I’ll have more to say about the opening three episodes of Only Murders In The Building’s fifth season, but I wanted to start with a discussion of the second episode, because I found it particularly awful for a number of reasons. Spoilers follow.
In the Season 4 finale, just as our heroes solved the case and thwarted the murderer, and wedding bells were ringing for Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and Loretta (Meryl Streep), another body was found: The affable, unassuming doorman, Lester (Teddy Coluca) was found dead in the fountain. The morbid scene was quite a shock for our trio of sleuths, and for audiences.
It was clear from a handful of clues in Season 4 that Season 5 would have a mafia angle, and that was made explicit at the end of the season, when Sofia Caccimelio (Tea Leoni) showed up offering the podcasters a new case: Find her missing husband, Nicky (Bobby Cannavale). At the end of Season 5, Episode 3, we learn that the mob angle may have been something of a red herring. The “new mafia” is New York City’s billionaire’s club.
In the second episode, we learn how Lester was mixed up in all of this. It turns out, there’s a secret speakeasy below the Arconia. Nicky Caccimelio has been running a top-secret poker game in this mysterious basement for decades, and he’s been paying Lester to let the players in on Saturday nights at midnight. Charles (Steve Martin) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) discover the gambling room when Charles finds a magnetic card in Nicky’s deck of playing cards. It has a secret map on it that . . . I guess leads from Charles’s room to the secret passage in the supply closet near the doorman’s desk. It’s kind of a neat discovery until you start to think about how goofy that is. For one thing, why would the map lead from Charles’s room? And why would Nicky even need a map? I like that the card is the key to the gambling room, but everything else is just too silly. Surely they could have come up with a better way for our sleuths to find the speakeasy.
In any case, it’s quite the discovery and this leads to a big flashback episode that brings us to Lester’s first days on the job. Lester, who was born in 1948, looks about thirty in these scenes, despite the flashback starting 32 years before the present day. It’s very puzzling. Almost everyone in the flashback scenes looks older than him. Partly this is due to how they de-age Oliver and Charles and various other characters. I’m actually fine with the makeup and wigs. It’s not realistic but it doesn’t really need to be. The problem is that Lester should have been played by a much older actor in the flashbacks. He looks younger than everyone in the past timeline and then older than everyone in the present. It’s a bizarre creative decision. He looks younger than Howard, for goodness sakes.
Worse, however, is the nature of the episode itself, which is just naked fan-service at its worst. Everyone is in the Arconia, 32 years ago. Charles is at the top of his game, the star of hit TV show, Brazzos. The funniest bits are when we see him talk about the roles he’s surely going to get, including the lead in Gladiator. He’s “delulu” to quote Lester.
But to have everyone there, rubbing elbows and being just as outlandish and quirky as ever, three decades ago just felt off. The kid version of Mabel encounters the middle-aged versions of Oliver and Charles. They clearly would have been aware of one another at this point in this version of the timeline. It doesn’t fit at all with how our trio actually met and became friends years later. Recall in Season 1, they essentially knew nothing about one another. Oliver and Charles both pretty much kept to themselves. They only became friends when they discovered their shared interest in true crime podcasts, which also led them to Mabel. These three were effectively strangers. The flashback episode doesn’t explicitly make them friends back in the 90s, but it makes the way they do come together as friends much less plausible. It’s all very bizarre.
It’s fan-service layered on fan-service. There are cameos. We see Bunny and Tim Kono, previous murder victims from earlier seasons. Nathan Lane’s Teddy makes an appearance. Oh the nostalgia! And yes, it seems to have worked. Fans are raving about the episode on reddit and elsewhere. I’ve seen plenty say this was their favorite episode so far, which I find so baffling. As an episode, it does almost nothing for the story. It wouldn’t work at all without the nostalgia element. We learn that Teddy has been doing this side hustle for Nicky all these years and that’s about it.
Also, why is this secret gambling club using the front door to access their secret gambling room? It makes no sense. Shouldn’t they be coming in a side door or a back door or something? How has nobody spotted anyone entering the building and going through a secret door in the storage closet in all these decades (presumably much longer than 32 years)?
The three-part Season 5 premiere feels incredibly sloppy to me overall. The humor feels more forced, like the characters (and especially Oliver) are no longer actual characters, but just walking jokes. The mystery feels less natural and more forced because it feels tacked-on. There’s a weird distance between our heroes and the victims, one of whom is found in the dry-cleaner’s rather than the Arconia proper. Speaking of which, the sequence following the discovery of Nicky’s corpse is perhaps the stupidest in the entire series. I realize it’s in the third episode, but the entire “autopsy” scene was just incredibly preposterous. Moving the body of a murder victim? Seriously? And instead of immediately rushing it back (or calling the police to explain that Oliver had a mental breakdown) they spend all night going over it and don’t even notice basic details like the tattoo on Nicky’s chest?
The only saving grace here is Bobby Cannavale, who “speaks” to Charles (who sees dead people) and is quite funny. He also looked older than young Lester and younger than old Lester, I should note. In any case, I didn’t find myself particularly amused by these episodes and I really think this show has run out of steam and probably should have called it quits at the end of Season 4. I realize there are loose threads from past seasons that fans are eager to tie up, and I want those answers also, but if this is the quality we can expect from the rest of the season, I’m definitely worried. This show has also been propping itself up on star cameos for way too long. Every season is more egregious than the last and this one is no different. I miss Season 1 when it was just a bit quirky having Sting in the Arconia but mostly we focused on the regular people of the Arconia and our trio of podcasting sleuths. That was magic, but that magic is gone.
