Danger Done Safely

Elizabeth Alsop investigates how the latest season of “Only Murders in the Building” reveals the pleasures and limits of coziness, in the latest installment of Screen Shots.

By Elizabeth AlsopSeptember 22, 2024

• Television

• Cultural Studies

This essay is part of the Screen Shots series, monthly takes from LARB’s own film and TV team.

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IN THE FIRST EPISODE of the new season of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building (2020– ), the camera tracks down what appears to be an iconic New York City block. It’s summer, so kids run through spray from an open hydrant, a woman hollers down from her fire escape, and a street vendor hawks hot dogs and knishes. A young, smiling couple walks toward the camera. “How can you not love New Yawk?” the man asks his date in exaggerated Brooklynese. “I don’t wanna know nobody who don’t love New York City!” she replies, beaming.

At first, this bit of Big Apple burlesque feels jarringly at odds with Only Murders’ wealthier, whiter, more urbane evocation of New York. The show’s style has always been more When Henry Met Sally than Do the Right Thing, with a credit sequence that resembles a New Yorker cover. But then someone yells “Cut!” The scene is quickly revealed to be a set at Paramount Studios, which has flown the series’ core crime-solving trio out to make a movie of their now-famous podcast. It’s confirmed: this is all just pretend.

That the fourth season opens with a soundstage is a clever wink at the series’ own highly fabricated pleasures. Over its previous three seasons, Only Murders in the Building has buffed its component parts—amateur sleuths, Upper West Side co-op, the conveniently located corpse—to a highly theatrical sheen, creating a self-contained world that exists alongside of, but not too close to, the real one. “It’s true. We’ve been very lucky with people dying in our building,” Charles (Steve Martin) notes in the season four premiere, one of the show’s many self-reflexive asides that, Pirandello-like, call attention to its fictional status.

The series principals are sketched in broad strokes: there’s the flamboyant, name-dropping producer Oliver (Martin Short); disaffected millennial Mabel (Selena Gomez); and uptight Charles, a Felix Unger–type and actor who was once, as he put it, “People magazine’s 8th most beloved TV cop.” It’s no accident that for the tenants of the Arconia, the titular building inspired by actual complexes like the Ansonia and Belnord, it always seems to be fall. It’s a place where residents wear plaid, plush knits, and scarves (lots of scarves); the doorman knows your name; and everyone—well, almost everyone—owns. As Charles’s sister puts it, when Mabel responds to her fandom by protesting that their podcast “is about our neighbors being murdered”: “Yeah, but you made it sound so cozy.”

Coziness, in fact, has been among the primary reasons to watch Only Murders, whose latest season premiered last month. In its earlier seasons, the series refined a formula whose novelty lay in relocating the ensemble mystery plot to an urban setting both contemporary and nostalgic—transposing the whodunit from the sitting rooms, cruise ships, country estates, and train cars of the Continent to the not-so-mean streets of Manhattan, and specifically its older, culturally Jewish Upper West Side. In so doing, Only Murders cleverly subverts the rhetoric and iconography of New York as “fear city,” imagining a neighborhood peopled by residents who are cranky and colorful, but only occasionally criminal. It’s a mix of amateur crime-solving and shtick: Scooby Doo, by way of Seinfeld.

At the heart of Only Murders in the Building has always been a winning paradox. Even as the show takes as a point of departure the undeniable allure of true crime—the main characters’ shared obsession with a true crime podcast inspires their own—it offers a refreshing respite from the genre. It’s a serial drama that spoofs Serial (2014–2024), whose fictional counterpart in the show, All Is Not OK in Oklahoma, plays a major role in the first two seasons. Serial creator Sarah Koenig gets her own send-up in the character of unhinged producer Cinda Canning, “the queen of murder podcasts,” played by Tina Fey, with whom the gang strikes up an uneasy truce.

That the team never manages to truly reconcile with Canning reflects the show’s ambivalent stance toward true crime. From the start, Only Murders is clear-eyed about the genre’s extractive logic. (As Canning puts it in season two, describing a missing-girl podcast conceit, “For it to even have a chance, I’d really need her dead.”) In place of kill rooms and blood spatter, Only Murders serves up secret passageways and smoked salmon dip. And despite their shared appetite for true crime, the series leads are linked from the start to forms of less-true crime storytelling: Mabel harbors a lifelong love for The Hardy Boys, Charles built his career on TV procedural Brazzos, and Oliver spent the third season reimagining Death Rattle, a barely veiled homage to Agatha Christie’s own famously long-running murder mystery play, The Mousetrap (1952– ).

