “There’s a fun little moment that didn’t make the cut where Maya, in that introductory scene, tells Jason that she loved him on Silver Spoons and he thanks her for that,” Johnson says. “But then Will is fully in his Terry character, so he’s not understanding what the cultural reference is, and then they’re commenting on the fact that he’s in a different universe. But it was really fun.”
Who Killed Santa? A Murderville Murder Mystery (Netflix)
