Review: Only Murders in the Building, "Thirty" | Season 3, Episode 9
The investigation reaches its climax, but are we invested in it beyond the star power involved?
When I was writing about CBS’ Elementary for three years, I often wrote about the inherent struggle of stakes in a weekly procedural. Ultimately, a show about Sherlock Holmes could cover a wide range of different types of crimes that his specific skills could assist with, but Elementary focused exclusively on murder, mainly because it was believed that it was necessary in order to efficiently establish stakes that could invest audiences in a case-of-the-week. Without those stakes, there just wouldn’t be the investment needed for audiences to stay tuned in and not change the channel.
I always found this to be an unsatisfying justification for a debilitating mandate, to be honest, but I find myself thinking about stakes and murder as Only Murder in the Buildings reaches the finale of its third season. Because although the show is predicated on the stakes offered by a murder, I have to be honest and say that the stakes around this one feel incredibly low. In the first seas…