"A Murder At the End of the World."

The FX series on Hulu gets the Two Episode Test.

I wasn’t planning on making “A Murder At the End of the World” a Two Episode Test case. It had just come out on FX via Hulu and it seemed like something that might be a light binge — since all of these types of of movies/shows are of a certain genre.

Ah, but it turns out that FX just dropped the first-two-episodes-only on Nov. 14 and they were a pretty quick watch and then I waited around and realized the next episode didn’t appear until today (Tuesday), so there you go. Pre-ordained Two Episode Test.

Now, when I say that “A Murder At the End of the World” is part of a genre, I think you know what I mean: A bunch of people are collected in one spot, often remote, and then one of them dies. The killer is in the group. Think, well, pretty much every Agatha Christie and Hercule Poirot movie or limited series. You know, “Clue” times 10,000 other things.

The allure of this concept is that it allows the writer to play a pretty easy game of chess while also giving comfort food to viewers. Those viewers have seen this before, whether they are conscious of it or not, and the expectation is clear and enticing — they will get to know eight or 12 or however many people; one of them will be killed; everyone is a possible suspect and putting the puzzle together is often entertaining if not too difficult.

I’m hoping “A Murder At the End of the World” will be different if only because it has intriguingly different elements of DNA — advanced technology (always in the news, but certainly right now), a troubled main character with modern mental health issues, a link to this country’s over-fascination with true crime and a potentially evil billionaire (although the later is more de rigueur these days), plus it doesn’t take much guesswork early on to see there might be a juicy feminist twist in there somewhere.

Done well. THAT could be something really special.

Emma Corrin and Clive Owen and a really cool place in Iceland.

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