Only Murders in the Building, Season 4: Killing It in Hollyweird

By Liam Lacey

Rating: A

The comedy mystery series, Only Murders in the Building, starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez as a podcasting, crime-solving trio, has become a streaming era phenomenon. It’s earned 44 Emmy nominations in three seasons on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ in Canada.

Released in the summer of 2021 in early months of COVID lockdown, the series is comfort food television that hasn’t been processed into Pablum. Set in the fictional Arconia apartment building in New York, a Dakota style shrine to faded elegance, the series focuses on the friendship formed by three characters who together produce a podcast and solve murders.

Martin Short, Selina Gomez and Steve Martin go Hollywood in Season Four.

Martin plays Charles Haden Savage, an emotionally withdrawn washed-up actor, the former star of a police TV series. Short plays Oliver Putnam, a scarf-twirling, narcissistic Broadway director with a history of flops. The third wheel is pop singer and actress Gomez as Mabel Mora, an unimpressed/depressed millennial squatting in her late aunt’s apartment. Her presence here is less about drawing in a younger demographic than providing the ballast to Martin and Short’s giddy humour.

Unlike that other prominent comfort food series, the therapeutic dramedy Ted Lasso, Only Murders values whimsy over wisdom and playfulness over platitudes. The first season, for example, included an entire episode from a deaf character’s perspective without any audible dialogue. Last season’s inventive 10-episode season involved the creation of an entire Broadway musical.

This season is all about the movies, with each episode titled after a well-known film, beginning with this week’s first two episodes, Once Upon a Time in the West and Gates of Heaven.

Fans of Season Three will recall it ends with the murder of Charles’ stunt double and lookalike, Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), who was shot by a sniper in his apartment, while wearing his clothes. The idea of doubling, and sometimes tripling characters, runs through the new season.

When the podcast team are invited to Hollywood, at the behest of a producer (Molly Shannon) to make a movie based on their podcast, they are introduced to the actors cast to play them: There’s Eugene Levy as a grumpy Charles; Zach Galifianakis as Oliver —they try to out-snark each other — and, in the role of Mabel, Eva Langoria, who’s defensive about being too old for the character.

There’s also the behind-the-camera crew, including a screenwriter (Pachinko’s Jin Ha) who tries to look like Charlie Kaufman, and a pair of goth indie film sisters, Catherine Cohen and Siena Werber, (apparently modelled on the Wachowsky siblings.)

Naturally, the actors want to shadow the characters they are playing and follow them back to New York, which makes crime solving complicated, and even more complex when their stunt doubles start popping up. By Episode 6, in a parody of art house meta-cinema, rival camera crews confront each other in a sort of Mexican standoff.

As the series develops, Suspicion falls, not just on various members of the production crew but also on a cult-like group of people, (including characters played by Richard Kind and Kumail Nanjiani) who are living in the Arconia’s West Tower, within shooting distance of Charles’s apartment.

Also, just because they were killed in previous seasons, that doesn’t mean Lynch’s or Paul Rudd’s characters don’t have parts to play here again. Though the multi-plot juggling gets wearisome, there’s a late episode entry from Melissa McCarthy, whose slapstick performance works like a booster rocket to take the comedy to a new level.

Although Only Murders was created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, the continuing appeal of the series, to my mind, is Martin Short’s character, one of his favourite types going back to his SCTV days, a flamboyant, passive-aggressive performer, insistently pronouncing his genius against contrary evidence. (In the show, Oliver is described by one of the Hollywood writers as someone everyone wants to “strangle and cuddle at the same time.”)

In Martin Short’s half-century career, he has done almost every entertainment genre, but he has never done anything for four seasons:  Not SCTV, Saturday Night Live, his own talk show, variety show, or sitcoms. Some years ago in an interview, he mentioned an aborted project from the late ‘80s, a David Lynch film called One Saliva Bubble. It was to be a murder mystery in which he would costar with Steve Martin. Only Murders, with its blend of silliness, absurdity and undercurrent of dread, may be exactly the part he was born to play.

This review is based on the first seven of the 10 episodes of Season Four of Only Murders in the Building. Created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman. With Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez. The first two episodes of Only Murders in the Building are available on Disney+ on Aug. 27 with one new episode available each week for the next 10 weeks.