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).
