‘Only Murders In The Building’ Is A Crushing Disappointment In Season 5

Only Murders In The Building is one of my favorite cozy mysteries, and even though the last three seasons failed to live up to the perfection of the first, I’ve always been drawn in by the murder mystery and by the fun podcast angle. But I will say this: I preferred this show when the podcast’s fans were sitting outside the Arconia waitin for a glimpse of Oliver (Martin Short), Charles (Steve Martin) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) to what it’s become.

And what has it become? As far as I can tell, Only Murders In The Building has traded its signature gimmick – the podcast element – for celebrities. This has been an encroaching issue for the series since Season 2, though it only really became a problem in Season 4, when number of celebrity guest stars increased beyond the main cast. It has become more of a problem in Season 5 for two reasons:

First, it’s gotten old. It was funny and random when Sting was a resident of the Arconia in Season 1. The joke already felt like it had worn out its welcome in Season 2 when Amy Schumer moved into the penthouse. I enjoyed Paul Rudd’s wildly different characters – a famous actor, an insane stuntman, and now the voice of LESTR – but grew less and less amused as the number of celebrities kept going up in Season 4 to the point where it became pretty much expected rather than clever, especially since celebrities added earlier on, like Meryl Streep’s Loretta Durkin, became recurring characters.

Second, in Season 5 at least, these celebrity guest stars have taken priority over the show’s podcasting element, their billionaire characters quite literally shutting down the Only Murders podcast as part of the plot. It’s a weird choice for the script. After all, this season is trying to throw in as many callbacks to previous seasons as possible, even bringing back Teddy (Nathan Lane) and his son Theo (James Caverly) on the last night of the Arconia as we know it – which brings up another problem.

I just don’t like the story this season. I don’t like the billionaire plot and I intensely dislike that Camilla (Renée Zellweger) has somehow managed to buy out every single one of the Arconia residents in order to build a casino in NYC. For one thing, it’s just too preposterous even for Only Murders In The Building. Zoning laws alone would make this impossible, no matter how rich a developer was or how corrupt the mayor might be – and I suspect that Mayor Tillman (Keegan-Michael Key) is very corrupt, and likely involved in the twin murders this season that our heroes are half-heartedly investigating.

That’s the other big problem with Season 5 as we near the series finale. Oliver, Charles and Mabel don’t seem to have their hearts in the investigation despite regularly expressing their dismay over Lester’s (Teddy Coluca) death. The mystery feels all over the place. Previous seasons gave us really good red herrings and clues to follow. This one just sort of bangs from one point to the next haphazardly. There are too many characters and too few interesting misdirects. Season 4 had an overstuffed cast, but at least it was easy to keep track of everyone. The residents of the West Tower were all one group, distinct from the film cast and crew. Everything in Season 5 feels slapped together and haphazard and it’s become increasingly difficult to even care about who killed Lester and Nicky (Bobby Cannavale) at this point.

Robot LESTR is also aggravating because it makes for lazy storytelling. How convenient to have this robot always in the right place at the right time to record what happened and show it later on (and how convenient that nobody tries to find out what else it knows).

I still love the characters but even little things like Nathan Lane popping back up this last episode make me think of how much more fun and clever this show used to be, back when it was a show about a quirky trio of podcasters investigating murders in the building, less self-referential and before its obsession with celebrity guest stars.