(courtesy IMP Awards)
“Cosy murder” is one of those deliciously contradictory genre labels that somehow leaves you feeling simultaneously alarmed and reassured.
If you stop to think about it, there really isn’t anything truly comforting about murder which, it’s inherent life-ending qualities apart, suggests trauma, violence, pain, loss and soul-scarring sadness.
Not exactly reading under the doona (duvet) on a rainy afternoon cosy, now is it?
And yet throw in a loveable or likably troubled investigating protagonist, a few quirky characters and an ending which justice isn’t just seen to be done but emphatically acted, and you have a genre that people flock to because it makes you feel that in this chaotic, often unfulfilling reality we inhabit that there is some sense of definitive closure.
The great love held by many people for the genre likely partly explains why Only Murders in the Building is so popular, and how in its third season on Hulu (Disney+ in many international markets), the show continues to attract a health viewership from people who wouldn’t want to be anywhere near an actual murder but who are perfectly content to watch others deal with its happening and its closure-certain resolution.
The trick, of course, heading into a third season is whether the producers and writers can sustain the original premise of three formerly separated tenants of New York’s Arconia building on the Upper West Side who become friends investigating the first season murder and stay close, despite differences in outlook and age, band together to podcast their findings in the pursuit of the killer.
Charles Hayden-Savage (Steve Martin) and Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) are the two older members of the True Crime podcast trio, the former an actor, the latter a Broadway director who bond with the much-younger Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) who is self-admittedly trying to figure out her place in the world.
That’s still happening in season three, complicated by the fact that her unseen aunt has sold the apartment and she has to move in a month – enough time to solve another murder, should one occur? But of course! – but while she is trying to figure out where to go and what to do next, her two older friends have some challenges of their own.
Charles’s issues are quite so big though he likely sees them that way.
He is still smarting from never quite becoming the storied actor he imagined was his destiny, and his casting in Oliver’s new play seems to be a way for him to gain some new relevancy and thespian potency now the revival of the TV series that brought him some manner of fame, Brazzos, is now fading in the popular memory.
Meanwhile it’s Oliver who has the most to lose if the play goes south; it’s his first big break in about 15 years and his final grabbing of the theatrical brass ring and if it doesn’t work, then that’s it for a man who, like Charles, aspires to some sort of lasting successful legacy.
If you watched season two, you will be well acquainted with the fact that after solving that season’s murder, they were at the theatre to wait the opening night of Oliver’s play, Death Rattle, only to watch its leading man, Ben Glenroy (Paul Rudd) apparently drop dead on stage.
Not the best of outcomes by any measure and as season three opens, Oliver is dealing with the very real prospect that the death of Ben, who did not endear himself to a cast which includes Meryl Streep as long-in-the-shadows actor Loretta Durkin and ambitious up-and-comer Kimber (Ashley Park), may mean the end of his own ambitions to finish his theatrical career on a high note.
But then ———- SPOILERS !!!!! ———- and this is how the show actually stays true to its title which is important since it is pretty the whole premise of this funny, sweet and emotionally meaningful slice of cosy murder – Ben somehow is revived in the hospital, comes back to the Arconia to attend the opening night party (which Oliver is, perhaps inadvisedly, adamant must happen regardless), serves up some mea culpa home truths that still reek of his trademark arrogance even in their outward penitent notes, before dropping dead into a lift which is, happily for the show, not so much for its residents, in the building.
Title and premise salvaged!
What is really salvaged, at least in the first three episodes anyway, and not to the extent that we love to see it in display, is the closeness of our three unexpected friends.
Oliver is often off either directing the play or hilariously trying to turn it into a musical when Ben’s death means that its producers, Donna DeMeo and her gay son Cliff, played with awkwardly funny, semi-incestuousness by Linda Emond and Wesley Taylor, decide to pull the financial plug.
He’s also busy falling in love with Loretta, for whom the play is her big acting break after a lifetime trying to break through, and so hasn’t got the time he would normally have to keep Charles and Mabel company.
They are mostly together, including when events take a more stalkery turn and their efforts at starting an investigation hit a few roadblocks, not least when the humourously-named Tobert (Jesse Williams) refuses to share some footage he has of Ben’s final moments (well, the first time around anyway) but even then not as much as you’d like them to be.
It makes sense in one respect that the three may be splintering a little since life is moving on for them and, unlikely close friendship aside, they are united mostly by their crime solving passion, but it does mean that one of the things that made, and makes, the show so endearing, the tree musketeers doing their amusingly snarky investigative thing, is quite so front and centre.
Still, we are only three episodes in to a ten-episode run and with its trademark wit, sense of the ridiculous and vibrantly quirky characterisation still very much on display, there’s a very good chance Only Murders in the Building will do very nicely in its third outing, keeping the “cosy” very much with the “murder” and giving us a lovely bright spot in a world that doesn’t seem to have a lot of time for it at the best of times.
Only Murders in the Building is currently streaming on Disney+