Did ‘Only Murders In the Building’ Reveal Its Culprits?

As a cozy mystery series par excellence, Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building plays within a set of mystery story rhythms and expectations. In a ten-episode season, viewers can expect a cluttered path of red herrings and false leads. It would be surprising for a show to present the likely culprits of the murder in the fourth episode, but it seems like Only Murders in the Building has done just that. In the fourth episode (“Dirty Birds”), the Arconia trio spends an evening with three people who lie and manipulate so outrageously that it’s difficult to see who else could have killed Nicky Caccimelio. But what mystery gives their killers away this early?

The billionaire card sharks Bash Steed (Christoph Waltz), Jay Pflug (Logan Lerman), and Camilla White (Renée Zellweger) are a deliciously villainous bunch. Each fictional billionaire borrows recognizable elements from real-world ones. AI magnate Bash is a sketch of Elon Musk with Bryan Johnson’s joyless vampirism and the utilitarian wardrobe of Waltz’s Blofeld. Jay is a “self-aware nepo baby” who dresses like Mark Zuckerberg and engages in performative philanthropy to beat his family’s Sackler-esque reputation. Hotel and interior design maven Camilla combines the Connecticut fantasy of Martha Stewart, the all-white-everything taste of Sandra Lee, and the expensive scented candles of Gwyneth Paltrow. The performances are big, especially Waltz’s and Zellweger’s, and the quirks are so quirky that you can write the three off as over-ripe buffoon targets for a very fashionable eat-the-rich storyline.

As Bash, Camilla, and Jay descend on the Arconia, they seem like disparate people bound together only by wealth and Nicky’s weekly games. They snip and snipe at one another, suggesting a lack of trust between them. When Oliver, Charles, and Mabel split them up for casual interrogations about the night of Lester’s murder, they all tell the same story: Nicky came storming into the parlor with a cleaver, Jay tried to stop him, the cleaver took off one of Jay’s fingers, and the three billionaires retreated.

During their interrogations, each member of the Arconia shares something personal. Mabel tells Jay about her insecurities with her old friend Althea, aka Thē, and how it drove her to pitch the podcast to pod network Wondify. After Bash uses AI to terrifyingly summon up Charles’ lost recipe, and Camilla performs an impossible stealth redesign of Oliver’s dining room, the three magnates leave. Our sleuths are stumped, but they’re glad they can explain the severed finger in Oliver’s freezer. Plus, Wondify has responded, and they want to sign the podcast.

Alas, during their tour at the Wondify offices, Mabel realizes that the finger they found can’t have come from Jay because he’s missing a finger from the opposite hand. A chipper Wondify executive speaks up to remind the trio that the contract they signed expressly prohibits their podcasts from investigating their corporate leadership, and incidentally, Bash, Jay, and Camilla all very recently bought controlling shares in the company. The trio panics, but the executive assures them that if this pitch doesn’t work, their deal can roll over into another concept. Either way, they’re locked into a three-year contract. Diabolical.

It’s so early in the season to reveal the killers, and Only Murders is no stranger to red herrings. They may be just deluded by all the money and power they have as garden-variety billionaires. Still, it’s difficult to imagine why these three people would lie about the night of the murder and use their machinations to essentially own and silence the investigators if they didn’t have everything to do with Nicky’s murder.

If they are our culprits, it would be thematically resonant. Earlier in the season, Sofia asserted the mafia is functionally dead, and Oliver referred to the billionaires as “the new mafia,” people who support their own interests with no care for others. Setting up Jay, Bash, and Camilla as the murderers would continue this eat-the-rich thread and contextualize solving the murder as something beyond the typically more personal scope of past seasons. This would also potentially set the billionaires as recurring antagonists. Usually, the potential killers remain more obscured, but this time they’ve got enough wealth to be bolder. This could change the tenor of the season, taking it from another whodunit into a grander battle against murderers whose wealth lets them stand above the law.