By Lili Loofbourow
If “Only Murders in the Building” started as a satire of “cosy” true-crime podcasts, but it quickly surrendered to the genre’s ghoulish pleasures.
Now entering its third season, the show - a comedy about amateur detectives co-created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman and starring Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez - is cosiness itself.
It hasn’t just bonded its lonely principals together rather sweetly through the slapdash investigations they opportunistically record for the public; it's also stuffed with pleasant references and cameos.
Aesthetically, too, it invites you to curl up by a fire. Interior shots of the Arconia (the building in question) are as lavish as the protagonists’ wardrobes.
There’s a sense that it’s always autumn within those walls, that time has slowed and that an extremely precious version of New York - the kind narrated through voice-over in romantic comedies from the 1990s - still exists.
At its best, the series understands why stories about amateur sleuthing are comforting: They turn a scary world into a playground for the inquisitive and reframe gossip as high-minded truth-seeking, giving the snoops among us moral cover.
As comedy, especially when it pokes a little fun at its heroes’ motives, “Only Murders in the Building” is terrific. As satire, it’s amusing, if a little toothless. As drama, it’s . . . uneven.
But it’s as a who-dunit that the series really started to sag in its second season. The mystery turned out to be a mess. So, for that matter, did the season as a whole.
Bogged down with dead-end subplots, “Only Murders,” churned out red herrings, storylines that went nowhere, stunt castings and implausible twists.
“Second seasons are tough,” Short’s Oliver Putnam said at one point with a wink, but meta-commentary can only take you so far.
I still hold that season’s finale in high regard for its physical comedy. I won’t soon forget the spectacle of Martin and Short walking toward Tina Fey in pretend slow-motion and terrorising her with a tomato.
And the series of suspects the trio cycled through (before naming the actual murderer) felt like a nod to the 1985 film “Clue”, which has always felt like the show’s real spiritual ancestor.
But the actual solution was straight out of Scooby-Doo.
I had accordingly lowered my expectations for the third season, which that finale set up by introducing the new victim: Paul Rudd as Ben Glenroy, the star of Oliver’s new Broadway show.
I’ve seen only eight of the new season’s 10 episodes, so I can’t speak to its qualities as a who-dunit, but the season as a whole is a pleasant surprise: less frenetic, more confident and more character-driven.
Charles (Martin) is adapting to life with his live-in girlfriend, Joy (Andrea Martin), a fish-loving makeup artist, while Mabel (Gomez) prepares to move out of the Arconia and figure out what’s next.
Oliver is obsessed with his play, and one of his actors - played by Meryl Streep - is obsessed with him.
This season is more invested in lampooning Broadway than it is in lampooning podcasts; Charles’s struggle to master a “patter song” he’s been given as the cast member who can’t sing, turns into one of the show’s more experimental and entertaining sub-plots.
Oliver’s play, “Death Rattle,” is wonderfully ridiculous. It is also, and this seems significant, a murder mystery.
A very, very bad one. The main suspect is an infant, and by the time Oliver turns it into a musical (oh, yes), there are three - baby suspects, that is.
Potentially murderous ones.
Triplets.
Sleuths like a good confession, and I take Oliver’s masterpiece to be the show’s arch admission that, try as it might to come up with a terrific murder plot, it isn't great at them.
Streep is predictably stellar as a conflicted actor in a story that comes to define the season’s stakes.
Rudd’s Ben gets a gratifying amount of screen time for a dead guy, and Gomez’s Mabel - who gets to be a little bit sincere this season - starts hanging out with Tobert (Jesse Williams), a fetching documentarian who had been shadowing Ben before he died.
The show is less digressive than it has been in seasons past, but it still makes space to spotlight a few of its less central characters, particularly Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton, now a series regular) and Uma Heller (Jackie Hoffman), and brings back some old favourites, including Detective Donna Williams (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), Sazz (Jane Lynch) and Theo (James Caverly).
Not a bad line-up if this turns out to be the show’s last season.
It was always a risky idea, pairing Short and Martin with Gomez. Besides the unintuitive casting, there was the premise: two old has-beens and a young never-was haunting a swanky New York apartment building where they’re virtual outcasts until they team up.
The series began with its leads in a bad place, with Martin’s Charles making sad, commemorative omelets, Short’s Oliver facing eviction and Gomez’s Mabel haunting her aunt’s half-gutted apartment.
With a set-up like that, “Only Murders in the Building” risked being the sort of “funny” short story people like to describe as mordant where there are no jokes and everyone’s depressed, but in a regionally specific way.
Subtlety didn’t end up being this show’s problem. Even when it botched the details, you could count on “Only Murders” for some very broad humour, a little heart and a somewhat surprising lack of snobbery.
Roger Ebert once described Martin as “a sort of upper-middle-class American everyman, crazy on the inside, normal on the outside, needy all over.” It feels like an apt description of the show, too.
Despite festooning itself in markers of prestige - the New Yorker’s trademark font, the tony halls of the Arconia, Amy Schumer literally saying, “I wanna go full prestige,” to Oliver in the second season - the series wears its ambition lightly.
Distractible, impulsive, confident and a little hopeful, the show makes explicit in its third season what was already pretty clear: that it wants to be fun more than it wants to be right.
∎ “Only Murders in the Building” season 3 is streaming on Disney+.