(courtesy IMP Awards)
They’re back!
While there are many TV/streaming shows where you often feel, as a new season dawns, as if you are being reunited with characters you know and love, there are only a select few where you feel as if you’re back with family.
While that differs from person to person of course, it’s reasonable bet that Only Murders in the Building, now three episodes into its fourth season, engenders that sense of familial closeness in more viewers than it doesn’t.
Watching this bright, whimsical, cheeky, and often moving show about three disparate murder-solving and podcast-recording residents of an upmarket New York apartment complex known as the Arconia, whose togetherness defies the odds of not just big cities themselves but age demographics, is a real joy because in each other, these three have found family.
And in so doing, so have we, with each season feeling like a chance to spend quality time with characters who mean the world to each other – you can tell because they constantly affectionately bicker with one another which is as good a mark of true love and close friendship as you’re likely to get – and who honestly feel like family in a way that often transcends our own.
These three people – semi-retired actor Charles Hayden-Savage (Steve Martin), Broadway director Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and struggling young artist Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) – need each other as much as they want each other and as they set about investigating yet another murder in the building, that of ———- SPOILER ALERT !!!!! ———- Charles’s long-time body double Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), shot, you presume by mistake in her friend’s darkened apartment, you get the feeling that they relish the idea of working closely together again.
With things beginning to get a little too Murder She Wrote – in so far, as people keep dying in the building; maybe everyone should just move out? – season four bears the same beguiling mix of humour and intrigue and societal commentary that had made the show such a warmhearted success so far.
The extra fun to be had this season is that Hollywood wants to turn this story of three unlikely digital sleuths into a movie, which not only gives Charles and Oliver a chance to indulge heightened thespian dreams – particularly Oliver who, as you might expect, rather overdramatically stakes everything on the film not only happening but being a HUGE success – but gives Eugene Levy, Eva Longoria and Zach Galifianakis, playing Oliver, Charles and an aged-up Mabel respectively, the chance to ham it up and play hugely amusing parodies of themselves.
Watching them interact with, and not get the point of the podcast at all, at least at first, is a hoot, and plays to the idea that Hollywood is manifestly unable to present the real world through anything else that a hugely distorted and greatly untruthful lens.
Happy to parody show business itself, just it has proven gleefully predisposed and eager to make fun of everything from New York society to the need we all have for meaning and purpose (often to hilarious but emotionally affecting extremes) in the past, Only Murders in the Building has a great deal as Hollywood and actors’ egos come screaming hard up against three people who simply want to tell stories that better and build their sense of family still further and tighter as they do so.
It’s fun too to watch as we meet the residents of the West Tower who are looked down upon by the largely owner-occupiers of the East Tower such as Charles, and who, on first glance at least, deserve the description of being a little weird and odd.
Cut off from the main entrance and exit of the Arconia after someone started a brothel there, three of the people over West (mostly “renters” sniffs one of the cast) come under suspicion when the gunshot that killed Sazz, whose murder by the way doesn’t get officially recognised until the end of episode one because of #reasons (Bulgaria features as does lots of ash), is found to have come from the direction of apartments over yonder.
The various idiosyncrasies of the Westies are a glorious joy to behold, and while the exact details of their eccentricities should be left to the watching of these three finely wrought episodes, suffice to say that pinkeye-sufferer Vince Fish (Richard Kind), Christmas obsessive and ripped videographer Rudy Thurber (Kumail Nanjiani) and pig-eating-in-the-bathroom family Alfonso, Inez and daughter Ana (Desmin Borges, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Lilian Rebelo respectively) are going to provide a great deal of entertainment throughout this season.
After all, if there is one thing Only Murders in the Building LOVES, it’s idiosyncratic characters who defy the idea of “normal” and who often turn out to be either weirder and nowhere as weird as you first think.
This show has a field day with these kinds of characters – while they don’t see themselves in this light, Charles, Oliver and Mabel as all odd and strange in their endearing ways, one of the reasons their cosy, caring, dysfunctional found family works so well – and they are, in many ways, the lifeblood of a show that delights in skewering, often with great affection and honesty, the various vagaries and oddities of human nature all while asking “Aren’t we all a bit strange in the end?”.
While progress is made in solving the crime, and Oliver gets to record more than a few characteristically overwrought memos to self for the podcast, Only Murders in the Building season four has the most fun when it leans into the weirdness and strangeness of people, and how we often make assumptions on all kinds of things that often turn out to be far from the truth, revealing as we do, that we’re all a little bit broken, a lot in need of family and prone to get ourselves lost before we stumble on the truth.
Only Murders in the Building season four streams on Disney+