To paraphrase Charles’s best friend and longtime stunt double, Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), Only Murders in the Building has always “do[ne] danger safely.” Which is to say, the show has—up until now—kept murder in the realm of the less-than-real. Coziness depends on this ethos: it guarantees a certain insulation from the depredations of actual violence. People may die in a cozy mystery, sure, but not one is supposed to get hurt.

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All the more disconcerting, then, to discover that the show’s fourth season breaks with this compact. The trouble starts in the final minutes of the season three finale, with the disclosure that the show’s next dead body will be that of Sazz herself. In contrast to previous victims who were largely unknown to the audience (Tim Kono) or not especially well liked (Bunny Folger, Ben Glenroy), the decision to kill off a popular recurring character like Sazz produces something closer to real pathos. When, in the season four pilot, Charles pulls Sazz’s charred bone fragments from the basement incinerator, the series slides into a different, darker register, one in which a character now has to wash his murdered friend’s ashes off his hands.

The show’s apparent decision this season to make the body more than a MacGuffin feels like one of several misguided bids for emotional depth or social relevance. Along similar lines, the current season makes a half-hearted run at a class resentment scheme—pitting the original trio against the “Westies” who occupy the Arconia’s West Tower and who (gasp!) rent instead of own. One of these tenants, the mysterious and initially suspect Professor Dudenoff, leases an apartment so dilapidated that it looks like something out of Saw.

Put another way, Only Murders’ current season gives the impression at times of wanting to throw over coziness for complexity, that ultimate prestige TV currency. In so doing, it misconstrues the primary source of its own appeal. At its best, the ensemble mystery has always been an actor’s showcase, offering a stage for performers’ talents and on-screen chemistry. Earlier generations of Hollywood whodunits—from Agatha Christie adaptations like Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Death on the Nile (1978), and The Mirror Crack’d (1980) to The Last of Sheila (1973), Clue (1985), and Gosford Park (2001)—understood that the point was to assemble an all-star cast, strand them in close quarters, and then wait for sparks. The main attraction of The Mirror Crack’d is not the plot, after all, so much as the sight of Liz Taylor positively bristling at Kim Novak.

In the opening of “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin,” one of the Maurice Leblanc stories that inspired Netflix’s own one-man mystery procedural, Lupin (2021– ), the narrator notes, correctly, the potency of this recipe (in George Morehead’s translation): “Have you ever stopped to consider how much originality and spontaneity emanate from these various individuals who, on the preceding evening, did not even know each other, and who are now, for several days, condemned to lead a life of extreme intimacy”?

The third season, Only Murders’ best to date, leaned into the inherent staginess of the genre by setting much of the action in an actual theater. As in Busby Berkeley’s musicals, whose backstage plots were of the thinnest, “let’s put on a show!” variety, the show used the production of Death Rattle Dazzle!—Oliver’s reimagining of an old chestnut—as a pretext for staging a series of over-the-top musical numbers. (In a nod to Berkeley, Oliver’s biggest theatrical flop to date, Splash!, featured “fantastic synchronized swimming choreography.”) If the murder was not exactly ancillary, it was arguably secondary to the spectacle of brilliant actors engaging in delightful bits of comic business. Think of Martin entering a surreal fugue state while attempting to master his “patter song,” or Short losing a tooth in an overcooked pork chop that his girlfriend and protégé Loretta (Meryl Streep) serves on a first date. Or Streep’s line reading, when she reacts to the news that, after years as a struggling actor, she’s been cast as a series regular in the fictional Grey’s Anatomy spin-off Grey’s New Orleans: Family Burn Unit, and learns that, to top it off, her character is disabled. “I get a limp!” she growls.

The building’s function as a proscenium for comic action is why it doesn’t work when, in the season four pilot, the main characters are spirited away from the bespoke interiors of New York to the palm tree–lined streets of Hollywood. Without a clear container for the riffs and digressive sidebars that have come to define the show, the storyline threatens to spin off its axis. When Mabel announces, near the end of the first episode, “We need to get back to New York,” my immediate reaction was, “Oh, thank god.”

