Only Murders In The Building · Hoffa-tinis
Plus Penry, Peacock, and premiere news
the true crime that's worth your time
Midway through the first episode of Only Murders in the Building’s second season, Martin Short’s character, failed theater producer Oliver Putnam, exclaims, “God. I love this building.” I do too, Oliver; I do too. I’m happy to be spending some time at the Arconia, the lavish Upper West Side apartment where Putnam and the co-hosts of his true crime podcast live, this summer.
Hulu dropped the first two S02 episodes this week; the season’s eight remaining episodes, which focus on yet another murder in the Arconia, will be shared weekly. This summer, our favorite podcast hosts have been framed for murder. Will the trio find out who’s framing them and find the real killer? My bet is yes, but that’s not necessarily the point of the show.
The joy of the first season of Only Murders wasn’t the mystery — I figured out the culprit pretty early on — but the chemistry among the three main leads, the stellar casting, the jokes and the meta commentary on the true-crime genre. The first two episodes of Season 2, particularly the premiere, deliver each of those: Short, Steve Martin as aging TV actor Charles-Haden Savage, and Selena Gomez as mysterious millennial Mabel continue to light up the screen with their interactions. Short and Martin have spent decades working together and the addition of Gomez adds an extra sparkle to their humor. It would be easy to have her play the straight (wo)man to the established comedians, but the show’s writers give her solid jokes as well.
The first season featured some excellent guest casting — notably Nathan Lane as a theater producer (yes, I know) and Tina Fey as a Sarah-Koenig-style celebrity podcast host. Fey reprises her role in S02, as her character makes a podcast about the Arconia’s podcasters. She’s clearly having a lot of fun and I’m hoping for more screentime from her this year. Amy Schumer plays a version of herself interested in adapting the first season of the trio’s podcast into a TV show. Her hilarious attempt to play the bassoon made my dog bark in alarm. And Cara Delevingne joins the cast as Mabel’s artsy love interest.
One last bit of casting — actor and podcaster Michael Rapaport as a police officer who announces he hates podcasts in the premiere’s opening moments — showed Only Murders remains committed to meta commentary. This season, though, the show is critiquing itself and the mystery genre more broadly. Short, in a direct-to-camera moment, comments on how difficult second seasons are when someone asks about his podcast. And “Amy Schumer” explains that she loves that the first season of Oliver, Charles, and Mabel’s podcast made murder “cozy.” It’s a line that made me laugh and squirm all at once. Because — for better or worse — I’m one of those people who finds murder mystery shows like Only Murders cozy. And this summer, when I’m craving a sense of justice, I’m sure I’ll be tuning in weekly. — Elizabeth Held
More book recs, and summer-reading bingo cards, at Elizabeth’s Substack, What To Read If.
Voting for the July bonus topic is still open! I think we probably have a winner, but just in case you Dahmer partisans didn’t have a chance to pull the lever…
June’s bonus review of The State of Texas vs. Melissa went up — mirabile — last night, but if you don’t have a paid sub, you can’t see it. Five bucks and you can roll around in the archive like catnip, just sayin’! — SDB
I’ve had another longform item on my “cold case” story budget for a long time, a 2001 feature for Talk by Alex Prud’homme on the case of Johnny Paul Penry. Penry too faced a death sentence, for the 1979 rape and murder of Pamela Carpenter, but while there was comparatively little doubt that he did it, debate raged over whether he should face capital punishment given his intellectual disability. Debate also raged over whether Penry had an intellectual disability, or was cannily playing up legitimate delays — and a scabrously abusive childhood home — to create compassion where none might otherwise exist. Here’s a snip detailing Prud’homme’s meeting with Penry (and a content warning for the R word):
Penry seemed eager to please, and he had a certain offbeat charm. But I found the conversation disconcerting. Dressed in a white uniform, he smiled at me through the plexiglass and in a soft voice said, “Hello. What are we going to talk about today?”
Penry was shy at first: then he opened up. He pronounced his r’s as w’s-as when he said, “my momma made me eat my own number two and dwink my own uwine.” His stories wandered, he was distracted by a buzzing noise in the ceiling, and he happily admitted he didn’t know the meaning of some of the words he used-“some people in here look at me like an outcast,” he said, “which I don’t know what that means.” He said he dreams about getting out of jail and getting a job as a busboy.
Yet Penry didn’t appear nearly as “retarded” as he has been portrayed in the reams of press coverage about his case. He was able to carry on a fairly normal conversation, could tell the correct time from his digital watch, and said he could read and write “a little bit.” Suddenly I understood why some prison guards and practically everyone I met in Livingston suspect his claim of retardation is disingenuous.
A later detailing of the actual crime for which Penry was sentenced to die further muddies the waters as to Penry’s “responsibility” — and they’re muddied further by a grimly concise accounting of his upbringing, which implicates trauma in his actions and suggests (to me; I am not a doctor) literal traumatic brain injury.
