Only Murders in the Building is the best comedy series of the decade so far. Written by the legendary Steve Martin and starring him as washed-up TV actor Charles-Haden Savage, the show delivers warm, campy humour and clever, surprising gags, with a whodunnit plot in which (for bonus points) the murder victim is not a beautiful young woman.
The premise is simple but smart. The building of the title is The Arconia – an archetypal Upper West Side apartment block where a motley assortment of eccentric New Yorkers lives in a sometimes friendly, more often judgmental and bitchy community that (sadly) probably exists only in imagination nowadays. During a New York blackout Charles ends up sharing a table in the local diner with one-time Broadway producer Oliver Putnam (played by Martin’s frequent collaborator Martin Short) and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez).
The trio discover their shared love of a Serial-style true crime podcast ‘All Is Not Ok In Oklahoma’, presented by Cinda Canning (Tina Fey playing Serial’s Sarah Koenig’s evil twin). After one of their neighbours is murdered in the Arconia during the blackout the unlikely threesome investigate, starting their own deeply unethical and frequently mistaken podcast along the way.
These first ten episodes sparkled with wit and managed to feel both fresh and familiar thanks to the safe comedic hands of Martin and Short and the well-trodden atmosphere of the particular Woody Allen-adjacent Manhattan milieu. Brilliant cameos from genuine A-listers such as Sting added to the good sport quotient.
There was equal trepidation and glee when the final episode ended on a cliffhanger – could another season match up to this close to perfect gem of a series? The answer was not quite, but almost, with a second outing – and second murder, of neighbour Bunny Folger – providing plentiful laughs and appearances from Shirley MacLaine, Amy Schumer and, in the final moments, Paul Rudd, as Ben Glenroy, the ill-fated star of Oliver’s directorial comeback on Broadway. In the final moments of season two, he apparently dies on stage, setting the scene for series 3.
It is this shocking death (or is it?) that forms the bulk of season three’s plot. The action centres this time around Death Rattle, the murder mystery being directed by Oliver, with Charles playing the sleuth whose prime suspects turn out to be triplet babies. His big name, Ben (aka Rudd), having been murdered, Oliver manages to convince his producers not to pull funding by converting the drama into a musical.
So far, so Only Murders – and even better, he also ends up recruiting Loretta, a down on her luck older actress who never quite got her big break, played with delicious irony by Meryl Streep.
This brilliant bit of self-aware casting is one of the many reasons why a Broadway show is a great focal point for the programme, which trades on both its ‘New York-ness’ and on Martin and Shorts’ particular facility for brilliant self-referential jokes about actors, dating all the way back to their mid-Eighties film The Three Amigos.
But despite this promising start, the season stagnates towards the middle, mainly due to a rift between Charles, Oliver and Mabel, which deprives us of the magical chemistry of their triple act. That said, we are treated to a cameo from Matthew Broderick playing himself as an obsessive method actor and offering one of the series highlights - and when the three pals finally reunite to record their podcast, we return to romp territory.
But the play within a podcast within a television series, with overlapping murder mystery threads does make for a somewhat over-complicated plot. In trying to harness the complex twists and turns of the new plotlines, the dialogue has grown a little tired and the jokes have hardened into stale set pieces where you can guess the punchline before the set up is fully delivered.
It’s an uncynical and generous show and I was more than prepared to greet this latest series in the same spirit. I actively wanted to like it. And I did, it is still perfectly likeable. Sadly it’s little more than that, a third outing designed to sate its avid fans, who would never have become so if this were their first introduction to this magical world.
