Only Murders in the Building

 I've just watched the first two episodes of the new Hulu show: Only Murders in the Building. True Crime as a podcast genre has become extremely popular, with shows like Serial encouraging listeners to try to piece together clues about real-life cases (usually murders) that are at least presented by the shows as more complex than perhaps the initial investigators had considered.

We're introduced to our three main characters as they walk about New York, each doing a voice-over monologue that could possibly be the opening of a podcast (and indeed, one of them winds up being just that) while we get a sense of who they are.

Steve Martin plays Charles, an actor who once had a lead on a detective show in the early 90s called Brazzos, and it seems he has been living off of residuals for that role since then. Martin Short is Oliver, a theater director who lives big and theatrically, but hasn't worked in years. Finally, Selena Gomez is Mabel, a closed off and bitter young woman who seems to have a whole lot of anger within her.

The three of them live in a giant old Manhattan apartment building called the Arconia. And each of them follows the same True Crime podcast, Not OK in Oklahoma. When a fire alarm goes off and sends exiles all the residents of the building to a nearby cafe late at night, the three meet and bond over this podcast, but when they return to the Arconia, they find out that a man they'd just shared an elevator ride with has apparently just killed himself.

The police are convinced it was a suicide, but the three of them are sure that there's more going on (even when the detective berates them as a bunch of true-crime-obsessed dipshits). Defying the police, the three of them team up to make their own true crime podcast investigating the death of Tim Kono.

The tone here is actually not quite as silly as one might expect. It's interesting to see Martin Short in particular playing a more grounded character, even though the characters' narcissism and cluelessness is a great source of humor.

The show instead plays a fun game where the mystery does, in fact, grow significantly deeper as more details are revealed, and we find that our own protagonists are hiding secrets from one another even as they play the amateur sleuths. To go into further detail would be a spoiler even for the first two episodes.

Thus, this winds up being one of those "have your cake and eat it too" styles of parody, where we can laugh at the impulse to get caught up in these sorts of mysteries while also getting caught up in the mysteries of the show itself.