Murder has been comfort TV fodder for almost as long as there has been television. Standards like Murder She Wrote and Columbo and modern homages like Poker Face offer predictable rhythms and familiar characters — and the promise that the perp will always get caught in the end. All of those shows star detectives, oddballs, and misfits who I love to watch for hours on end, but none of those characters feel like my friends. The stars of Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building, though? I want them to get along with each other (and me, if they were so inclined) maybe even more than I want to see them solve a murder.
The primary hook for Only Murders in the Building has always been the oddly matched trio at its core: semi-retired TV actor Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), washed-up theater director Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and millennial misfit Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez). Generation-gap comedy aside, watching Only Murders means you get to see one of the longest-running comedic pairings in the business doing what they do best every week, with the je ne sais quoi that Gomez brings along with her deadpan wit. Add to that the quirky residents and old New York charm of the Arconia, an apartment building that’s a world unto itself, and Only Murders immediately feels intimate and warm — quite like a good podcast.
For the uninitiated, a podcast is what fuels Only Murders in the Building’s action. Each season Charles, Oliver, and Mabel stumble across a murder in or around the Arconia, and podcast their way through their attempts to do some amateur sleuthing, usually getting far too close to the murderer in the process (and annoying the hell out of the cops). In the third season, which kicks off this week with two episodes, that
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