Review: Only Murders in the Building, "Persons of Interest" and "Framed" | Season 2, Episodes 1 and 2
A meta two-episode premiere preempts the obvious questions of how you make a second season to this kind of show
Even if it wasn’t actively offering meta-commentary on the difficulty of making a second season, Only Murders In The Building’s second season would be a case study in the difficulty of making a second season.
When it debuted last year, the show was a delicate balancing act of its stars’ respective skill sets and the needs of a mystery-forward half-hour comedy. The first season worked because it was ambitious but always in a way that felt assured and controlled—when it finally let Steve Martin go full physical comedy in the finale, for example, there was enough of a foundation that it didn’t feel like it was derailing the pathos of the mystery’s climax. And while there was always the chance that Martin Short’s excess or Selena Gomez’s deadpan might disrupt the show’s ethos, both ended up fitting comfortably within the universe around them.
It was cohesive chaos, which is difficult to achieve, but even more challenging to maintain. And in the first two episodes of the show’s second season, I would argue that Only Murders In The Building doesn’t hold back. Untethered from the initial mystery and the expositional burdens of introducing the main characters, “Persons of Interest” and “Framed” barrel into the mystery of Bunny’s murder, the multiple podcasts investigating it, and the mysteries and motives that will bring our three intrepid podcasting detectives together and tear them apart in equal measure. And while I don’t necessarily know if the strategies the show is deploying to generate a second season of cohesive chaos will work in the end, these episodes were a reminder of the charming world the first season introduced us to, and made me want to spend more time there figuring out what kind of show this wants to be.
The actual plot of these two episodes is the natural extension of where last season’s cliffhanger left us: Bunny is dead, someone is framing Charles and Mabel (but not Oliver) for the crime, and while Tina Fey’s Cinda Canning makes a podcast about their potential guilt they’re back at the microphone making a podcast about trying to clear their name. There’s a missing painting that shows up as a reproduction, flashes of Mabel’s memories from that night giving us Bunny’s last words (“14” and “Savage”), and of course Mrs. Gambolini, Bunny’s pet bird that may well know who did it based on the tease at the end of “Framed.”
This is all…fine. It’s fine! I don’t know that I really need the mystery to be my central point of interest, but there’s enough twists and turns here that if it’s your primary interest in the show then this is likely perfectly adequate. However, the show is clearly uninterested in making the mystery primarily about the question of who killed Bunny based on how they’ve integrated the characters into the story. It isn’t just that Mabel was the one who found her body—stabbed by a knife, and then Mabel’s knitting needle—but also that the painting in question features Charles’ father, who was having an affair with the painter as well as Bunny’s mother. Given what we’ve seen so far, this mystery will be every bit as connected to them as Tim Kono’s was, making it less a standalone case and more an excuse to dig into each character’s past…well, each character that is actively being framed, which leaves out Oliver (much to his chagrin).
This is why the Jan reveal being kind of predictable last season wasn’t really a problem: it offered a meaningful resolution to Charles’ arc in the season, and thus worked as an ending for that story. But there’s a difference between designing a mystery to introduce us to characters and designing a mystery for characters we already know to live in. And while another mystery with ties to the characters makes sense, I can’t help but wonder whether these characters could exist with mysteries that don’t revolve around them in quite the same way. That’s clearly the only path the show could take if it extends beyond a second season, although the show’s title (and the diegetic podcast) does imply that at the very least the murders need to be limited to the Arconia. But there’s a clear limit on how far that can take us, and this initial stretch of credulity seems unreplicable should the show move forward.
I’m getting ahead of things, I know, but the central theme of these early episodes is the characters imagining a life beyond making a podcast about murder and then yourself being implicating in a murder. These episodes consciously give all three characters external outlets that require them to set aside—or, in Mabel’s case, destroy a symbol of—their connection to all of this. After years of being defined by trauma, Mabel just wants to be seduced into an art cult by Cara DeLevigne, who I would perhaps be capable of seeing as a love interest and not a villain had DeLevigne not gone fully unhinged at the Billboard Music Awards. After casting directors had listed him as “N/A (Dead)” for years, Charles is suddenly back in the papers and in line for a role as “Uncle Brazzos” to a black, female reboot coming to CBX.1 And while Oliver may be ignored by whoever is framing them for Bunny’s murder, he did run into Amy Schumer in the elevator, who wants to make a prestige play by playing the title role in a Jan-centered adaptation of real events…but only if they can clear their names.
The stories are well-suited to the respective characters. Mabel’s art was kind of a tangential piece of the first season, but centering her character on it both works as a glimpse of a normal life and also lets Gomez explore how Mabel’s deadpan is itself a defense mechanism. And while I don’t know if Schumer’s self-parody has necessarily been particularly hilarious, it works well as an avenue for Oliver’s ambition. In both cases, it complicates their motives in the core story, and will guide their decision-making as they move forward.