Compounding this sense of narrative drift is the mystifying profusion of new and returning characters. While one of Only Murders’ most reliable sources of delight has been its guest stars, this season’s casting verges on overkill. In addition to an influx of high-profile stars (Molly Shannon! Eugene Levy! Kumail Nanjiani!), nearly every guest star from earlier seasons is also back, even those who are ostensibly in prison (Amy Ryan) or dead (Paul Rudd). (This is not as fun as it sounds; Rudd, playing his own stunt double, now has a cloying Irish accent.) In past episodes, the fact that even dead bodies got their turn to deliver voice-overs, à la Sunset Boulevard, felt fun. Now, the refusal to let Rudd leave the stage reads like a stunt, less a soap-operatic twist than a self-indulgence. Even the best ensembles have their limit. When it comes to casting, all-star is not the same as all the stars.

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Combined with these shifts in tone and direction is a newly virulent strain of self-critique. The premise that Eugene Levy, Zach Galifianakis, and Eva Longoria have been cast to play the three podcasters in a big-budget film adaptation becomes a justification for the actors’ running commentary on their respective characters’ failings, especially their flatness. “You know, I just realized something, Charles,” Levy offers. “You’re not that complex. You’re just as chickenshit as I am, which makes you funny!” Galifianakis, meanwhile, offers an even more excoriating assessment of Oliver: “[Y]ou give me pocket-sized, flop-sweat Willy Wonka. This man is a one-dimensional narcissist. Under those scarves, deep deep down, it’s just more fucking scarves.”

But what if one dimension is all we want and need? Like the geometric print wallpaper that adorns the entryway of Charles’s apartment, and which gives an Escheresque illusion of dimensionality, the flatness of Only Murders is deliberate, a feature rather than a flaw. To conclude otherwise is to ignore the fact that the series’ most reliable rewards lie in its visible, surface-level charms. These include, besides bravura performances and meticulously detailed production design, Oliver’s throwaway lines about life in a louche, pregentrified New York—that time, say, when he “spen[t] a complicated three months living in Maureen Stapleton’s mud room” or played “strip pinochle […] with the wonderful Frank Langella, whose drapes do not match the …”

At a moment when even sitcoms have become “far less situated,” as scholars Jonathan Gray and Daphne Gershon have argued, there is a lot to recommend about the Only Murders model, which has reliably offered viewers the uncomplicated pleasures of a solid hang. Its previous seasons have replicated the satisfactions of a good podcast, providing an experience that is intimate but accommodating, pleasantly distracting but not all-consuming.

It's hard to know how audiences are meant to take the season’s newly mean-spirited critiques that feel out of keeping with the show’s tone—which has been bitchy, but never biting. Only Murders in the Building has always made a point to offer a running commentary on itself, using the conceit of the characters’ podcast to remark on its own construction. “What a terrific goddamn finale this is going to be!” Oliver announces in the first season’s finale. “Hey, at least we found the killer, and in record time,” Charles wrongly notes near the beginning of season three. “Usually, it takes us at least eight episodes.”

This season, however, betrays an embarrassment about the series’ formula that expresses itself as an almost paralyzing self-consciousness. Entertaining as it may be to hear Oliver elucidate the defining characteristics of his signature storytelling style, it’s also a little deflating. (For reference, “an Oliver Putnam story […] should take place between 1960 and 1980, it should involve a celebrity who you’re shocked to discover is still alive […] and the best ones take place in a nightclub that’s now an Applebee’s or involve a drug that no longer exists.”)

Similarly, the film production storyline, and the choice to have Levy, Galifianakis, and Longoria appear as versions of themselves, punctures the fantasy world of the show, diminishing rather than enriching it. When Molly Shannon, in character as hard-charging film executive Bev Melon, delivers a merciless read of the lead characters’ shortcomings, it’s meant to be funny but is, frankly, a little devastating—the equivalent of an improv comic refusing to buy into their scene partner’s reality.

Only in the seventh episode—the last of those made available for advance screening—does Only Murders return to more confident footing. When it starts, the gang, fearing for their lives, has fled Manhattan to hide out with Charles’s sister in her “Strong Island” home, whose interior is packed with tchotchkes and life-size dolls. Like the Arconia, the house proves to be an enabling constraint for farce. Annoyed by her husband for too frequently patronizing Cans Cans (“Hooters for butts”), she turns her lusty attentions toward Oliver and attempts to seduce him with her signature cocktail, vodka and Crystal Light (“a long pour for my short king”)—until Loretta makes a surprise appearance. The episode gently nudges the investigation forward, but mostly, it allows an A-team of dramatic players to just play.

