Spoilers for the third season of Only Murders in the Building, which has just wrapped up. At this point the show has been going for three seasons, so either you’ve been following along or you’re probably not going to watch it and won’t care if I spoil things. Also spoilers for seasons one and two as well, I’m going to delve into the overall narrative of the show. Should be fun!

Only Murders in the Building has been airing on Hulu since the fall of 2021. It stars Steve Martin, Martin Short, Selena Gomez, Michael Cyril Creighton, and Jackie Hoffman. In the past it has featured cameos and guest appearances from the likes of Nathan Lane, Sting, Amy Ryan, Tina Fey, Jane Lynch, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Shirley Maclaine, Cara Delevingne, Michael Rapaport, and Amy Schumer. This season introduces Paul Rudd, Meryl Streep, Jesse Williams, and Ashley Park, with cameos from Matthew Broderick and Mel Brooks as themselves.

Typically when I remember to update my blog I cover Paul Rudd TV series by episode, but that’s usually because he’s only in a few here and there and the overall plot of the series doesn’t gravitate around his character. This time around the show is focused on the death of Paul Rudd’s character Ben Glenroy, so even when he isn’t in an episode, there’s still a lot of Paul Rudd stuff to talk about. So instead I’m going to cover the whole season and break it down by a few different elements.

The Story Thus Far
Charles Haden-Savage (Steve Martin), Oliver Putnam (Martin Short), and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) live in a fancy apartment building in New York. I’m going to do a lot of flipping back and forth between actor and character names and we’re all just going to have to live with it. The three of them came together, despite their differences, due to their love of murder podcasts, when their neighbor and Mabel’s childhood friend Tim Kono was murdered mysteriously. This also allowed them to become great friends and grow as people. Charles being an ex-TV veteran that is lonely yet arrogant, Oliver being an ex-musical theater veteran that is lonely yet arrogant and in love with dips, and Mabel being a surly traumatized millennial, who is lonely. A lot of stuff happened. There was an episode that was almost entirely silent. Sting cameoed as himself (He lived in the building) and sang a creepier version of “Every Breath You Take”. A season of beautiful shots of New York went by and the murderer was revealed, but as the three celebrated, Mabel, and by proxy the others as well, was framed for the murder of their grouchy landlord, Bunny Folger.
Then season two rolled around and just kind of meandered along, with no real plot or speed or sense of danger. In my opinion. Amy Schumer showed up, playing herself (I don’t hate Amy Schumer like the rest of the internet, but this was not as funny a choice as Sting, especially since she always plays herself, so there was no real novelty to it.) and bought Sting’s apartment. There was a risk that the three main characters would go to prison, but it never happened. Then eventually they solved the mystery and, even though he’d spent the whole first two seasons learning there was more to life than his love of theater, Oliver gleefully said yes when asked to direct a play. And the show jumped forward one year in time to reveal that Ben Glenroy, played by Paul Rudd, was starring in this play, only to be murdered the second he stepped out on stage.

The Basic Plot of Season Three
They quickly retcon and reconfigure the manner of Ben Glenroy’s death for reasons I’ll touch on below. Oliver’s play, Death Rattle, is about three babies that are accused with killing their mother. It gets turned into a musical after Ben’s death, (Oliver’s idea) and Mabel and Charles use the ongoing rehearsals to determine who in the cast could have killed Ben Glenroy on opening night. Of course everyone hated him, because he was a jerk and an arrogant actor, so it could’ve been anybody. Someone from the cast, perhaps, like Kimber (Ashley Park), the social media famous younger actress, or Bobo (Don Darryl Rivera), a guy who’s just there. Perhaps it was Loretta Durkin, the good actress that never hit big but has mysterious intentions for being in the play and also is Meryl Streep. Or the mother-son producers of the show that kiss weirdly. Spoilers, it was them. Donna DeMeo (Linda Edmond) and Clifford DeMeo (Wesley Taylor) killed Paul Rudd. The mom rat poisoned him for getting terrible pre-reviews in her son’s first ever show, and the son pushed him down the elevator shaft of the Arconia to protect his mom.

