Sigh. Life changes a lot, you know, and as much as I wanted this bit to continue, I didn’t really want to watch this season but I’m stuck with it anyway. Anyway, spoilers for all five seasons of Only Murders in the Building. Ugh.

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 too many actors to list.
This season enlists the talents of Téa Leoni, Keegan Michael-Key, Bobby Cannavale, Jermaine Fowler, Beanie Feldstein, Dianne Wiest, Renée Zellweger, Christoph Waltz, and Logan Lerman, while giving longtime cast member Teddy Coluca a larger role. Also Meryl Streep is still here, inexplicably. Obviously there’s a reason I’m doing this again, also. I’ll talk about it.

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. 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. And now they have their own podcast, which I highly suspect would be terrible and would get them arrested many times over. They also gave their podcast a name that did not lend itself to multiple seasons, but thankfully for them, their landlord, a pompous actor, a stunt double, a murderous screenwriter, a doorman, and a mobster were all killed in that building over the course of a couple years.
Now Oliver is married to Meryl Streep, Paul Rudd has died three times as two different characters, and Charles and Mabel are suffering from “Writers have no clue what the fuck to do with them-itis”. And Lester the doorman died last season, so it’s time for us to care a bunch about his character. But if I’m honest I literally never gave a shit about him. He was an in the background nuisance. And with all due respect to Teddy Coluca, he’s not a very good actor. He’s serviceable, but much of the finale hinges on a lengthy scene with him, Cannavale, Zellweger, Waltz, Michael-Key, and Lerman, all of whom are top tier actors who always bring their a game. Anyway.

The Basic Plot of Season Five
So Lester was murdered during or after Oliver’s wedding, because there’s a secret gambling room under the Arconia where the mob does deals, and a mobster was running a game with three billionaires and the mayor of New York City to determine who would win the bid to open the first Casino in NYC. Though I don’t know how profitable that would be at this point. The gangster chopped off the Mayor’s finger because the Mayor was sleeping with the gangster’s wife, which made Lester snap and he killed the gangster. And before he could get away, the Mayor killed him to hide the evidence of corruption.
In and around all of that, Charles starts taking testosterone and sleeps with Téa Leoni, who has four to five dumbass sons that are grown men but act like children. Mabel reconciles with an old friend who is now an annoying pop star. Oliver almost moves out of the building but just decides not to and that plotline was seemingly thrown in to give him something to do with Meryl Streep, who is still here. And Lester is replaced by a robot doorman named LESTR, which is unfortunately why we’re here.

I May Be Broken
I don’t think I like this show anymore. Season five was very much an obligation watch. This show could be so much better than it is, and should be. But it’s more fun watching the three main actors do press together than watching these characters interact. It’s just the same tired uninteresting stuff. Mabel is nasal and unemotional, Charles is dumb, reckless, vain, and old, Oliver is old, vain, reckless, and dumb.
Rather than tell interesting mysteries that dig into the meat of the characters and have some bite to them, without fail we are subjected to surface level poorly structured and inevitably underwhelming mysteries that always get upstaged by a few different factors.

Only Problems In The Building
When I watch this show I look for background details that hint at an ongoing mystery, that involves plot threads from season one, that we were told would come back eventually and they haven’t, because clearly the writers don’t know what they want to do with any of that.
Each season now becomes a game of “How many guest stars and major actors can we stuff into this thing” and the show has gotten stuck on this stunt elevator that sacrifices substance in favor of style. Because why try to one-up season one and make more seasons like that when you can just throw Eugene Levy in front of a camera and remind the audience why they like him? Some performers manage to rise above this thankless usually under-written performances they’ve been told to bring to the table. Christoph Waltz unsurprisingly managed to steal the whole series with one gleefully chaotic grin in the finale. But performers like Kumail Nanjiani and Keegan Michael-Key, who are great when utilized properly, flounder in largely unnecessary roles that do not in any way serve them or do them any favors.
Also it should be mentioned that the constraints of the title of the show have limited what the writers are capable and willing to do. They make fun of it in the finale, the technicalities of what counts as “in the building” and they had to un-kill and re-kill Paul Rudd to get him in the building in the first place. But I feel like season one and two never really used the fun concepts of secret passages in an old building to the fullest and most interesting extent, whereas the building just suddenly has a secret gambling room and a secret… dungeon? I can’t remember what the other room is for. It’s all quite annoying.
And the mysteries never have satisfying or interesting payoffs, nor do I ever care about them because I’m too focused on the overall mystery that won’t ever get properly resolved and trying to figure out who will die next.

The Narrative Arc of the Three Main Characters
If you’ve read my previous Only Murders posts, you know my long-term gripe with the show for not having consistent character development throughout the show or even a single season. And that gripe will not end today.

So Mabel spends the season… worried about change? I think? But also irritated because her friend is now an annoying pop star living in her building. And she’s maybe considering having a relationship with Logan Lerman even though he’s a rich jerk she shouldn’t like based on all aspects of her personality, which is still mainly defined by her nasality and mild annoyance toward her old friends. Oddly though this show loves to replace character development with Selena kissing a young hot celebrity, her and Logan never get there. So I guess that’s her plotline? Oh and in the ninth episode she gets really nihilistic and it’s kinda fun for a minute.

