‘Only Murders in the Building’ peaks with a bouncy fifth season

“Only Murders in the Building” — TV’s coziest fantasy about life in New York City — starts its fifth, silliest and most enjoyable season with some unsettling changes to the status quo. Mabel (Selena Gomez), the disaffected millennial of the crime-detecting trio, seems discordantly hopeful and optimistic. Charles (Steve Martin), normally a diffident sort, radiates with newfound swagger. And Oliver (Martin Short), the colorful egotist whose pride and joy has long been life at the swank Arconia, is considering moving out.

The catalyst for the fifth season is, of course, a dead body. The fourth season punctuated Oliver’s climactic wedding to Loretta (Meryl Streep) with two cliff-hangers. The first was a mysterious visit from mob wife Sofia Caccimelio (Téa Leoni), who asked the podcasters for help finding her husband Nicky (Bobby Cannavale). The second was the harrowing spectacle of the Arconia’s charming old-world doorman, Lester (Teddy Coluca), bleeding out into the fountain in the courtyard.

I’ve long maintained that “Only Murders” is almost comically bad at the mystery part. There are too many characters, twists show up out of nowhere and the solutions feel less like logical outcomes than the end of the 1985 movie “Clue,” which offered up three equally plausible endings. But the show excels at switchbacking (without apparent contradiction) between tragic and comic registers, and the new season reaches new heights on this front. One episode manages to honor Lester’s life and legacy while driving home exactly how much he was taken for granted by the folks he took pride in serving - without quite making you hate the Arconia residents. Another delivers some of the year’s best slapstick comedy during Lester’s funeral (over his literal dead body). A third features Martin and Leoni at a hibachi restaurant erotically (?) diving for food like randy dolphins while her character’s gaggle of grown sons squabble at a nearby table. Leoni is the season’s MVP; not since Jean Smart’s Lana Gardner in “Frasier” has there been such a comically appealing, sexy, put-upon, semi-effective mother.

The canvas is broad and so are the set pieces, which range from a disembodied finger nested in Oliver’s wedding shrimp to an underground casino to the literal “Godfather” house (where Sofia unhappily resides). As with last season, which featured a group of actors playing the show’s central trio plus several stunt doubles, doppelgängers abound. Lester’s replacements include his trainee Randall (Jermaine Fowler) and a menacingly efficient robot. Our protagonists are challenged by a sinister team of podcasters and by another trio, this one consisting of billionaire gamblers. Christoph Waltz plays Sebastian “Bash” Steed, an ageless tech mogul fueled by the teenage blood he harvests. Logan Lerman plays Jay Pflug, a cross between Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey. And Renée Zellweger plays Camila White, a finicky Martha Stewart type with strong opinions about Oliver’s decor.

Hulu’s coziest mystery show is built on romantic improbabilities. Its engine has never really been the murder or its solution. Nor has it relied on the sleuth’s deductive genius, since the show’s three detectives are as silly as they are lucky. That scuttles the usual reason whodunits have such lasting appeal: namely, that death becomes a springboard through which the detective, armed with logic and expertise, can restore order to a chaotic and frightening universe.

“Only Murders” offers something other than order. It offers a world where oddballs — most of whom don’t seem obscenely rich — grumble and bump heads and make up in a stunning apartment building only millionaires could realistically afford. (Oliver, a former director perennially teetering on the edge of financial solvency, lives in an apartment worth somewhere between $10 and $12 million). The season tackles a bit of that tension, with the staff objecting to the residents’ indifference to their looming replacement by robots and the residents siding with them in a purely transactional way. The threat this season poses is that the evil rich - here, the mob and the sinister billionaires - might take the Arconia over. The most appealing part of that story is the fantasy that they haven’t already done so.

Only Murders in the Building, episodes 1-3, are available for streaming on Hulu; subsequent episodes air weekly.

This is an excerpt from a Washington Post story.