Only Murders in the Building (2021) is an American live-action television series distributed through the streaming platform Hulu, and is in the comedy and whodunit mystery genres. At the time of this writeup, three seasons, each ten episodes in length, have been released, and in October of this year it was approved for shooting to begin on a fourth season.
Only Murders in the Building is the story of three New Yorkers, all rabid fans of the same true crime podcast, all living in the same apartment complex, the Arconia. In the pilot episode, the three protagonists, played by Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short, are forced to evacuate the building due to an activated fire alarm. While waiting to return to their homes, they discover their shared enthusiasm for crime podcasts, and they also learn that one of their neighbours was murdered shortly before the fire alarm went off. They find the temptation of a real crime so close to home to be irresistible, and they immediately set to work staging their own amateur investigation of the murder, while documenting the entire process through a podcast of their own.
Over the course of the first season, more and more of their other neighbours are either murdered as well, or suspected (and usually cleared of suspicion later) of being the murderer by the protagonists. Because the podcast is being updated weekly, the other occupants of the Arconia - among them Sting, lead singer of the 1970s rock band The Police - have more and more of their private affairs scrutinised and broadcast to the general public, usually to their extreme displeasure. The three lead characters become incredibly close friends, forming bonds of trust as each other's found family, even when their relationships are strained by discovering painful secrets about each other in the process of their investigation. As they alienate more and more of their other neighbours, they soon can only rely on one another for guidance and support. The warmth and playfulness of their dynamic is convincing and comforting, and despite the morbid subject matter, that is how I would characterise the show overall: warm, comforting, a story that is actually about found family, which simply uses a murder mystery as an inciting incident. The quality of the mystery itself in Only Murders in the Building is quite high, and the comedy is ticklish, excellent, and chiefly found in believable dialogue, not forced and laugh tracked one-liners.
I would recommend Only Murders in the Building to anyone who has enjoyed the video game Stray Gods, which has a similar combination of warmth, humour, mystery, and commentary about generational trauma. I would also recommend it to anyone who enjoyed the films Clue (1985), Murder by Death (1976), or Kenneth Branaugh's modern adaptations of the Hercule Poirot mysteries by Agatha Christie, Murder on the Orient Express (2017), Death on the Nile (2022), and A Haunting in Venice (2023). Fans of Christie's novels in general would likely enjoy this series very well, and it probably would also appeal to fans of Doctor Who, which has a similarly warm, playful, and humanistic approach to mystery plots.
Iron Noder 2023, 23/30