Charles, though, is more muddled. Part of this is that the Uncle Brazzos story really doesn’t carry over into the second episode, which is when the reveal that Charles’ father is in the painting becomes his entire story. I presume the Brazzos reboot will recur as the story moves forward, but the “Daddy Issues” turn kind of swallows it whole, as it is wont to do. Oliver literally calls him out for getting lost in them, but that kind of meta-commentary doesn’t mean that it feels less rote. It’s not a terrible story, but its connection to the mystery is really the only thing about it that seems interesting, and it lacks the subtlety of Charles’ loneliness and grief over the loss of his former partner and her daughter that defined his character last season.
I will say, though, that the dig into the Arconia’s history in “Framed” was really effective, and using Charles’ flashbacks to explore these earlier periods in the building life and the community around it is a good addition. Shirley MacLaine fits beautifully into this world, bringing pathos to her stories of the past while her prop work with a cheese knife embodies the show’s comic ethos.2 And while not every joke necessarily lands, the show’s comic timing remains sharp, the half-hour runtimes bloating a bit to 35 minutes but never feeling too overstuffed. As the characters from last season—the neighbors, the Gut Milk saleswoman, etc.—reemerge, you realize that the world of the Arconia is really a pivotal piece of this puzzle, and while there’s some natural artifice to building a new plot around it it’s mostly worked thus far through two episodes.
The sustainability of this is obviously less certain, but between my general affection for this cast of characters and the way the first season kept up its balancing act, nothing here gives me express reason for concern. There’s just the natural skepticism that comes with the second season of a show that feels like it shouldn’t have worked as well as it did, which was always going to be the theme of this review no matter what choices they made. And the choices they made were overall pretty solid, even if the jury’s still out.
Stray observations
The idea that someone famous moves into Sting’s penthouse apartment every season is a great conceit, and I really liked the “Sting’s Rainsticks” box going by as the things were being moved out. As noted, not every Schumer joke lands (I liked her delivery on the “okay” after Mabel introduces herself best), but the overall idea behind her interest in the project is fun.
Wasn’t hot on Charles’ stock footage tour of NYC that opened the episode, and then the fact that Bunny’s mother got the voiceover at the end of the second episode. I just don’t know if they really accomplished much, and while I know the conceit of the podcast invites them, the minimized focus on the diegetic podcast means that kind of lack motivation except at the end of the premiere where it’s a triumphant return to said podcast. Curious if they recur.
Only Murderers In The Building is some great SEO, it’s gonna come up in all the searches.
Notably, none of the season’s new characters are officially part of the show’s cast: Schumer, MacLaine, DeLavigne, and everyone else are listed as guest stars, with only the three leads as the series regulars. I wonder if this was in response to Amy Ryan being credited the way she was in S1.
Isn’t it fun that any time a character gets an emotionally-motivated haircut in a TV show we all think about Felicity?
“OliMabel—the Charles is silent”—there’s literally so much Oliver word vomit that there’s multiple jokes pointing out how chaotic his stories are, but I continue to feel like the fears I had going in that it would become too much were unfounded. We may not get much on the emotional family side of things here, but its existence makes the Oliver chaos easier to see as part of a larger story, even when it’s mostly there for joke pacing.
“Charles (Old)” will always make me chuckle.
Feels wrong to define Mabel as a millennial and then set her cathartic destruction of a statue representing her past trauma to a Billie Eilish song, but I suppose Mabel’s maybe more of a Gen Z cusp than Gomez herself?
Welcome to my reviews of Only Murders In The Building! As I expected, this has become a show that everyone is covering, so I’m hopeful that it’s also something that people—existing subscribers and new subscribers alike—want to discuss in an environment like the one we’re building here at Episodic Medium. If you’re new to the site, this first review is free, while subsequent reviews as well as the comment sections are reserved for paid subscribers. You can find more information on our About Page, and paid subscribers will receive a new review in their inboxes every Tuesday.
The fact they made up a fake network made me angry, for some reason? Felt wrong.
Did I ever tell you the story about how I always use comic instead of comedic because my professor hated the latter and refused to let us use it?
At first the fake network for the Brazzos reboot seemed weird, but then I figured it was maybe meant to be some kind of CBS-offshoot (like FXX to FX) and it made sense in terms of making the offer to "reboot" the show less appealing than it originally seemed to Charles — "You're a 'recurring character' as the uncle, and it's on some new tiny platform nobody's heard of!"
Glad the show's back, though like this review and others, I definitely have some trepidation about how they can pull it off in a second season. But I enjoyed these first two.
One of my favorite things from season 1 was seeing how every apartment at the Arconia is uniquely decorated. I can't recall if we saw Bunny's apartment last time, but that set was great in these episodes. Her connection to the architect of the building was neat, though I was a bit confused who was narrating that part. Was that from Only Murderers in the Building?
Lastly Myles, hate to sound like a broken record, but I take it you're also writing these reviews without having seen the remaining screeners, but "real life commenting Myles" has seen all episodes available for critics?