If, as Tzvetan Todorov argued, every whodunit is comprised of two stories—“the story of the crime and the story of the investigation”—in Only Murders, it’s the second story that has always comprised the greater source of interest. But even that story may be of less immediate interest than the minor vignettes that emerge over the course of each season, and the thematic filigree that overlies them. The show may be intimately scaled, but it still manages to convey, at times through its minor characters, some surprisingly compelling insights: about the ways shared experiences of storytelling can mitigate loneliness, for instance, or the capacity for frustrated ambition to transmute, through patient dedication to craft, into art.

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Significantly, Only Murders seems to have lost some faith in its formula at a moment when the formulaic pleasures of the whodunit are being rediscovered. The ensemble murder mystery has experienced a mini revival in recent years, evidenced by the success of Rian Johnson’s Knives Out (2019) and Glass Onion (2022), and the appearance of Kenneth Branagh’s series of Christie reboots, Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Death on the Nile (2022), and A Haunting in Venice (2023). Meanwhile, television has given viewers The After Party (2022–23), A Murder at the End of the World (2023), Death and Other Details (2024), and, most recently, The Perfect Couple (2024).

On one hand, the appeal of the genre seems almost self-evident, as Phil Maciak notes in his review of A Murder at the End of the World. “It’s a timeless setup for a reason,” he writes. “The pressure-cooker atmosphere—the close-quarters psychological combat, the small resentments and simmering tensions, even the physical discomfort of sharing space for that long—turns ordinary murder mysteries into devilish social experiments.” It especially makes sense, he adds, that “isolated, ensemble-cast murder mysteries […] had a minor renaissance in the pandemic era,” when viewers were, to various extents, trying to puzzle through their own personal locked-room dramas.

But there’s another reason for the appeal of these recent whodunits, Only Murders in the Building included. In contrast to the “murder shows” that dominate the digital era—and which have become so normalized that we now fold laundry to them—these cozier alternatives offer a dose of untrue crime, with more definitive conclusions and fewer gruesome particulars. Poker Face (2023), like its antecedents Murder, She Wrote (1984–96) and Columbo (1968–78, 1989–2003)—both of which have found new streaming audiences—offers similar satisfactions in a more episodic package.

Put another way, these recent whodunits—or howdunits, in the case of Poker Face and Columbo—provide the same outlet for participatory engagement that Tanya Horeck discerns in the true crime serial, but without that genre’s queasy ethics. Only Murders, notably, is clear about that distinction from the start. As Charles remarks in the first season, “Every true crime story is actually true for someone.”

Without the same ethical stakes or obligations to realism, Only Murders is free, as it mostly recognizes, to lean into its most ornamental tendencies. In his 2023 book Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder, David Bordwell argues that detective fiction has historically played a key role in introducing and acclimating audiences to forms of narrative experimentation. “Matters of form are fundamental to the genre,” he writes. “[A] taste for felt construction, for flagrant artifice and sensed pattern, informs much of what audiences enjoyed about mysteries.”

What is interesting, however, is how comparatively underappreciated the “flagrant artifice” of the show seems to have been. Even as narrative complexity has become a celebrated feature of prestige television, Only Murders represents a different subset of shows whose artistry exists mostly on the surface: hidden, like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight, rather than in Easter eggs debated on Reddit. Only Murders in the Building might not be symptomatic, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t reward scrutiny.

It especially seems to invite what literary scholars have called “surface reading.” If close analysis has typically assumed that meaningful elements must be secreted, a “surface”-oriented approach focuses on what has “been rendered invisible” by this assumption—which is to say, what more paranoid reading might miss. Coziness may still be undertheorized as an aesthetic category, but there’s nothing concealed about it. Rather, it inheres in aspects of the text—its costume design, its dialogue, its look—that are immediately apprehended and, as a result, too readily dismissed as unserious.

In this light, one of Only Murders’ signal contributions may be to remind audiences that complexity exists outside the sprawling, large-scale story worlds and strenuous displays of social relevance that have defined so many prestige dramas in past decades. Think of the seemingly infinite chessboard that appears in the Game of Thrones (2011–19) credits sequence; nothing could be more antithetical to the sight of Loretta’s beautifully curated—and undeniably cozy—one-bedroom apartment. “It’s art!” Oliver exclaims, staggered by the intricacy and idiosyncrasy of its design. Flatness may not be all, but sometimes it’s enough.