The Narrative Arc of the Three Main Characters
Charles is a man who can’t figure out how to change and accept joy, and he acts like an idiot and proposes to his girlfriend, Joy, on accident, and then accidentally tells her it was an accident, so she dumps him and ends up with Scott Bakula. This tracks. Charles is an idiot.
Oliver gets a minor heart attack and then a major one that he recovers from off-screen between episodes. Despite learning in the first two seasons to let theater go and move on, he dove back into it this season, determined not to lose his last shot or his newfound love interest, Meryl Streep.
Mabel has to sell her apartment in the Arconia and almost stops being friends with the two old guys because they don’t understand her obsessive need to find the killer of this guy she didn’t know. Eventually they all become nerdy podcast bros again and continue to make “We’re old and you’re young” jokes. Also she gets a third young attractive love interest. She gets one per season. I suspect this is an attempt to continue to keep young people on-board despite this already being their biggest show.
I don’t really think these seasons connect with one another quite cohesively, but they’re mostly good. I don’t know. It’s a fun dumb show. What more do I want?

The Dilemma of Casting Meryl Streep for Multiple Episodes of a TV Series
She’s only in six episodes of this ten episode season, and when she doesn’t show up, it’s really obvious because she’s Meryl Streep. She’s an expensive lady with a lot on her schedule, so I get it, but a big part of this season is dedicated to her and Oliver falling in love. And while Meryl Streep and Martin Short have surprisingly great chemistry, I find it highly unlikely that her character will ever come back for anything more than a one episode cameo, so that relationship kind of felt pointless as a result.

The Paul Rudd of it all
What a great role for him to play. As a lover of murder mysteries, I always say the two best roles to play in a classic murder mystery are the killer or the victim. Either you’re a killer and super menacing and you’re a victim that usually sucks and gets to be awful. Paul Rudd gets to do that in this. Sure, some of the way he plays this performance remind me of his more wacky performances like in Wet Hot American Summer or Anchorman but this isn’t meant to be a serious show, so the weirdness works. The “CoBro” franchise he’s in that’s an Ant-Man parody is funny. I like the backstory of his character and I wish we’d seen more. By the way, he does have some good serious scenes that I did really enjoy. He’s fantastic, he’s my favorite actor. The script just doesn’t seem to know whether he should be a caricature or serious or both or a complete asshole or a nice misunderstood guy. Also there’s a scene early on where Mabel finds footage of Paul Rudd talking to someone about how he “wants them really badly but they’ll ruin his career” and it was clear to me from the foreshadowing that this wasn’t a person but a cookie, because his character is addicted to cookies. But somehow his delivery of that line and Mabel’s experience with solving mysteries didn’t make that obvious.

Did I like this season?
Yes, for the most part. As I detailed above, the show changes a lot from season to season based on the mysteries the trio are covering. I think that by calling the show Only Murders in the Building they kind of narrowed the amount of seasons they could plausibly make. They already set up season four and got renewed, but there’s only so many murders that could happen in one building before the insurance companies would inevitably shut down the Arconia (If that’s how that works) and send all these affluent New Yorkers packing. It is odd to me that in this day and age, a TV show about a bunch of old rich people running around an expensive building in New York has reached such a wide audience and garnered so much acclaim. Again, I do like this show, but I do have some issues. I’ll list them below.
1. I don’t remember why Michael Rapaport helped Tina Fey’s assistant kill Bunny last season or how it had anything to do with Shirley Maclaine and Steve Martin’s dad. I also don’t really want to go back and check. I didn’t love season two overall and even though I think the jokes and overall story and creative liberties and weird cameos that made me like season one are all back and strongly utilized this time around, I think this show has suffered from not giving the main characters a strong emotional stake in the murder.
In the first season Selena Gomez had to figure out what happened to her friend, but in season two the three of them really just wanted to clear their names, and in this season Selena Gomez’s big reason for investigating was that Paul Rudd was in a show she liked as a kid. But it seems like season four will fix that. I also don’t think the characters necessarily need an emotional motivation to investigate, the whole point is that they’re curious and murder podcasts fascinate them.
2. The first two seasons were centered on the Arconia because the murders took place there and all signs pointed to the suspect being someone who lived in the building. The murderers last season didn’t actually live in the building, but it was still building-centric. Then season two jumped forward in the finale to the opening night of Martin Short’s play, where Paul Rudd died on the stage in front of anyone. It was an interesting ending, but one that didn’t feel at all tied in to the season I’d just watched, and came completely out of nowhere.
Based on the season three premiere, I feel like the writers realized that they’d killed someone outside of the Arconia, and so they had Paul Rudd miraculously survive rat poison, decided he’d been subletting the apartment that Amy Schumer bought from Sting, and had him die a second time, in the building. I do think that’s a funny way to do it, but it really feels like they threw the season two ending in there and had to figure out how to make it work retroactively.
And they had to find ways to keep things in the building, by having Martin Short hold rehearsals in his apartment while the theater was closed for investigation, and snooping through Paul Rudd’s apartment, only to give up midway through and just go to the theater. Which I also didn’t mind, I just think they’re trying a bit too hard to make the conceit of this fictional podcast fit rather than just let the show evolve. Also in retrospect there are way less outside shots of them just walking around and enjoying New York, which is probably because of Covid.
3. I don’t think they used Paul Rudd to his full abilities. Sure, he’s my favorite actor, and sure, I always say that. But they couldn’t seem to decide whether they wanted him to be an irredeemable monster and completely stuck-up rich asshole actor, or a guy who’s leant into that persona as a defense mechanism that is secretly a good person with flaws. In season one and two there were episodes told fully from the perspective of the murder victims, letting us in on things that even the trio didn’t know. But in this season the episode detailing Paul Rudd’s last day on Earth is told through information learned from interviews with other people and assumptions the trio makes along the way, so it didn’t really feel as personal or as effective to me. But he nailed every scene he was in, obviously. I did for the most part really enjoy this season and seeing him play a mean version of himself, these are just things that occurred to me after the fact.
4. I never really liked Jesse Williams as “Tobert”. I like a weird ridiculous name for a character, but that one is obnoxious, and as a love interest that could have, in my mind, easily been revealed to be the murderer at the end, I didn’t enjoy him. I feel like based on the way he was written, they were leaning into having him be the murderer until they remembered they did that twist in season one. There’s a scene where Selena Gomez specifically tells Meryl Streep that she could be dating Martin Short to get closer to the case, but an episode later she blatantly ignores evidence of a heated argument between Tobert and Paul Rudd that could have been motive. So it felt like there was foreshadowing that didn’t lead to anything.

