Fans’ favourite mystery series back for season five

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.

- LILI LOOFBOUROW

Mabel (Selena Gomez), the disaffected millennial of the crime-detect-ing trio, seems discordantly hopeful and optimistic. Charles (Steve Martin), normally a diffident sort, radiates with newfound swagger. And Oliver (Martin Short), the colourful egotist whose pride and joy has long been life at the swanky 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 cliffhangers. 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.

Tve long maintained that Only Murders is almost comically bad at the mystery part. There are too many characters, and 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 switchback-ing (without apparent contradiction) between tragic and comic registers, and the new season reaches new heights on this front. One episode manages to honour 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).