Only Murders in the Building Season 4 Episode 1 SPOILER Review
The podcasting trio is back in season four of Only Murders in the Building, this time the podcast takes them to Los Angeles. Episode one is out now, what did I think about it? Let’s get started!
NOTE: It’s said in the title, but it’s safe to say that it will contain SPOILERS for the episode. I don’t wanna spoil anything for you if you haven’t seen the episode.
General Thoughts: If you’ve seen my coverage of this show in the past, I loved the first two seasons. I really liked both of them, tons of fun, I love the main trio. I thought season three was good, I was a bit disappointed by it but still enjoyed it. I went into season four excited to see what hijinks our trio got up to. We’ve now seen one episode, I was a bit underwhelmed. Sometimes it’s hard to judge the first episode without having seen the entire season. Your thoughts on certain episodes can change dramatically depending on how the season plays out. My thoughts on this episode can very easily change once we get next week’s episode or the entire season. It’s fun taking our trio to a new location. I don’t believe we’ve left New York City in this show before, if we did I forgot about it. There are some nice charms about seeing them in Los Angeles. With them being in Hollywood, there's a lot of movie references, actors’ careers here. There’s some funny moments here. I was laughing throughout this episode. But there were certain moments that I wasn’t really feeling and I’m concerned where they’re going with some of this. That’s my general thoughts on the episode, now let’s talk about specifics.
- The Actors Playing the Trio: The plot of the episode is that our trio learns that Hollywood wants to make a movie about them, so they head off to the city and meet with the producers. In the process, the trio meets the actors playing them. Eugene Levy is playing Charles (Steve Martin), Zach Galfinakis is playing Oliver (Martin Short), and Eva Longeria is playing Mabel (Selena Gomez). There were some really funny moments here, especially some of the dialogue between Short and Galifnakis was a lot of fun. Where you have Oliver not remembering Zach’s career. He goes from thinking he’s Jack Black to the kid from Home Alone, who mispronounces Zach's last name (let’s be honest, we all have). It can be distracting to cast such recognizable faces as the trio, but in this context of Hollywood making a movie I think it makes sense to have famous people as the side characters in this season. I don’t have any major problems with them casting famous people to play the movie versions of the trio.
- The Trio’s Flaws: This is the part of the episode that made me nervous for where they’re heading with some of this in the future. When they meet with the producers and the actors, they start to point out some of the trio’s flaws. They call Charles an un-fun turtle, they say that Mabel is too moopey and mumbles a lot. There’s truth in some of this, they’re not wrong about the stuff they’re saying, I just don’t know if it fully works. This is a Hulu original show, since this show started Hulu is now bundled with Disney+. Disney Streaming owns Hulu. I’m not sure how much of this season was affected by the fact that Hulu is now owned by Disney. One of the common criticisms of Disney as of late is deconstructing the heroes. Lucasfilm is a key example of this, they’ve deconstructed Indiana Jones, Luke Skywalker, and The Jedi. Pixar has done it a little bit with Lightyear. When this section of the episode was playing out, that’s where my mind kept on going. The show is trying to deconstruct and show the flaws of the trio. I don’t know if this show needs that, these characters don’t need to be deconstructed. The viewers and the characters themselves, already know their flaws. It feels a bit distasteful to use Hollywood as a way to deconstruct the main characters. I get that it’s part of character development, once we see the entire season my thoughts on this could change. In one episode, I’m a bit concerned about moving forward with what their plans are with this.
- Mystery: We don’t get a lot in this episode in terms of the mystery. Most of it is information we already know, season three ended with Jane Lynch’s Sazz being killed, based off of this episode I’m guessing whoever shot the gun meant to kill Charles. The characters figure that out towards the end and they realize that Sazz was killed. In the end of the episode, they see an item of sorts that has Bulgaria on it. Bulgaria is where Sazz was supposed to be filming a tv show, but she’s not there because she’s dead. Your brain immediately starts wondering what this means, what this item means. More importantly, who’s this person that is using Sazz’s phone number to text Charles. There’s a few mysteries set up that I’m sure we’ll get more clues in episode two. One thing that struck me as weird, why did it take so long for them to realize “hey maybe, she got murdered”. They were making jokes earlier in the episode about how the people keep on dying in their building. Sazz is missing in their building…that wasn’t a guess that one of them had. That struck me as weird, it seems like they should have put that together sooner.
- Final Season?: The final thing I wanted to talk about in this episode was clues that season four is the final season. I believe I talked about this in my review of the season three finale. But with how much focus they’re putting on Oliver and Loretta’s relationship, I think season four is going to end with Oliver and Loretta getting married and ending the show on that note. They set up the idea of Mabel doing an animal podcast with one of the apartment residents. Maybe that’s where we end Mabel’s story. I’m not sure what the ending for Charles is going to be, maybe it’s him returning to Hollywood to continue his acting career. This is just my theory, we have to see where the season ends. But I wouldn’t be surprised if season four is the final season. It does starts to strain a little bit of credibility that somebody close to them gets killed whenever another murder ends.
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