I have a confession to make. If you’ve been following our ONLY MURDERS reviews, you probably noticed we left out the review for E4 THE WHITE ROOM. It was my week to review it, and I didn’t because my full-time job and life got in the way. Three weeks later, I have to admit I barely remember that episode. And that’s part of the problem for season 3 together: It’s just too damn similar to previous seasons, and I’m bored.
When you’re as beloved as Steve Martin and Martin Short are, you can get anyone to be in your show. As previous seasons have shown us with guest appearances from Sting, Shirley MacLaine, and Amy Schumer, plus guest stars Nathan Lane, Tina Fey, Michael Rapaport, Jane Lynch, and more. S3 has amped up the celebrity walk-ons, and it’s really taking away from the core of the show. That coupled with the fact that there hasn’t been the actual podcast that makes the title of this show yet. ONLY MURDERS S3 has fallen far from where it started: Two old friends and their millennial neighbor making a true crime podcast about a murder in the building.
The other issue with this and earlier episodes of ONLY MURDERS this season is that it appears the writers have written a template to draw the mystery out for the season and are now just plugging in the components, similar to an episode of LAW & ORDER. The love interest is a suspect; check. Introduce a new love interest (or two) and make them suspects; check. Have one of the suspects say something really awful about the victim that matches back to a previous scene, check and check.
I think the main thing that saved COBRO from being a 🤮 for me, was seeing a former co-star that I adore return, even if it was just for one episode.
ONLY MURDERS can ONLY save their season by getting the core three back together and getting down to business with the podcast & solving the murder of Ben Gilroy (Paul Rudd). Everything else is superfluous.
ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING streams every Tuesday on Hulu.
