Only Murders in the Building : Season 1, Episodes 1–3
Might contain spoilers.
A reasonably funny and entertaining show at first glance, though perhaps not as gripping as a murder mystery should be. It’s a bit amateurish: so much of the writing boils down to ‘and then the character explains his history’. There are far too many images of Tim Kono with a hole in his head. I can’t decide whether I like the little imaginary flourishes like the trampolining in the first episode. (I do like the audition sequence in the third episode.)
Steve Martin is a touch campy compared to the other two, although that could be explained by how his character uses dialogue from his old show to seem authentic. Martin Short is the only one to make me feel anything, for the most part. Selena Gomez gets twists and history, and practically performs a parallel investigation, but doesn’t escape a gratuitous shower shot.
Then along comes the third episode, where someone’s dead cat was placed in the freezer to preserve it and someone else knocks it over and breaks it into pieces… and I am no longer interested. It’s possible the rest of the episode reveals it was just a recreation of the cat or something in that vein. I don’t know. I don’t care. This is nowhere near good enough so far to be as callous about death and gore as it has been from the start, nor to treat an animal in this way.