The Penry story didn’t just resonate with the Lucio case because of the geography and death-row aspects. Both stories feature women whose reproductive and parenting choices were not supported, post-birth, by a state and a socio-cultural atmosphere uninterested in doing the work of protecting children. This is not me justifying Mrs. Penry’s monstrous behavior to further an agenda; there is no justification. But when the system centers child-bearing as an automatic net good, and doesn’t step up when that’s not the case…again, I’m just a retired poetry major who thinks she can solve the world after a glass and a half of sangria. But this isn’t the first time these…co-morbidities, let’s say, have occurred to me. A snip from my bonus review of An American Crime from last year:
[W]hat Sylvia Likens had to endure before her grimy, humiliated death does typify several of the problems with American life and institutions, specific to the middle of the last century. In the first 20-30 minutes, you get a solid sense of the overwhelmed bitterness felt by poor women in conservative areas, abandoned by their husbands, with no realistic access to birth control (and abortion legally and financially off the table as well as “morally”), struggling to manage chronic conditions with drugs of abuse. Not that any of that is the reason Gertie [Baniszewski] did what she did, or made her children and neighbors do, much less an excuse, but to the extent that the audience — presumably not ethically deformed monsters forged in a hopeless crucible — can hope to understand how this horror came to occur, An American Crime does a creditable job indicting both Gertie and her circumstances.
…As my dad likes to say when something stupid is occurring, “Who has more fun than we do?” Anyway, if you don’t feel like busting out the sheet cake for America’s birthday next week, I get it, but there’s worse ways to spend the long weekend than with a copy of a Best American Crime Writing — and that’s where I spotted this longread, in the 2002 edition. (What became of Penry? You can find that info here, but I’d read Prud’homme’s piece first.) — SDB
Okay, let’s TRY to lighten the mood in here JUST a skosh with a news round-up, starting with a Hoffa-themed eatery in Ohio. Yet another h/t to my esteemed colleague Craig Calcaterra for this one, in which the DelliQuadri brothers add another link to make a chain of true-crime-ish restaurants…
“Here’s when Dublin’s unique new Jimmy Hoffa-themed bar is set to open” [614now.com] // Missing Jimmy’s, slated to cut ribbon at the end of July, joins the family business (…as it were) alongside Meatball Mafia.
“‘Black Bird’ Cast Remembers Co-Star Ray Liotta at Premiere: ‘He Meant Everything to Us’” [Variety] // “[Series co-star Paul Walter] Hauser donned a T-shirt with Liotta’s ‘Field of Dreams’ character, Shoeless Joe Jackson, in the actor’s honor. Dennis Lehane, showrunner and writer of the series, adds: ‘He meant everything to us. I wrote the part for him, it was my dream to work with him.’” Black Bird hits Apple+ next Friday, July 8.
“They Confessed, But Weren’t Guilty: HBO’s True Crime Series ‘Mind Over Murder’ Documents Strange Nebraska Wrongful Conviction Case” [Deadline] // Matthew Carey does a deep-ish dive with Mind Over Murder filmmaker Nanfu Wang. Among Wang’s comments: “That’s why I think I was so attracted to this story because it’s not only a Beatrice story, it’s an American story. It reflects so much of the current society and how people have strong opinions about one thing, they form a judgment and they are unwilling to be challenged to reconsider.” Carey’s piece name-checks the 2017 New Yorker piece on the case that caught Wang’s eye; you can find that article right here.
Peacock’s A Friend Of The Family gets a premiere date [Futon Critic] // The scripted docudrama is “based on the harrowing true story of the Broberg family, whose daughter Jan was kidnapped multiple times over a period of years by a charismatic, obsessed family ‘friend.’” It’s the case at the center of Abducted in Plain Sight; AFOTF debuts October 6.
“Arlington National Cemetery faces directive to remove killer’s remains” [WaPo] // The subhed adds that “Rep. Jackie Speier has proposed a measure requiring disinterment of Navy Lt. Andrew Chabrol’s ashes before October 2023.” Chabrol was executed in Virginia almost thirty years ago for murdering Melissa Harrington, who had reported him to Navy superiors “for stalking and harassment.” This raises some interesting questions about the resting places of “the notorious,” and I’m not sure how I feel about the answers. (The other “genre connection” is of course Rep. Speier, who survived the Jonestown airstrip shooting.)
Discovery+ announces July premieres [vitalthrills.com] // Titles include Faking It (basically, tertiary analysis of confession footage to find the lying “tells”; subjects include Bundy (sigh/of course) and Chris Watts) and The TikTok Man: Catching A Predator.
And if you still need some content suggestions for the long weekend, Eve’s story-budget buffet from yesterday should hold you for a minute. — SDB
Next week on Best Evidence: No newsletter Monday, but after that, look out for Girl in the Picture, DB Cooper, and more!
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