‘Only Murders in the Building’ Season 4 Transformed the Show

The fourth season of Only Murders in the Building ventured past its horizons to serve viewers a rollicking Hollywood satire and leaned much further than it had before into meta commentary. The murder mystery, while heartfelt for our sleuthing gang, was not the cleanest or tightest Only Murders has spun, but it managed to be so charming it scarcely mattered. Even so, we finally learned the identity of this season’s killer and resolved things just before dropping the next murder for the forthcoming season five. There’s no rest for our quirky crew!

Beware, there be spoilers beyond here.

Wow wow wow! Did anyone have “Marshall P. Pope” aka Rex Bailey pegged as our killer? The anxiety-ridden screenwriter/disgraced stunt performer was almost too under the radar to be considered, but if anyone called this turn, please come collect your flowers! Rex held Mabel hostage at gunpoint until Charles, who figured out that Rex walked the window sills outside the building to pull off his speedy kill-and-clean, burst in through the window after his own uneasy 10-floor-high walk. He threatens Rex with Eva Longoria’s 19-in-1 multi-tool (a sentence I didn’t expect to write) and Rex is eventually disarmed and subdued. The seemingly meek killer spills the beans: Sazz was a mentor and friend who took Rex under her wing, even when he almost accidentally killed Ron Howard on set. She was inspired by Rex’s aspirations of being a writer and wrote a script about the beginning of the Only Murders podcast when the gang assembled to solve the murder of Tim Kono. The script was great, but Rex told her it was awful to keep her quiet. Sazz seemed plenty devastated to hear this and Rex shopped the script around to production companies in secret, leading to Bev Melon green-lighting the project.

When Sazz learned about Rex’s betrayal, she told him how hurt she was and set out to tell Charles about the whole thing after his triumphant performance in season 3’s Death Rattle Dazzle! So Rex raced to New York and used the knowledge of the Dudenoff apartment he gleaned from the script to snipe Sazz from across the courtyard. Before Sazz died, she warned Rex that her number one will avenge her and in the present, an infuriated Charles flings the multitool at Rex. Another scuffle ensues and Rex ends up with the gun. However, Rex is a hack who can’t help himself and tries out a truly groan-worthy pre-kill line and is sniped by Jan from across the courtyard. Sazz almost certainly meant Charles when she said “number one,” but it’s fitting that her other “number one” did the deed.

As we pull into the end, we get to see Oliver and Loretta’s wedding and obviously it’s adorable. There’s the specter of more trouble in paradise though; Loretta’s burn unit show is moving to New Zealand and Only Murders has been renewed for a fifth season, so… here we go again? Téa Leoni comes up out of nowhere as Mrs. Caccimelio, the wife of a missing mob boss who wants the Arconia Three’s help finding him. She gets turned down, but this is almost definitely factoring into the next season so we’ll see you then, Téa! Speaking of next season, we end as we usually do, with next season’s murder. This time, dear sweet doorman Lester is the unlucky one when he’s discovered dead in the Arconia’s fountain. Not Lester!

I’ll put this bluntly: this season’s murder mystery was so-so. Only Murders isn’t the kind of mystery show where you can always track the clues yourself and that’s perfectly fine, but making Rex/Marshall our killer was a mediocre choice. He’s barely enough of a character to have enough weight for the twist to really hit and it probably would’ve worked better if he were more present throughout the season. It also resolved in a pretty ridiculous way; I love Jan, but the whole thing felt like a deus ex Machina. There was also a lot of time spent on red herrings like the Westies and the Brothers sisters which made swaths of the show feel less connected to the mystery. All of that is true and I would still say this was one of their best seasons so far.

I realized something around the time I watched Meryl Streep tackle Melissa McCarthy because Melissa was wearing giant pigtails in an effort to win Oliver’s heart: is the mystery actually important here? Yes, I know this is a murder mystery show, but this fourth season put such a heavy emphasis on having fun with their characters that their antics and delights overtook the mystery of Sazz’s killer. That’s not to say the show didn’t care about Sazz because some of the best moments this season followed Charles attempting to avenge her and properly grieve the loss. It’s just that there was so much fun to be had with the wacky Westies and the Brothers sisters and all the meta jokes the characters were allowed to make in the context of a movie being made about them. Only Murders changed its balance of elements and gave more weight to the comedy and the character development than to the mystery. With its emphasis on character hijinks, I believe Only Murders in the Building has transformed into one of the best type of mystery shows there is: a cozy mystery.

Cozy mysteries are one of life’s great pleasures where the mystery is fun, but the characters are even more so. Sure, sure, the butler did it, but I’m really in it to see characterful sleuths bounce their way to the truth. Only Murders in the Building isn’t shy and it could transform again, but I think it’s a sign of its strength as a show that its characters are such a joy to watch that I hardly care if the mystery’s very good.