Template:Infobox show Ten Little Roosters is a murder mystery series created by Rooster Teeth. The first episode premiered on the
4th November 2014, with the following episodes being released on Tuesday until the finale in December.
Plot Summary
The series takes place at the Rooster Teeth studios during a banquet held by Burnie Burns for nine of his employees ( Chris Demairis, Barbara Dunkelman, Adam Ellis, Gavin Free, Ryan Haywood, Lindsay Jones, Michael Jones, Miles Luna and Gus Sorola). However, the evening goes downhill after Michael starts accusing the other guests of killing people close to them, saying that one person is guilty of 'cold-blooded murder'. Afterwards the guests stumble upon a poem entitled 'Ten Little Roosters' which is written in the style of the original 'Ten Little Indians' poem. As the evening goes on it becomes clear that the verses of the poem are outlining the murders of several guests over the course of the night, and the guests have no choice but to try and survive the night locked in with a 'cold-blooded' murderer...
Inspiration
The series is inspired by Agatha Christie's 1939 novel 'And Then There Were None', with various elements in the series appearing almost indentical to the plot of the original novel - both stories involves a party of ten people being murdered one by one by a mysterious killer, with their deaths being foreshadowed in the form of a poem. However, Josh Flanagan has mentioned that 'Ten Little Roosters' has few other similarities to Christie's novel - 'Ten Little Roosters' has a much more comedic tone than the novel, and the story is deliberately different so that people who have read 'And Then There Were None' are unable to rely on their knowledge of the novel's twists to solve the mystery in the series.
The competiton
On its original release, the show had a interactive element which doubled as a competition - after each episode aired, viewers had the opportunity to guess the victim and the murder weapon for the following week's episode in a poll that was uploaded shortly after that episode's release. After the first episode aired viewers also had the opportunity to guess the identities of the killer and the survivor, although this particular was taken down shortly before the premiere of the second episode, and it became the only opportunity for viewers to guess those particular identities.
Every week, if people guessed both the victim and the murder weapon correctly, they were entered into a prize draw and winners were chosen randomly to receive Rooster Teeth-specific prizes. In addition, the person with the most correct guesses at the end of the series won the chance to visit the Rooster Teeth Studios or a convention of their choice.
Rules of the Competition
When the first poll was released in the journal of Josh Flanagan, a number of rules were contained in the journal in order to help the viewers make the best choices for future polls:
- Any character that has been killed in the series is dead for good - no plot twists, no fake deaths etc.
- There is only one survivor at the end of the series, but the survivor is not the same person as the killer.
- The only characters that are involved in the mystery are the ten party guests introduced in the first episode.
- Whilst the plot may thicken over the course of the series, there is only one person responsible for all of the murders.
- In the first episode it is revealed that Gavin has a clone of himself at the party as well - the rules state that whatever happens to one of the Gavins must happen to the other as well ie. one can't survive until the end if the other has died earlier in the series (to secure this particular rule, the 'Gavins' were counted as one person in the polls).
Episodes
Episodes of the first series originally aired weekly on Tuesdays from the 4th of November to the 23rd of December. Each episode was uploaded on Rooster Teeth's youtube channel a day after its release on the Rooster Teeth website:
Episode one: And Then There were Nine
Episode Two: And Then There Were Eight
Episode Three: And Then There Were Seven
Episode Four: And Then There Were Six
Episode Five: And Then There Were Five
Episode Six: And Then There Were Four
Episode Seven: And Then There Were Three