Forget which of the Pickwick triplets did it — I’d pay good money to see Eugene Levy kill a man. Indeed, this is a theoretical possibility in the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building, which sees the Arconia trio going Hollywood. But as fun as the prospect of a homicidal Levy — or any other big guest stars — might be, Only Murders doing a showbiz season made me wary. The previous Broadway-centric season bordered on unwatchable, so a seeming reprise of the conceit naturally raised concerns that this West Coast swing would be more of the same. Thankfully, this is not the case. In fact, Only Murders has never been better.
The problem with last season’s Broadway sojourn was its sheer insularity: There were too many gags coded like inside jokes for theater nerds, Martin Short was perhaps given too much space to do his thing, and the narrative strayed too far from the series’ chief comfort of watching our cross-generational main trio in cahoots with one another. Charles (Steve Martin) and Oliver (Short) frequently butted heads as actor and director in the latter’s musical, and as a unit they were mostly cut off from Mabel (Selena Gomez), isolated in her own corner of the murder mystery with some guy named Tobert (Jesse Williams). It wasn’t entirely a wash — the addition of Meryl Streep as Loretta was a high point (duh), and there’s a real sweetness to the septuagenarian romance between her and Oliver — but the meh outweighed the good.
This time around, it’s pretty much the inverse, beginning with the season premiere, which establishes the Hollywood hook as Charles, Oliver, and Mabel are invited out to Los Angeles by a major studio executive (Molly Shannon, pulling from The Other Two) who intends to turn the Arconia trio’s podcast into a movie. This season also picks up in the immediate aftermath of the season-three finale’s shooting of Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), Charles’s cheerful stunt double, who was seemingly confused with the actual Charles when she was targeted by a sniper in his dark apartment. Is it awkward to lay out those two narrative threads at the same time? Sure, but that’s Only Murders for you: a mix of the very cozy and the very dark. Before long, as our trio start identifying suspects within both the Arconia and the film shoot, the season begins braiding together its Hollywood conceit, new character beats, and the actual murder mystery.
A big part of why this Hollywood season works so well frankly has to do with its choice to not commit to the bit entirely. Other than an early jaunt to Los Angeles, most of the season sticks within the greater Arconia milieu. Hollywood is brought to the apartment complex instead, principally embodied by, among others, Shannon’s hot-shot executive, Jin Ha’s nebbish-screenwriter archetype, a pair of weirdo-sister directors, and the three actors meant to play the Arconia trio in the adaptation: Levy, Eva Longoria, and Zach Galifianakis, all playing varying heightened versions of themselves.
Sticking to the Arconia is a wise move, of course, since the building is so central to the cozy appeal of Only Murders, but the season also manages to find new grooves in its setting. We come to learn that there’s a whole other section to the Arconia: the East Wing, whose occupants — two of which are played by Kumail Nanjiani and Richard Kind — are far less wealthy than the people in Charles and Oliver’s neck of the woods, cracking open a tiny window for the series to play out some class tensions. (Based on the seven episodes made available to critics, it’s unclear the extent to which the ten-episode season will actually dig into this particular layer.) There is also what feels like a deepening boldness to the construction of each episode starting with the opening installment, when we follow Charles, Oliver, and Mabel’s slow-burn realization over Pataki’s fate in a manner that’s pretty clever — and thrilling. Later in the season, we get a more experimental episode that mixes the style of a pretentious senior-thesis film with the found-footage genre. On paper, this might sound relentlessly obnoxious, but in execution, it totally works.
The season similarly defies expectations in its deployment of cameos and guest stars. As has increasingly been the case with each successive season, viewers should expect a litany of famous faces to pop up, and given the recent excesses of The Bear, I worried this season’s tidal wave of notable names — some announced, some not; some new, some familiar — would be distracting, if not downright annoying. (John Cena as a Fak still bothers me.) But this doesn’t turn out to be the case with Only Murders, even as it continues to deepen its bench of guest stars. I suspect this has something to do with the nature of the reality this show has fashioned for itself, operating somewhere between the register of vaudeville and a New Yorker cartoon, so each cameo, no matter how glossy or random, is able to be integrated in a way that fits Only Murders’s general unreality.
In any case, the bigger joy lies in the returning players. Only Murders has come to feature a vast cast of potential side characters going back three seasons now, and it’s become quite a delight to see the show draw from its deep bench, whether it’s for an unexpected red herring or even a throwaway gag. A particular highlight once again is Da’Vine Joy Randolph, fresh off a deserved Oscar win, whose Detective Williams is responsible for many of the best line readings in this outing. The way she says “scrumptious, fuckable baklava,†referring to a character I won’t disclose, is still rattling around in my head.
It’s wonderful to see Only Murders return to such great form. There are even traces of an evolution: If you squint, you can see a manic and unhinged quality to some of the jokes and set pieces that feels distinctly new. But what’s truly welcome is how the show has recentered itself. Only Murders is at its finest when it draws on the deep melancholia ever present beneath its sunny disposition. Despite the zany high jinks, this is a series about people struggling to find a place in the world, whether it takes the form of Mabel’s millennial existentialism or Charles and Oliver’s aging into obsolescence or Loretta waiting her whole life to be discovered. That bittersweetness is pulled back into top billing this season. Charles has to grapple with Pataki’s death, Oliver struggles over being with Loretta, Mabel is still trying to carve out a place in the world for herself — all while a bonkers film shoot is swirling around them. This is the Arconia trio at their most desirable as characters: wanting but progressing. Hollywood has often been said to bring out the worst in people, but in Only Murders, the opposite turns out to be true.