Why everyone should be watching Only Murders in the Building in this anxious era
The Steve Martin comedy is not thought-provoking or controversial, it does not need a trigger warning and it does not keep you up at night, writes Tom Murray. But it’s a comfort blanket, a lovely, warm chicken soup, if you will, that offsets the bleak news cycle
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Your support makes all the difference.A distinctly average TV show called Only Murders in the Building is back, and I couldn’t be happier. The Disney+ drama, the second season of which launched on 28 June, stars Martin Short, Steve Martin and Selena Gomez as three amateur sleuths investigating – you guessed it – a murder in their New York apartment building. It is, to be honest, fine – and that is all it needs to be.
You see, Only Murders falls into a sub-genre of television that could be termed “chicken soup viewing”. Chicken soup shows are not thought-provoking or controversial, they do not need trigger warnings and they do not keep you up at night – quite the opposite. Chicken soup shows, as the term suggests, are programmes we watch when we need a break from the horrors of modern society, politics and sexist old white men telling women what to do with their bodies. Other chicken soup shows include Gilmore Girls, Ted Lasso and Schitt’s Creek. These programmes are not necessarily adored for their riveting plotlines but for their breeziness, and their character relationships that keep us coming back for more. In many episodes of these shows, nothing at all happens, and that’s also fine.
It is easy to forget, with the abundance of high drama that big-budget streaming platforms have afforded us, one of the core functions of television: to relax. Only Murders has no pretences about its ambitions as a series. It exists on its Pinterest-board aesthetic more than it does on its whodunnit mystery behind the death of Tim Kono. The show is just as much about Charles’s (Martin) adorable hat, the gorgeous, idiosyncratic Upper West Side apartments, and Oliver’s (Short) proclivity for condiments.
At the heart of this show is the chemistry between Short and Martin; a friendship forged over three decades since working together on the 1986 comedy Three Amigos! The two comedy greats go on family vacations together and their closeness is blatant on screen. Martin, also a writer on the series, gives the best lines to his buddy, who delivers quips such as: “As I said to Paula Abdul during our production of Hedda Gabler, we’ve got to start thinking outside the box, here.”
Gomez fits surprisingly well into this trio as the withering millennial navigating two gentlemen in their seventies. “I’m a stranger that lied to you a bunch and you’re two randos that dragged me into a podcast,” Gomez’s Mabel sneers. “Rando is a slang for a person of no significance,” Oliver explains to Charles, who replies: “I used context clues, but thank you.” When Short, who is 72, asked Gomez, 29, how she reacted when she found out she’d be working with him, the former Disney star reportedly responded: “I Googled you” – this total lack of reverence is exactly why their relationship works.
This show is not perfect. In fact, from a narrative perspective, it’s really not great and it features some hilarious plot holes. The funny thing is, it doesn’t matter. We, the viewers, don’t care, because the point of the show isn’t who killed poor old Tim Kono. We’re here to settle into a deep armchair in Oliver’s apartment and watch the repartee between two veteran comedians and the former star of The Wizards of Waverly Place.
Carefully crafted chemistry like this leaves the audience feeling not as though we are watching a story play out, but returning to a group of old friends. It’s a delicious recipe that has won favour time and time again with Seinfeld, Sex and the City and, ahem, Friends. As Oliver says in series one: “That’s really all we want, isn’t it? More time with the people we love.”
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