Martin Short spends the season thinking about how his new wife is too expensive to be there all the time and wondering if it’s time to move out of the Arconia. But then he doesn’t because the Arconia almost gets sold and he just decides to stay. And that’s pretty much it.

Steve Martin thinks he’s taking testosterone so he gets really horny and gets catfished by Christoph Waltz. Also he learns he’s attracted to dangerous women, which I guess is true, because that has sort of been the case in the show so far except for that makeup artist who left him for Scott Bakula. And for a minute he has conversations with Bobby Cannavale’s corpse because he did that with Jane Lynch last season but it makes no sense this time. In the end though I guess his testosterone thing pays off because he climbs up a pole and then a stunt man slides down as we see from below, because every finale has to end with a bit of Steve Martin physical comedy.

By the way, you’d think they’d be better at this five seasons in. But Oliver’s comical mishaps leave them doing an autopsy in Charles’s apartment, and they accidentally sign their podcast onto a network that prohibits them from investigating their primary suspects. They’re pretty dumb investigators.

The Paul Rudd of it all
Yeah, so Paul Rudd is a robot. He is LESTR. I don’t like the idea of a robot doorman. Apparently it was originally voiced by a different actor but they rerecorded it because it didn’t work in Paul’s schedule to come in and play someone else. And originally he was going to be a Ben Glenroy hologram. I hate that, by the way.
A few things. I was the one who asked for him to keep showing up as different characters, so in a way I did this. The robot gets thrown off a roof at one point in this season and then replaced with another robot, so technically if you count Ben Glenroy temporarily dying from poison, Paul Rudd has been killed in four out of the five seasons of this show.
And here’s another stat, episode nine hinges on a piece of information that LESTR the robot has that the trio needs, which is the third season in a row where he’s held an integral piece of the puzzle or been the point of view character for a penultimate episode. Paul Rudd is very much part of the DNA of this show now. But I don’t think the joke has anything more to add. And I do not want to see that robot come back. I love Paul Rudd, obviously. I don’t think his bland robot affectation adds anything meaningful to the show. And Howard’s creepy obsession with it isn’t funny.

Did I like this season?
No. I don’t know what happened because I liked season four, but even before this came out I was just burnt out and not the least bit excited for this one. And that attitude certainly colored my experience negatively throughout, but nonetheless.

What the Finale Means
I called it, basically. Not the Mayor being the killer, which came entirely out of nowhere. I’m onto them. Their finales always set up the next season by showing us the next murder victim, and they have a very clear formula for these setups. It has to be a character who’s been around for a while but isn’t a major player. It can’t be one of the main three or a prominent supporting character like Howard or Uma. I don’t like Howard, I find him grating. I do love Uma. But they haven’t taken the time to differentiate her in personality from Bunny so it wouldn’t make sense, plus she’s hilarious.
The only time they’ve strayed from this formula was with Paul Rudd, and based on the three following finales, this will remain an outlier. Bunny, Jane Lynch, and Lester all fit the bill. So I figured going into the finale, it’s either going to be Tina Fey or Nathan Lane. I didn’t want it to be either of them. I figured it may be Nathan Lane because they brought him back in episode nine. Sidenote, I won’t go back, but when did he go from house arrest to actual prison? But yeah it was Tina Fey instead.
They jump forward three months and our trio sits down to listen to her new podcast “The Girl With The Curls” or something (Terrible name) about a curly redhead in trouble in the UK. And Steve Martin says “Hey guys, it’s real great that we’re listening to Tina Fey’s new podcast since listening to her podcasts is what brought us together five seasons ago and we want to remind any audience members who may have forgotten since Tina Fey hasn’t shown up since season three.”
Meanwhile a curly redhead in a trenchcoat is running through New York leaving bloody handprints everywhere, and she collapses in front of the gate of the Arconia, leading Howard to make crass comments about how it’s a bummer she didn’t die three inches closer. At which point she grabs the gate and turns over, revealing herself to be Tina Fey with dyed hair, which surprises three veteran murder investigators, who neglected to point out the odd coincidence of a curly redhead dying in front of their building while they listened to a podcast about a curly redhead.
I don’t know. They’ve confirmed there’s a sixth season on the way and they’ll be going to the UK. I would like to say I’m interested in the long history of Cinda Canning’s (Tina Fey’s character) history as a crime podcaster coming into play, because that could be really interesting. But I have no faith this show will delve into that, since they did nothing with Charles’s acting career in season four and instead threw in a plotline about a second wing of the building that didn’t need to be in the show. Plus that was kind of slotted in to being important at the end of season two. I’m sure they’ll end up finding a secret tunnel under the Arconia that lets them walk to England in five minutes or something, and Malcolm McDowell will be the killer. Ugh.

Overall Rating: 6.3/10(I’m giving the season a slightly higher rating than it deserves because of the scene where Renée Zellweger threatens to cut Martin Short’s balls off.)
Rudd Rating: 5.4/10(Unmemorable and disappointing.)

Well on that fun note! I’m slowly getting this blog back on track. Expect more posts here eventually. The end of the year is coming hot and fast and I have many thoughts on many movies to share. Plus some other dumber things on the way. Stay tuned!