Only Murders in the Building REVIEW

In a mildly entertaining murder mystery with the lull of podcast voice, the actor co-stars with Martin Short and Selena Gomez as true crime aficionados.

has an immediate hook in its seemingly mismatched stars - comedy veterans Martin Short and Steve Martin, both in their 70s, and millennial superstar Selena Gomez, in her first scripted television role since the late-2000s Disney show Wizards of Waverly Place, which launched her career.

The show, created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman (a producer on Netflix's Grace and Frankie) and produced by Dan Fogelman, creator of This Is Us, is less of a murder mystery and more of a showcase for cross-generational repartee, with the added mystery of how Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez were persuaded to perform and produce a show about true crime aficionados turned amateur detectives.

Only Murders in the Building is a whodunnit with the lull of podcast voice; despite a lot of gesticulating, rolling punchlines, sitcomy irreverence, and inventive direction, it amounts to a whodunnit with the lull of podcast voice.Gomez’s Mabel is a 20-something curiously living in the swanky Arconia who masks a questionable past with sarcasm and Beats headphones.

The pilot, directed by Jamie Babbit, opens in bloody medias res: Gomez's Mabel leaning over a body, claiming to a flustered Martin and Short that "it's not what you think". Only Murders then jumps back in time (two months earlier), to when its three protagonists are still strangers in their shared Upper West Side building, the Arconia, in a narrative trick familiar to viewers of HBO's breakout summer hit The White Lotus.

Martin's Charles is a former TV detective on the decline, fond of slipping on his faded taglin and keeping people at arm's length. Oliver, played by Short, is a talkative, financially strapped Broadway producer who struggles to maintain relationships.

Though set in a non-pandemic alternate January 2021, the show is set in 2015 - all three are fans of a true crime podcast called All is Not OK in Oklahoma hosted by the "queen of true crime," Cinda Canning (Tina Fey), a spoof of Serial and its narrator par excellence, Sarah Koenig. Because of their shared interest in true crime, the trio becomes overly invested in the shooting death of a young man in their building, which police dismiss as a suicide. They turn their haphazard, slapstick investigation - sorting through trash, light breaking and entering, generally snooping around - into their own true crime podcast, focusing on "only murders in the building".

The investigation bounces around with comic incompetence, from suspecting Sting (playing himself) to a dead cat gag. The main event remains the unlikely spectacle of two comedy titans batting around with Gomez - an enjoyable enough pairing that never quite transcends the scripts' clear beats. Martin and Short appear to be having a great time, as if this type of work is as natural to them as breathing.

Those shifts provide enough novelty to suspend disbelief on some dangling threads, most notably a subplot involving a character wrongfully imprisoned for ten years, which the scripts frequently mention but rarely explore.

Only Murders in the Building has an oddly shallow hold on one's attention for a series about obsession. The show appears to be figuring things out as it goes, much like the true crime podcasts that inspired it. Whether or not you join the ride is determined by your affinity for the performers - and how much time you're willing to invest in a mildly rewarding journey.