Only Murders in the Building: S5 E8

When it premiered in 2021, Hulu’s series “Only Murders in the Building” sought to capitalize on the booming true crime podcast industry by having three strangers in the fictional Upper West Side Manhattan apartment building the Arconia — Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez) — join forces to solve a murder on the swank premises while creating a hit podcast about it. As the show has continued, however, and become as much about style as structure, the podcast itself has waned in importance. Indeed, last year’s Season 5 engineered a way to essentially do away with the podcast altogether. That might sound strange, but I don’t mind a show recognizing it has outgrown its gimmick and focusing on other things, like the chemistry between its star trio that with each passing season has tightened into something delightful and even moving. The best scene in Episode 8, Cuckoo Chicks, my favorite episode of Season 5, finds Charles, Oliver, and Mabel as well as the two honorary members of their crime-solving team, Oliver’s new wife Loretta (Meryl Streep) and NYPD Detective Williams (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) just sitting around a table talking. More of that, I thought! “My Dinner With Andre” as “Dips at the Arconia!” 

Now, it is also true that “Only Murders in the Building” has become as much a platform for big name guest stars as a narrative murder mystery, but it has worked wonders in this context, nevertheless, a serialized TV version of the misunderstood meta gem “Ocean’s Twelve” in so much as it is a bunch of famous people getting together to have a good time on camera. Look no further than the Eastern Europe accent Streep deploys in Episode 8 when her character impersonates a psychic. She is the master of accents, after all, and as My Beautiful, Perspicacious Wife theorized, the writers probably just wanted to engineer a way for her to use one. What’s more, Streep employs the accent to unwittingly interrogate one of the season’s murder suspects, the billionaire hotel magnate Camila White, and played by Renee Zellweger. And that means “Only Murders in the Building” also engineered the most unlikely “One True Thing” reunion possible. Why there is even a split-second where Meryl Streep impersonates Renee Zellweger. It’s worth a Hulu Free Trial all on its own.

Time flies when you’re watching movies.