For a certain kind of listener, the true-crime podcast is the audio equivalent of crack cocaine. The perfect marriage of content and cliffhanger-friendly form, productions such as Dr. Death, S-Town, and In the Dark have been downloaded and dissected at a frantic pace ever since the first season of Serial streamed into the public imagination in 2014. True-crime podcasts have been the subject of doctoral dissertations, countless clickbait features, and heated online denunciations. (“The Killer Question: Are True-Crime Podcasts Exploitative?” asks the Guardian.) Given the genre’s explosion, is it any wonder that parodists and spoof artists have begun to flock to the scene?
Similar to its lamentably underwatched predecessor American Vandal, Hulu’s new comedy series Only Murders in the Building re-creates the true-crime experience in ways that are both satirical and sincere. The story of a murder investigation conducted by a trio of self-involved amateurs, Hulu’s program is The Hardy Boys meets Seinfeld meets Waiting for Guffman, with all the absurdity and irreverence that that combination suggests. Despite its cheekiness, however, the series never quite loses track of the mystery at its core: whether a young financier’s alleged suicide was, in fact, a slaying. The result of this duality is a show that delights in lampooning genre conventions but isn’t above a little cliffhanger magic of its own.
The series stars Steve Martin and Martin Short as a pair of has-been entertainers who spend their evenings digesting All is Not OK in Oklahoma, a lurid Serial rip-off hosted by obvious Sarah Koenig proxy Cinda Canning (Tina Fey). A former television actor whose glory days lie far behind him, Martin’s Charles-Haden Savage not only listens to the multipart audio production but assembles homemade maps to track its many convolutions. Equally obsessed is Short’s Oliver Putnam, a failed stage director whose latest flop (Splash!: The Musical) has shut Broadway’s doors in his face forever. When the death of fellow building resident Tim Kono (Julian Cihi) sends the pair fleeing to a nearby diner, they meet co-devotee Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) and hatch a plot. Instead of following the police inquiry from afar, the threesome will solve the case on its own and chronicle the journey in streaming form. Mightn’t they investigate multiple killings, an ambitious Charles demands? No, Oliver insists. Only murders in the building will do.
As suggested by this droll exchange, Hulu’s production offers comedy in a quieter vein than such high-strung programs as Veep and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Though invective has its place — Charles’s podcast narration is “like a Ken Burns documentary on the history of boredom,” Oliver snipes — the show’s central currency is charm and its most enjoyable trait the camaraderie between its leads. Separated from Mabel by an ocean of experience, Charles tries gamely to speak her language despite his inability to send so much as one normal text. (“What sounds more casual: ‘Dear Mabel’ or ‘Greetings, Mabel?’”) Ever the demanding director, Oliver runs roughshod over his collaborators but can’t hide the vulnerability and decency beneath his sarcastic shell.
Having worked together as long ago as 1986’s Three Amigos and as recently as 2018’s Netflix special An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life, Short and Martin are old hands at the mugging clown–straight man dynamic on display in these 10 episodes. What gives their current interplay its freshness is the addition of the lovely Gomez, whose on-camera mien — millennial anhedonia with a hint of sweetness — arrests the series’s descent into preciousness. In lesser hands, or strapped with worse writing, Mabel might have been a mere grumbler or scold, castigating Oliver and Charles for the imaginary offense of being elderly and white. Instead, the youngest member of the triumvirate treats her hoary partners with a bemused tenderness. She might not be the most honest person in the world, as an early revelation makes clear, but she is nevertheless a pleasure to have around.
To the extent that Only Murders in the Building errs, it does so by giving too free a rein to the abundant creativity of its writers and directors. Though beautifully filmed, an early set piece in which apartment floors morph into trampolines is both tonally discordant and vaguely ridiculous. The same is at least as true of a fourth-episode subplot that sees Charles stalked by ghostly Looney Tunes figures as he ponders the stepdaughter who is no longer in his life. True to its nature, the series is on far safer ground when it moves out of its actors’ way and lets its winning dialogue shine. To be sure, visual inventiveness has its place. But why bother with clever animation sequences when Martin is standing right there, blithely comparing Hempstead to Bosnia?
Indeed, for all of the show’s podcast-related humor, Hulu’s production is perhaps best understood as a love song to the Big Apple, not only because of its New Yorker-inspired opening credits but because of such only-in-NYC moments as Charles delaying a high-speed chase to express his disbelief that Oliver can afford a parking spot. Watching the series as a former Gothamite myself, I couldn’t help chuckling at Charles’s claim not to have left Manhattan in five years, nor at Oliver’s confession that his driver’s license expired more than two decades ago. For that matter, what New Yorker could fail to see in one of the deceased resident’s neighbors a glint of murderous envy? Of course the elegant Caribbean woman should be treated as a suspect. She wanted his apartment.
That Only Murders in the Building will eventually solve its central crime cannot be seriously in doubt. Until then, viewers can relax into a show that is, at its best, a mere notch or two below brilliance. As for its co-stars, here’s hoping that their long collaboration continues on some future project. Martin and Short in a Manhattan nursing home? I’ll be watching.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
