By Lili Loofbourow
The new season of “Only Murders in the Building” picks up exactly where the third season left off: with podcasting trio Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) celebrating solving the murder of Ben Glenroy (Paul Rudd) while their friend Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch) dies - shot through a window in Charles’s apartment while fetching the gang a precious bottle of malbec.
Sure, it’s grim. But the death of a relatively important character puts a new spin on a plot that might otherwise feel a bit like a reprise of the show’s meta-meditations on fame.
In the hit show’s fourth season, the amateur sleuths helming “Only Murders in the Building” find themselves once again experimenting with micro-celebrity and becoming fodder for a vampiric - and potentially deadly - entertainment industry.
That’s not exactly new terrain for them or for the series; the doughty podcasters spent much of the comedy’s second season fighting podcast superstar Cinda Canning’s (Tina Fey) allegations (on her own sensational podcast) that they were in fact the murderers.
But if the wacky detectives have to endure being grist for the content mills, at least they’re (mostly) happy about it this time: There’s going to be an “Only Murders in the Building” movie!
Better still (for Oliver, anyway) all three of them are going to be played by real-life Hollywood actors!
Not since “Arrested Development” has a comedy been this good-naturedly self-referential. Some of “Only Murders’” best jokes come at its own expense.
In a nod to how implausible it initially seemed that Gomez, playing a deadpan millennial, would gel well with Short and Martin, the in-universe bit is that Hollywood, personified by Molly Shannon as a slightly unhinged executive, felt they needed a glow-up.
The studio cast Eva Longoria as an older and substantially peppier, more confident Mabel, Zach Galifianakis as an aged-down Oliver and Eugene Levy as Charles.
The actors are charged with following the trio around so as to better understand how to play them in the movie.
That this effectively makes the sleuths the ones being shadowed starts to feel like a theme. The new season is packed with doppelgängers, shadows and stand-ins.
There’s the murder victim, Sazz, Charles’s longtime stunt double who died in his kitchen while dressed exactly like him. (Was she the intended victim? Or was Charles the target all along?)
The directors of the “Only Murders” movie are a terrifying, artsy pair of twin sisters. Rudd, who last season played murder victim Ben Glenroy, is back, this time as Glenroy’s stuntman.
Addled and bereft, he haunts a bar called Concussions, where stand-ins in the biz convene to bond over their injuries, mourn their dead, and grouse about their “faces” - the people whose dangerous stunts they thanklessly perform.
Other doublings include the “Westies,” a group of down-on-their-luck Arconia residents who live across the courtyard from Charles. They include a Christmas-themed influencer (Kumail Nanjiani), an eye-patch-wearing loner (Richard Kind) and an eccentric family (Desmin Borges, Lilian Rebelo and Daphne Rubin-Vega).
Devotees of the show will no doubt connect a ham-radio sub-plot to some remarks Sazz made before she was murdered, and even the ham is punned on and doubled: There is, in addition to a literal ham, a small and charismatic pig.
On the forensics side, body parts are confusingly redundant. (You might say doubled.) There’s even a surreal moment when Charles’s sister - a deliciously unstable empty nester played by Melissa McCarthy - attacks Oliver’s girlfriend, Loretta (Meryl Streep), while wearing a pair of braids just like hers.
As doppelgängers proliferate, so do the cameras. By the show’s seventh episode, “Only Murders” has featured footage from an impressively wide range of devices and run through an improbable number of framing techniques. There are, in short, too many storytellers.
Even Howard’s (Michael Cyril Creighton) long-standing thirst for the spotlight might be abating; he seems increasingly willing to settle behind the mic (and the lens).
The plot mechanics range from outlandish to silly; the revelation that Charles may have been the intended target propels a number of charming, not-quite-logical plots, including one in which the Hollywood trio successfully tracks the original trio to a hideout and assists with the investigation.
The welcome inclusion of fan favourites such as Da’Vine Joy Randolph (as the long-suffering detective), Jackie Hoffman (as Uma) and even Streep (as Loretta) feel a little more wedged in than organic, but this is obviously Lynch’s season to shine, and shine she does - mainly, though not exclusively, as Sazz’s ghost, who keeps Charles company as he wrestles with whatever role he may have accidentally played in his stand-in’s death (and with how much of her health and well-being she sacrificed for his career).
If that sounds like kind of a downer (for a cosy murder show), it should. The death of Sazz, given how well viewers knew her, feels like a tone shift for the generally upbeat series.
This is certainly the saddest “Only Murders” has ever been.
The new season’s most intriguing development, however - and I can’t comment on the outcome, because critics were given only seven episodes - is the show’s startling declaration, a few episodes in, that it plans to return to its origins and address all the plot holes plaguing Season 1.
That’s a big ask. I’d call it ambitious and perhaps even unnecessary. I’ve long held that one of the comedy’s most lovable faults is its inability (or unwillingness) to produce a mystery that can hold up to any kind of scrutiny.
That felt like part of the lightly satiric lens the show takes to everything and everyone, and of a piece with its self-deprecation.
Oliver’s show, “Death Rattle Dazzle”, in which the three murder suspects were babies, felt like the show was owning up to - and owning - its inability to come up with a decent whodunnit.
I look forward to seeing how it all comes together, but closing loopholes isn’t, in the end, what “Only Murders” is for.
The murder comedy will be studied in future years not for its intricate plots, but for the meta-dissertation it delivers on various strains of benign fraudulence, all via grace notes and asides that cover things such as Broadway, Hollywood and why Oliver Putnam might confuse Zach Galifianakis - the man hired to play him - with “that poor boy from ‘Home Alone.’”
We watch not for the clues but for the show’s genial brand of cluelessness.
∎“Only Murders in the Building” season 4 is streaming on Disney+.