[Editor’s note: The following post contains spoilers for Episode 6 of “ Only Murders in the Building .”] In this streaming age, where a lot of television seems designed to stretch a story across eight to 10 hours of bingeable content, it’s fantastic to watch a show commit to a stylistic bit for a single episode. “ Only Murders in the Building ” has always loved tweaking its format in cheeky ways, and it feels right that for Season 4, with Hollywood interlopers (and an unwilling Zach Galifianakis) interrupting Charles’ ( Steve Martin ), Mabel’s ( Selena Gomez ), and Oliver’s (Martin Short) investigations, “OMITB” plays with styles of filmmaking themselves.
Episode 6, “Blow Up,” does so in a couple of ways. The most obvious is that the episode is presented as a companion documentary made by in-universe directors the Brothers Sisters (Catherine Cohen and Siena Werber), using only found and specially recorded footage: The episode’s events unfold from the viewpoint of archival material, Sisters Brothers’ talking heads, film footage shot by both of them and by Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton), plus drone and surveillance footage, and a truly staggering number of cameras hidden around our main trio’s apartments. Originally, series creator John Hoffman was excited to shoot an episode entirely on Super 8, in part because of the release of a new Kodak Super 8 with an HDMI out, making it possible to fold Super 8 footage into the show’s workflow.
But in .