(courtesy IMP Awards)
Only Murders in the Building S4, E4-8
What beautifully wrought five episodes.
While the expected sleuthing twists and turns are well and truly present & accounted for, in almost gasp-worthy, cliffhanger number, what emerges quite powerfully, as it always does in Only Murders in the Building is the humanity at the heart of the storytelling.
While Only Murders in the Building whimsical and funny to a superlatively funny degree, what strikes you again and again is how the writers drive everything form the point of view of how connected or disconnected the characters are.
Of course, Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) remain as tight if hilariously fractious as ever, but in the weirdest and yet somehow loveliest of found families, characters like their gay neighbour Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton) and police detective Donna Williams (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and even the strange denizens of the West Tower of the titular Arconia apartment building are being drawn into a group which acts as a social antidote to the big, cold city of New York around them.
Many of the characters who are on the line as possible suspects, such as The Shining goth-like Brother Sisters, Trina and Tawny (Catherine Cohen and Siena Werber) who are directing the film based on our famous podcasters, also find connection in the strangest of ways, testament to the fact that Only Murders in the Building is ostensibly a whodunnit series, it’s far better described as a grounded human drama.
Even the three fictionalised versions of the actors playing Charles, Oliver and Mabel – Eugene Levy, Zach Galifianakis and Eva Longoria who are a hoot all around – somehow find a home in the oddbod ragtag group of characters who form the emotional centre of the show.
It’s because of this focus on the humanity of the people involved, that all the twists and turns of the investigation really resonate.
I mean, sure, we all love a big, scene-stealing revelation and there are plenty of those in these episodes such as ———- SPOILER ALERT!!!!! ———- the fact that the murder victim of the season, Charles’s stunt double and BFF, Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch) isn’t the only body detected in the ashes from the incinerator, but what really keeps you glued to the episodes is how real, even amidst all the comedic exaggeration and surreal silliness, all the characters are.
That comes to the fore in episode seven, “Valley of the Dolls” where, fearing for their lives for reasons best left to the viewing of the episodes, Charles, Oliver and Mabel flee to Charles’s sister’s place on Long Island which is all kinds of redneck middle class weird.
Doreen (Melissa Mccarthy) is Charles’s kid sister and she wears big cat print everything, acts like a cougar to Oliver especially – who, by the way, continues his strange but heartfelt relationship with Loretta (Meryl Streep) – and has covered almost every inch of her sprawling home with creepy, wide-eyed dolls.
She is a glorious piece of satire, and McCarthy makes an absolutely delicious meal of her, but what stands out in the farcical hilarity of the piece which has a lot of fun with the fact that everyone ends up at the “safe house” (making it possibly not so safe anymore?) is how lonely and vulnerable she is and how she needs to reconnect not just to her estranged husband but to Charles.
While the episode doesn’t overly progress the plot, it does underscore how richly character-oriented Only Murders in the Building is and how, while all the Agatha Christie-ing podcasting is hugely enjoyable, red herrings and true revelations like, what sticks with you is the people and how the why things happen is possibly even more important than the what and how.
Only Murders in the Building streams on Disney+
Bad Monkey S1, 8-10
Good lord but what a brilliantly clever series this has been.
A film noir detective thriller set in the very sunny and quite un-noirish climes of Miami and the Florida Keys, Bad Monkey (and yes, the titular monkey is real and not metaphorical) is one those shows that got absolutely everything right.
And that, rather happily for a series that did such a seamlessly good job of the build-up, includes sticking its sort-of-happy-ever-after-but-not-quote landing.
At the centre of Bad Monkey (based on the Carl Hiaasen book of the same name and adapted by Bill Lawrence), all the way through ten funny and fiendishly clever episodes, which sparkles with witty, intelligent dialogue, vibrantly-realised characters and substantial, supremely narrative storytelling, is Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn), a quip-heavy, one-time police detective who cannot help trying to be, in the words of his sage, hippie dad Jim (Scott Glenn), “the cop of the world”.
Sporting a fairly serious case of overly-responsible eldest child syndrome, Yancy is a man of great integrity, and while his decision-making may not quite be up to par at times, and he may neglect the finer points of people-to-people relationships, he is absolutely the kind of person you want on your side when things are going south.
Or when the bad guys, in this case, grifting rich girl wannabe, Eve Stripling (Meredith Hagner) and her incredibly manipulated husband Nick (Rob Delaney), who sells his soul and then some for a twisted dream not of his making, seem to be getting away with, quite literally, murder.
In the final perfectly-executed three episodes of the show’s first season, Yancy is out to get the Striplings, with the help of Nick’s spurned daughter Caitlin (Charlotte Lawrence), Bahamian fishermen Neville Stafford – the show splits its storytelling locations between Florida and the island of Andros in the Bahamas) – his girlfriend Dawnie (Reese Antoinette) and Rosa Campesino (Natalie Martinez) a medical examiner who might just be the one girlfriend Yancy manages to hang onto.
But Bad Monkey doesn’t make things easy for anybody, least of Yancy, and it certainly doesn’t trade in easy morality stories (though the ending might suggest it is a softer touch on this count than it lets on).
Whatever takes places in these three episodes, with a hurricane brewing, and it is a LOT, is tainted at every point by the way in which justice rarely acts the way we think it will, largely because people are ragingly inconsistent even when they act with the best of intentions.
We live in an imperfect world where sometimes people get away with some quite terrible things, and where it takes a pivotal event like, say ———- SPOILER ALERT!!!!! ———- Eve killing Nick – never fall in love with a sociopathic narcissist … DO … NOT – and fleeing on her boat to Portugal to really make someone like Yancy realise they can’t, in fact, save the world.
He gives it a red-hot go but in the end, he has to settle for the fact that justice does it’s own thing – the ending is a gloriously good study in how what looks a loss becoming the mother of all murder vanquishing wins – and he doesn’t have to be its architect and executor, and that he really can’t be because life is never that simple.
That’s the great joy of Bad Monkey; it is a film noir detective tale par excellence, but more than that, it is a study in the vagaries of human nature and the injustices of life, and how even when you do the right thing, events don’t always twist and turn in your favour.
In fact ———- SPOILER ALERT!!!!! ———- Bad Monkey with everyone (yes, even the Dragon Queenin a weirdly fatal way) bar Yancy ending up with some sort of happy ever after or potential for one, leading him to joke, rather sagely, his BFF and former partner, Rogelio (John Ortiz) that he is a catalyst for others’ happiness, remaining curiously immune himself.
Things aren’t quite that bleak for him, though – I mean, look at the view from his home! – and you get the feeling that Yancy will bounce back just fine, a man who has learnt some lessons, but rather happily for us, with a hoped-for second season in the possible offing (and a second Hiaasen novel that features Yancy), not enough that he won’t plunge back into the fray which he pretty much does as the first season ends.
Bad Monkey streams on AppleTV+