Only Murders In The Building Season 4: Back to the old house
the true crime that's worth your time
[CW: may contain spoilers for the show's 4th season]
Only Murders In The Building has returned to Hulu with its fourth-season premiere, and while I've watched a few episodes past that, I don't think it's a spoiler to go ahead and answer the question I posed in the subhed. The show isn't about true crime anymore, really. It probably stopped having much to say directly about the genre sometime in the second season?
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Indirectly, though, Only Murders still finds a way to comment on grief, the search for connection, and the mysteries whose solutions we take with us when we die – all things that some true-crime consumers/fans of a good old-fashioned whodunnit genre narrative like Dateline or an Ann Rule compendium might consider ancillary. I of course consider them central to true-crime stories, in the sense that all human art is trying to bring order out of chaos…
…but the great thing about Only Murders is that you can have it both ways. As my other work wife Tara Ariano wrote in her review at Cracked,
If you’re a fan of this show, all you really want to know is whether it’s still doing all the things you like. And it is! Each new Arconia apartment you see will still make you jealous of the elegant lives some lucky New Yorkers get to live. Each Oliver anecdote is still just silly enough to at least make you smirk. Each episode still ends on a little cliffhanger to make the week’s wait for the next episode pleasurably painful.
I would add that each Mabel outfit still has at least one enviable/pause-to-source-it piece, but the point is that, while it's more a straight comedy than a satire now, Only Murders succeeds as that – I laughed out loud several times in the first few episodes – and remains inclusive and compassionate, with an edge. (The Los Angeles meeting with Molly Shannon's Paramount exec, Bev Melon, and the opening cavalcade of EVPs who don't seem to have actual job definitions will feel nauseatingly familiar to anyone who's ever endured a conference-room pitch sesh.)
But what I continue to find remarkable about the show is how it portrays mourning and trauma. I said in my review of the first-season finale that I liked the way grieving, investigating, teasing, and annoying people with old stories about Marie's Crisis could all co-exist in these characters, just the way they do in people IRL.
The writing understands the fundamental unmanageability of love and death, understands how somber moments won't always resist a slapstick turn. Charles's dark, clumsy attempts to contend with the accidental cremains of Sazz Pataki, for instance: he wants to respect her memory; he wants to keep her, as evidence and because he misses her; he's…covered in her, up to the elbows. This is what grief is: ungovernable, surreal, darkly funny, a fucking mess.
Sazz haunts Charles in various ways early in the season – sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in his dreams, still in the wry person of Jane Lynch – and the script twins this, gently, with the idea that Sazz's ghost could be a symptom of Alzheimer's. Not many shows would use the "a ghost pointed me to a critical clue" mystery trope to comment on the hauntee's proximity to his own inevitable end; Only Murders does it, without getting maudlin, or scoldy about how there's only so much time.
And as much as the frequency of high-profile killings at the Arconia is a running gag, the show has always understood that living with loss is both things, that everyone in The Building is doing every day, with varying degrees of grace. It's how the show avoids becoming a sonorous tone poem – for every phantom grace note, there's an Oliver finsta rant, or a previous season's villain parkouring in from a hall closet, or a miniature pig. Nor does it pull off the balancing act with everything in the fourth season (one major player from last season returns with tooth black and a Potato Lad accent, and I was exhausted; this heightened version of Eva Longoria is a missed opportunity). It may have reached that point The Bear did this past season where the casting news outpaced the guest stars' actual usefulness to story.
It's still very good, though; it's still watchably funny, rude but not mean, an old friend with their pockets full of Easter eggs. And the way it makes room for sadness amidst violence, and the idea that trauma is never only one thing, is something I've seen true-crime properties doing more of of late...so I guess it does still have that connection after all.
Only Murders In The Building's fourth season premiered this morning on Hulu; one episode will drop each Tuesday.