Forget which of the Pickwick triplets did it — I’d pay good money to see Eugene Levy kill a man. Indeed, this is a theoretical possibility in the fourth season of Only Murders in the Building , which sees the Arconia trio going Hollywood. But as fun as the prospect of a homicidal Levy — or any other big guest stars — might be, Only Murders doing a showbiz season made me wary.
The previous Broadway-centric season bordered on unwatchable, so a seeming reprise of the conceit naturally raised concerns that this West Coast swing would be more of the same. Thankfully, this is not the case. In fact, Only Murders has never been better.
The problem with last season’s Broadway sojourn was its sheer insularity: There were too many gags coded like inside jokes for theater nerds, Martin Short was perhaps given too much space to do his thing, and the narrative strayed too far from the series’ chief comfort of watching our cross-generational main trio in cahoots with one another. Charles (Steve Martin) and Oliver (Short) frequently butted heads as actor and director in the latter’s musical, and as a unit they were mostly cut off from Mabel (Selena Gomez), isolated in her own corner of the murder mystery with some guy named Tobert (Jesse Williams). It wasn’t entirely a wash — the addition of Meryl Streep as Loretta was a high point (duh), and there’s a real sweetness to the septuagenarian romance between her and Oliver — but the meh outweighed the good.
This time around.