What the Finale Means
Basically every issue I just mentioned about the season two finale is something I feel has been improved on in this season’s finale. I liked this season overall, as I said, but I think the finale really nailed the ending, in that the cliffhanger mystery that has been set up didn’t come entirely out of nowhere, and it implies that the story of season four will have more emotional stakes for the main cast and be more dangerous. That’s technically what season two was supposed to be, but at the end of the day, this is a light comedic show where Martin Short’s character can spend a whole season worrying about his heart condition, only to have a heart attack and recover in between episodes. So maybe not more dangerous. But it sets up a more Steve Martin focused season, which I would absolutely love.
Basically after the mystery has been wrapped up, our three main characters hold a second opening night party at Martin Short’s apartment. Meryl Streep and Jesse Williams both find reasons to go to LA because Meryl is too expensive and they need to give Selena Gomez a new love interest next season. And then Jane Lynch shows up, reprising her reoccurring role as Steve Martin’s old stunt double. She tells Steve that she needs to talk to him about “Something sensitive” and he says he needs to get alcohol from his apartment first. Then we see a figure that looks like Steve Martin walk into his apartment in the dark, get shot through the window, and fall to the floor. It’s Jane Lynch, still dressed like her old buddy, and she begins to write something on the floor with her blood as the other three celebrate nearby, unaware.
So what I like about this is that it’s a death that means something to the show already. Jane Lynch has showed up a few times and been delightful because she’s Jane Lynch, so I’m bummed that they killed her off but very interested as to what this means. Her character, Sazz Pataki, worked with Charles, on his trashy long-running police procedural Brazzos. The way her death is set up implies that the bullet was intended for Charles, and not her. But she mentioned the sensitive subject, which could mean she was also in danger for different reasons. Also, after season two, she began a relationship with Jan, Charles’s ex-girlfriend and the murderer from season one, who is still behind bars, and she’s got a history of stealing Charles’s girlfriends. So this could be someone from Charles’s past, someone from Sazz’s past, or both. Either way, I think this means a deep-dive into his time on Brazzos, which could mean a more dedicated comedic send-up of procedural television, as they did this season with musical theater. It’s a very good cliffhanger, in my opinion.

Overall Rating: 8/10 (I had a good time with this one overall. I love Steve Martin and his physical comedy abilities are next to none. “The White Room” episode of this season was a great show of that, and I loved the finale. Good stuff.)
Rudd Rating: 8.5/10(I do wish he’d been in it more but of course I enjoyed him in this, he’s playing an asshole version of himself and it’s fun. It was nice to see him work with his acting heroes.)

So there we go! Another Ruddtrospective down and more to come. Soon I’ll do another Flying Nun post too. Stay tuned!