Review: Only Murders in the Building, "Grab Your Hankies" | Season 3, Episode 3
The show's never been fully serious, but there may be a silliness line it can cross
“Another female killer, that’s so done.”
One of the iconic moments in Only Murder in the Buildings’ first season was when it went full slapstick. Throughout the season, the show was delicately balancing the seriousness of the subject with the silliness of its stars—think about the “silent” episode, where Charles and Jan’s story is cheeky but always within the style of the rest of the episode around it. But then in the finale, the writers gave Charles—and by extension Steve Martin—a big moment of physical comedy as he lost control over his body, and it was a form of catharsis. The silly side of the show was always on the verge of breaking free, and letting it do so in such a tense moment was hugely satisfying.
The balance of tone is something the show is never going to stop dealing with, and this season represents a bigger challenge. Whereas the second season placed Mabel in enough legitimate danger as a suspect that Bunny’s death was clearly not a laughing matter, no one was really that close to Ben, who seems to have been a pretty huge asshole. As a result, the investigation of his murder doesn’t really have any inherent seriousness—sure, his killer is technically running free with a missing handkerchief, but going into “Grab Your Hankies” there’s no reason to think they’d kill again, and so the story has more freedom to be as silly as it wants to be.
And it’s definitely silly. Everything around Oliver’s musical and the show’s relationship to Broadway has been amped up this season—the mother-son producers who kiss on the mouth feel like they’re pulled out of something like 30 Rock or The Other Two, which matches the news that Loretta has booked a role on Grey’s New Orleans Family Burn Unit. And while this show has certainly had its sillier moments, I found these particular developments to be distracting, as though the writers are too present in the construction of the world. It combines with, as noted above, moments of meta commentary like Charles musing about the trope of the female killer (after two female killers in two seasons) or Tobert noting to Mabel that he “liked the first season better than the second.”