Only Murders in the Building Review: How it is a great advertisement for cozy crime

Co-created by comedy legend Steve Martin and John Hoffman, the comedy-drama series Only Murders in the Building premiered its second season on Tuesday (streaming in India on Disney+Hotstar) in characteristically witty fashion. The first season of the show had seen its three protagonists — has-been TV star Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), down-on-luck theatre director Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and twenty-something artist Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) banding together to solve a murder committed in the Arconia, the vintage New York apartment building they all live in. Inspired by their favorite true crime podcaster Cinda Canning (Tina Fey), the trio also documents their progress in a podcast called ‘Only Murders in the Building’.

Charles being an onscreen detective, Mabel being part of a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew like crime-solving outfit when she was younger, the role played by Cinda Canning in the narrative — these were all nice touches that added to the metafictional complexity of the show. There was an easy blend of genres and tonalities that also gently parodied the whodunit. In the very first episode of the second season, the show makes it clear that the second season is going to take even more artistic risks along these lines.

More from Entertainment

'Send Help' Movie Review: Sam Raimi is back with a genre-bending survival thriller that presents a brand new Rachel McAdams Sameen Wankhede vs Netflix's 'Ba**ds of Bollywood': Delhi High Courst dismisses defamation suit against Aryan Khan show

We meet Amy Schumer (playing a fictionalized version of herself) who has moved into the Arconia; she runs into Oliver in the elevator and confesses that she loves ‘Only Murders in the Building’—which is to say, the trio’s true crime podcast. Schumer says: “I was never that into murder before. Podcasts, I mean murder podcasts. But you guys make it so…cozy. Just cozy murder.” Although Only Murders in the Building hops adeptly from genre to genre, this bit of dialogue was an acknowledgment of the archetype it’s closest to, perhaps — the ‘cozy crime’ subgenre of detective fiction.

Cozy crime and its formal features

Starting from the late 1980s writers have tried to channel the ‘Golden Age of Detective Fiction’ — detective stories written in the 1920s and 30s—through the subgenre of cozy crime. The 20s and 30s classics they’re trying to emulate are stuff like the Father Brown stories written by GK Chesterton and the Miss Marple stories of Agatha Christie.

This is one reason why so many of these writers (examples—MC Beaton, Frances and Richard Lockeridge, Carola Dunn and others) set their stories in the 1920s and 30s. Another formal feature of the subgenre derives itself organically from the first step—elements like DNA, crime scene investigation, easily accessible digital records and so on are naturally absent from the action. This makes it easier for the amateur detective(s) at the heart of these stories catch up with the police detectives who are handling the case. Obviously, in contemporary times it is much more difficult for the amateur to close this gap — Bruce Wayne/Batman, for example, is the opposite of this concept; a modern-day amateur who outflanks the police due to his superior technology.

Another formal feature of cosy crime is the nature of the amateur detective as well as the nature of the villain or the murderer. Cozy crime stories feature articulate, well-educated people on both sides of the law—there is very little profanity and for the most part, people have well-defined, even seemingly altruistic reasons to commit the crime. The amateurs themselves are also Renaissance men and women who are typically far more liberal (the 1920s and 30s are, for obvious reasons, much more conservative on questions of say, gender, or race) than the people around them. They also have very strong views on the whole business of crime-solving (depending upon their age this ranges from open disdain to wide-eyed enthusiasm).

These crimes are typically set in close-knit rural or suburban communities where everybody knows everybody. Snoopy neighbours are commonplace and the motivations of pretty much every character on display are ‘public domain knowledge’ in the context of these narratives.

You can see how Only Murders in the Building checks all of these boxes—the three protagonists Oliver, Charles and Mabel are all amateur sleuths with different feelings about the genre. Oliver is a superfan and has the dramatic flair to make things a little spicy and lurid, often to the chagrin of the other two. He is prone to bombastic sentences; in the second season, for example, he says at one point, “Did the pernicious protégé make a prodigious power play?” Charles is, on paper, the one character most likely to be jaded playing the detective game, but surprisingly, he finds himself missing his glory days as TV detective. It is Mabel (Selena Gomez, cast against type and absolutely brilliant) who turns out to be the cynical one who has seemingly had enough of the whodunit.

The Arconia functions as the close-knit social setting for the murders—it status as a vintage building also ties the action to the past. In the second season we meet Charles’ father and his own struggles as a small-time actor (all of it ties up with the new murder this season, that of Bunny Folger, the lonely old manager of the Arconia who most residents either hated or pitied).

Season Two: What cozy murders reveal about the setting

One of the most impressive things about season two of Only Murders in the Building is how it creates an elaborate origin story for the Arconia — and then deploys it expertly, bit by bit, to connect Bunny Folger’s murder to the happenings of recent years in general and the lives of our protagonists in particular. We learn that Charles’ father once had an affair with Bunny’s mother and that he had once posed for an erotic painting…at the Arconia itself. The painting and the misadventures of Charles’ father both play an increasingly important role in the mystery as the season progresses.

This narrative strategy was always part of the cozy crime playbook. It’s simple, really—the set-up for the murder introduces us to the social setting in question, let’s say a British village or a very small town. The set-up typically exaggerates the genteel nature of the people and the serenity of the surroundings and the solving of the murder is meant to blow holes into this narrative. We the audience is supposed to discover the ‘true nature’ of this community and these people through the solving of the murder, a process which typically consists of uncovering age-old, typically embarrassing secrets about these characters.

We saw this same gambit in season one, only with Mabel (Selena Gomez). We know very little about her character at the beginning of the season but with every episode, the emotional ‘weight’ the character carries around increases steadily, until we learn the trauma at the centre of her life (in the first season, this was the revelation that she knew the victim Tim Kono and that the two of them were part of a Hardy Boys-like crime-fighting amateur group).

This emotional ‘weight’ spills over to the second season as well. During the first episode, for example, Mabel tells Charles and Oliver that she’s quitting the podcast, that she isn’t interested in solving Bunny’s murder. “We should all let ourselves be boring for a while,” she says, with the weariness of a much older person.

The show’s metafictional hijinks are also amplified, as we mentioned earlier. After their encounter in the Arconia elevator, Amy Schumer—or rather, the fictionalized version on display here—tells Oliver that she wants to adapt their podcast into a “prestige detective show”, with her playing the eventual murderer. A number of well-executed comic relief scenes ensue with Amy and Oliver, with the latter viewing the former as his golden ticket out of obscurity and back into the spotlight.

This season, however, is Charles’ magnum opus, it has to be said. Steve Martin, well into his seventies now and with little left to prove to anybody, is an actor unshackled from his own slapstick image, one feels. He brings a rare blend of goofiness and pathos to the character of Charles-Haden Savage. When we see him negotiating with network executives who want to reboot his once-glorious detective show—only with him playing the mentor figure this time, not the super-sleuth—we can see a man gritting his teeth while trying to be polite. When we see him talking to Mabel and trying hard not to act like her father, we see the hard-earned lessons learned by a man who’s out of time, a man who has learned by trial and error, largely.

As befits the cozy crime template, these three characters end up learning a whole lot about each other’s lives and personalities through the course of the second season—and also end up debunking some popular myths around the Arconia along the way. Only Murders in the Building is one of the smartest, most self-aware shows out there at the moment, and this second season underlines its strengths and its delights emphatically.

Only Murders in the Building Season 2 currently streaming on DIsney+Hotstar

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based independent writer and journalist, currently working on a book of essays on Indian comics and graphic novels.

Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News,  India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.