Only Murders in the Building, season 3, review: Meryl Streep joins the fun

It’s been a good month for wondrous guest stars. First, Olivia Colman rocked up on The Bear, in a scene that could almost have been captioned, ‘We’ve got Oscar-winner Olivia Colman on our show, how’s your week going?’ and now Meryl Streep, no less, has a major role in the new series of Only Murders in the Building. If Streep were not so good it would look like showing-off… and then Paul Rudd shows up in another lead role and it all becomes quite overwhelming. And that’s ignoring the fact that Only Murders’ three leads are Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez.

This kind of name-dropping is a modern trapping of success. Only Murders in the Building is, both in plaudits and pulling power, one of the big hits of the recent streaming age. To recap: the show follows three strangers Charles (Martin) a washed-up actor, Oliver (Short) a washed-up theatre director and Mabel, a directionless twenty-something, who share an obsession with true crime. In the first series, they all suddenly found themselves wrapped up in one and so they did what we all would do: they started a podcast. The Building of the title is the upmarket New York mansion block in which they all have apartments. Three seasons in and that building, ‘The Arconia’, is on its way to Midsomer Murders status, in that it’s a very small place for so many people to keep carking it.

Come this third year and by necessity there’s a new cadaver, this time of a vainglorious actor played by Rudd. We saw Rudd’s Ben Glenroy keeling over on the opening night of Oliver’s new play at the end of last season. This season jumps back and forward in time to explain how Glenroy came to be in the play, to show what an arse he was, and thus give lots of people reasons to kill him. Then it sets off on the sleuthing.

There is much more suspension-of-disbelief required this time round, even discounting the sheer amount of murders that have taken place in the building in three short years. Perhaps the oddest lacuna in this year’s case is the police. For about two thirds of the series the NYPD are entirely absent, yet a famous man has been very publicly murdered.

But then in some ways OMITB is a paean to theatre and the leaps of faith it requires. The play’s the thing, and when you’re having this much fun, the show says, who’s going to get pernickety about plotholes?

Because if Only Murders is anything, it is splendid fun. There is something delectably arch about the whole thing, a piece of well-worked stagecraft that nonetheless feels unorthodox at a time when so much TV takes itself so very seriously.

Even when it is working familiar tropes, the ace up Murders’ sleeve is its three leads, in particular the Martins (Short and Steve). The ease of their interplay is infectious, the tenor of their snark just-so. They come to entertain, to bring something of the joy of the theatre to the small screen. For as Alan Bennett said, “I go to the theatre to be entertained. I don’t want to see lust and rape and incest and sodomy and so on, I can get all that at home.”

On Disney+ (UK) and Hulu (US) now