On paper, Only Murders in the Building is everything that’s wrong with contemporary TV comedy. Rather than engage in the risky business of outright hilarity, the streaming era prefers to hedge its bets when it comes to the artform, prioritising high-concept plotting, emotional sincerity and hype-securing big names over actual laughs. Only Murders isn’t just excessively starry – Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez lead the cast as a trio of true-crime podcasters (Martin is also the show’s co-creator), while guests include Meryl Streep, Nathan Lane and Tina Fey – it also presents a novel fusion of media satire, thrillingly twisty whodunnit and sensitive exploration of loss and loneliness. In other words, there’s a lot going on here that could feasibly make up for a script that can’t quite deliver the comic goods.
And yet – plot twist! – Only Murders in the Building is screamingly funny. In fact, it’s the funniest thing on TV at the moment (or, rather, now being drip-fed on to a streaming platform). If you like comedy of any stripe, you will like – and perhaps even love – this show.
To make sense of it, however, you will need to start from the beginning: despite starring two septuagenarians, this is not your old-school dip-in-and-out sitcom. In fact, three seasons in, the Only Murders universe is so populous and its plot so labyrinthine that providing a brief precis is nigh-on impossible. Here, instead, are the bare bones. In season one, three neighbours and true-crime fans – washed-up TV actor Charles (an uptight and egotistically frustrated Martin), washed-up theatre director Oliver (Short, giving it everything as a sweatily flamboyant name-dropper) and never-got-going millennial Mabel (an utterly deadpan Gomez, in one of the most compellingly strange performances on TV) – started a podcast about a suspicious death in their fancy apartment complex. Their investigation involved Sting, a Greek deli owner and Charles’s new bassoonist girlfriend Jan. Season two focused on the murder of the building’s board president Bunny, while in season three their victim was Ben Glenroy (Paul Rudd), the obnoxious star of Oliver’s inadvertently hilarious Broadway flop Death Rattle.
Which brings us to season four (the fourth in four years, proving it is possible to produce new seasons of great TV on an annual basis). We already know which building-based murder is the focus this time; at the end of season three, Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), the phlegmatic longtime stunt double of erstwhile TV detective Charles, was shot through an apartment window. But before the trio gets sucked into another investigation – aided by a cadaver dog called Gravey (not Gravy) – Hollywood calls.
Only Murders is at its most delicious when pastiching showbiz, which it does in a pleasingly insiderish but not alienating way. This time the movie industry proves a rich seam as our trio visit Paramount studios, who are fast-tracking a film of their hit podcast. The whole trip is a comic feast, particularly the meeting with unhinged producer Bev Melon (Molly Shannon), who explains her desperate thirst for the threesome’s life rights with the immortal line: “When I see a hot piece of adaptable IP getting circled by a bunch of horny rival studios I go in hard and I always finish first.” That very 2024 piece of dialogue is soon joined by some vintage slapstick courtesy of Martin, as Charles attempts to hardball a fee but can’t quite propel his piece of paper across the supersized conference table (the show itself is a symphony of different eras of humour; all have the ability to elicit belly laughs). Soon, the trio come face-to-face with their new alter egos: Zach Galifianakis is set to play Oliver, Eugene Levy is Charles and Eva Longoria (a comic revelation) is Mabel.
What happens next is: a lot, most of which is under embargo (despite being a highly bingeable string of cliffhangers, Only Murders is released on a weekly basis). As in previous seasons, we’re introduced to a whole new universe of characters, including the shifty residents of the building’s west tower, but it eventually becomes clear that solving Sazz’s murder means rooting through the pile of loose ends the titular podcast – and the TV show itself – has left hanging since season one.
This kind of clever, long-game plotting means Only Murders is genuinely gripping as a murder mystery. It’s not a perfect series – the dynamic between its central throuple still feels underdeveloped, and although Charles’s guilt about the sacrifices Sazz made on his behalf is moving, it’s also over-egged – but it’s close: this show remains an extremely rare example of a comedy-drama that does both equally, and incredibly, well.
• Only Murders in the Building season four is on Disney+
