Culture essay: Why is Only Murders in the Building so good?

Christopher Jackson asks why Only Murders in the Building is such a hit

In one sense Only Murders in the Building – known to fans as OMITB – is just another TV show. It’s well-made, and moreish. It takes its place among umpteen other binge possibilities on Disney Plus and the other streaming channels.

Yet there’s something so clever about it that makes one want to make claims for it. One wants to call it culturally significant and see if the label fits.

Put simply, why is Only Murders in the Building so good?

All-Star Cast

Well, the show stars Steve Martin, Martin Short and star of the moment Selena Gomez, and has just been renewed for its 5th season. The location of the show is The Belnord on West 86th Street, a building whose residents have included Marilyn Monroe and Martha Stewart.

This location is a clever choice since it creates a set of structures – dramatic laws – even which make the sure admirably tight. For instance, a murder has to take place in the building for it to qualify. This means that we get to know its layout, and its regulations and the people who live there. There’s a sort of cosiness to this – something almost familial.

The Belnord is where Only Murders in the Building is set

It’s a good tip for young writers to consider exploring a location as OMITB brilliantly does. A place will engender characters – and sometimes do so better than our imagination. Once you’ve chosen a communal building, then you have the janitor, the receptionist, the chairman of the building board – probably not the other way round.

So who lives in the building where all these murders take place? Steve Martin plays Charles Hayden-Savage, a slightly has-been actor. Hayden-Savage probably has enough money to live there by virtue of having bought his apartment before Manhattan became unaffordable to anyone but the superrich.

Martin’s character is, like so many he has played in the past, eager to please but with a tendency to put his foot in it. He aspires to goodness, but something about that trait means he’s romantically alone, but that unexpected friendship comes to him.

Steve Martin plays Charles Hayden-Savage in Only Murders in the Building

That’s true too of Oliver Putnam, played by Martin Short, a name-dropping Broadway director whose failures – especially his disastrous musical Splash – are far more memorable than his successes. Putnam can begin to grate a little by the fourth season, but he is essentially loveable, a fantasist who thinks the next big thing is round the corner – and also that his past is more illustrious than it was.

He has a sort of Tourette’s when it comes to other people and can be delightfully rude about people to their faces because everybody knows he doesn’t quite mean anything he says.

Martin Short plays Oliver Putnam in Only Murders in the Building

Age Gap

Finally, Selena Gomez’s character Mabel Mora is only in the building at all because her aunt lets her live there. It’s this age gap which provides much of the comedy. Mabel isn’t sure who she is yet, but it turns out – as so often – that who she is will be determined by the relationships she makes – in this case, the two older men.

At one point Mabel says: “A murderer probably lives in the building, but I guess old white guys are only afraid of colon cancer and societal change.” At another point, a walk-on character thinks Mabel is Hayden-Savage and Putnam’s carer.

Early on in Season One, Martin hilariously signs off a text to Gomez with ‘Best regards, Charles Hayden-Savage.” Her smile as she reads this is marvellous, full of the knowledge one generation cannot convey to the next. This shows tells us that the world moves fast – but also that on another level, the human heart is a realm of possible stability if we can manage to be open and kind.

In fact, the reason the show works so well is precisely because of the inter-generational nature of the humour – and also because audiences inherently enjoy unlikely friendships.

There is a sense in all of us that only befriending people of our own age narrows us somehow: it is as if, deep down, time doesn’t feel entirely linear and we want to teach it that lesson by striking out in surprising directions.

Clockwork plots

But all this would be incidental if the plots didn’t work. Murder is hard, not because it isn’t inherently interesting. It’s hard, because it’s so interesting it’s been done every which way a million times. When you write a murder mystery you’re up against Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, GK Chesterton and Agatha Christie for a start – and they’re just the headliners.

Added to that, because the audience is reliably dedicated, they’ve seen every plot-twist. So you need to be extremely clever to surprise people likely to tune into a murder mystery: you have to secrete your clues carefully, you have to feint to the wrong killers plausibly, and you have to get your pacing right.

OMITB does all these things, and for the most part fabulously. It’s also brought together by acting which it can be easy to underestimate. The best for me is Martin, because you don’t notice he’s acting. But the main three all combine a genuine off-screen friendship with on-screen rapport.

Walk-on Parts

In fact, the first season gives you the best possible measure of that when Sting appears as a cameo playing himself. Sting is a great musician, and an okay actor – but what makes him only okay at the latter is that you can see him trying too hard.

The camera loathes exaggeration – and Sting slightly strains for effect. In his day job, and especially in his heyday, he doesn’t know how to make a clumsy chord change. But this isn’t his day job.

It’s Martin’s though, and you can see that he’s always been much more than just a comedian. Nothing he does draws attention to the fact that he is trying to convey it; he becomes that emotion, that predicament.

This is what lifts OMITB – its ability to keep you engaged in the storyline while providing laughs, and also moments of surreal drift. In the first episode, Putnam tells us that in New York City we sometimes fall down only to bounce back up again.

It’s a metaphor but we end up seeing this enacted, as he falls off some stairs and floats dreamily upwards when something promising happens to him at the end of the episode. The famous White Room episode in Season 3 provides a similar moment for Martin.

In this scene, Martin corpses and enters a strange parallel dimension: a white room where he is walking with a wonderful manic grin on his face. When he wakes, he is without his trousers and everybody is traumatised. It’s the funniest scene in the show.

More than Whimsy

It’s whimsy, yes, but there’s something more solid about OMITB than that. Twin Peaks made a habit of such playfulness, and perhaps in the end didn’t quite know what it was. OMITB has stronger delineation, since everything which happens in some way serves the mystery. To do this while offering up brilliant one-liners is a rare achievement.

The show is a good indicator of where society is now. This is a world dominated by new media – the murders all revolve around a podcast which the three main characters are producing, and which becomes a surprise hit.

But while it has its finger on the pulse, it’s a show that also knows that the latest thing is just the latest thing: the age gap between the main characters shows us how we all react to the modern world at a slightly staggered pace, according to what we wish to assimilate, and we can manage to accept.

Along the way there are nuggets of wisdom. In Season 2, Episode 6, Tina Fey’s recurring character says: “Never become too good at a job you don’t want.” She doesn’t add that if you do that you can wake up halfway through your life with your options narrower than you’d ever thought possible: she doesn’t have to because the dialogue is so taut.

The Here and Now

Ultimately, the show is to do with a sort of light touch unity. Why is Only Murders in the Building so good? Perhaps for the reason that good art always is. It says, cleverly, even tangentially: the world’s like this now.

But it also knows in Martin and Short’s characters that now will soon be then. To say that without being portentous or preachy, and to make you laugh and tell a story at the same time is a rare achievement.