6 Years Before ‘Nobody Wants This,’ Adam Brody Starred in This Sleeper Hit Netflix Thriller
The Kid Detective, a 2020 dark comedy-thriller starring Adam Brody, is being highlighted as an overlooked film that never found its audience because of its pandemic-era release, when cinemas were largely empty and word-of-mouth theatrical buzz was impossible. Six years before earning an Emmy nomination for Netflix's Nobody Wants This, Brody delivered what is arguably his best screen performance in this satire of children's detective fiction, playing a washed-up former child-prodigy sleuth forced to confront a real murder case.
Brody plays Abe Applebaum, a once-celebrated boy detective in the town of Willowbrook who was traumatised after failing to solve a friend's disappearance as a child, and who now coasts on former glory while running an unimpressive small-time detective agency. The plot kicks in when teenager Caroline (Sophie Nélisse) asks him to investigate her boyfriend's murder, a case far beyond anything he's handled since childhood, forcing him to prove his early gifts weren't a fluke. The film blends dark comedy with genuine pathos, undercutting nostalgia for series like Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys while portraying Abe as both sympathetic and narcissistic, right down to his running gag of a lifetime free ice cream pass he still claims two decades on.
- The Kid Detective (2020) is an overlooked Adam Brody dark comedy-thriller
- Brody plays a washed-up former child-prodigy detective solving a real murder
- Praised as Brody's best film role, pre-dating his Nobody Wants This Emmy nod
New here? Start with this
Adam Brody is best known now for his Emmy-nominated role in Netflix's Nobody Wants This, but this piece looks back at an earlier film of his that many people missed: The Kid Detective, a dark comedy-thriller released in 2020. It came out during the pandemic, when cinemas were largely empty, so it never built the word-of-mouth audience it might otherwise have found.
In the film, Brody plays Abe Applebaum, a former child-prodigy detective in the small town of Willowbrook. As a boy he was locally famous for solving cases, but he was left traumatised after failing to solve a friend's disappearance, and as an adult he runs a struggling, low-rent detective agency while still clinging to relics of his former fame, including a lifetime free ice cream pass. The story turns when a teenager, Caroline, asks him to investigate her boyfriend's murder, a case far more serious than anything he has handled since childhood.
The film is being highlighted now as a "sleeper hit" worth revisiting, both because it is seen as an underappreciated high point in Brody's career and because it offers a darker, more melancholic take on the kind of child-detective stories familiar from series like Encyclopedia Brown and The Hardy Boys.