No one ever really needed Only Murders in the Building to stay relevant. It’s a series that exists in a self-made, intergenerational bubble of perpetual turtleneck weather: where Martin Short and Steve Martin’s classic patter is balanced by the occasional Selena Gomez eye roll, where everybody lives in comfort—but not excessive consumption—at the Arconia apartment complex, and regular murders are committed for fun, not miserable reasons.
Only Murders in the Building: Season 5
And yet, somehow, season five tackles both the plummeting social reputation of billionaires and the threat of ChatGPT psychosis. It’s a more canny show than we give it credit for, considering it was first birthed out of the craze for true crime podcasts (there’s talk this time of how everyone’s pivoting to video).
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Its longevity is thanks, not to some desperate act of seasonal reinvention, but to a consistency in its world, characters, and tone. Sometimes it’s nice when a show makes you feel like you’re coming home, and with that solid a basis, it’s easier to shift things slightly to catch the current, or to toss in a few more A-listers for a guest appearance.
This season, we’ve been promised a truly New York story. At the end of season four, Sofia Caccimelio (Téa Leoni), the wife of the city’s dry cleaning king Nicky Caccimelio (Bobby Cannavale), begged our trio to find her missing husband. The whole situation has mafia written all over it—and when they arrive at her Staten Island home, they realise it is, in fact, the same one used in The Godfather, with its “original moulding and original nonna”. And it becomes clear that Nicky’s disappearance might have a connection to both the Arconia and its recently deceased doorman, Lester (Teddy Coluca), whose death was ruled as accidental.
Yet, the gag of the season is that, as Sofia explains, “the mob is dead… Scorsese’s now making movies about Native Americans and [gasp] Irish people”. They’ve been replaced by billionaires, which opens the narrative door for our heroes to meet their most formidable match yet: lifestyle guru Camila White (Renée Zellweger), described as “the human incarnation of a Nancy Meyers kitchen”; tech genius and anti-aging freak Bash Steeg (Christoph Waltz); and Pharma heir turned wannabe philanthropist Jay Pflug (Logan Lerman).
In short, it’s a season that confronts the fact that the cultural idea of “New York” is something that once was and perhaps can never be again, where even the tradition of the building doorman is under the threat of AI replacement. It’s not enough that Lester is dead. He has to be succeeded, now, by a robo-Lester, whom resident Howard Morris (Michael Cyril Creighton) has appointed himself caretaker of, only to find that his loneliness has made him extremely susceptible to a tech-based parasocial relationship.
Outside of all that, Only Murders keeps its formula tight, and for the better. The writing is still light and witty. The reference points are still graciously culturally broad, with Lester’s widow (Dianne Wiest) revealed to be a failed opera singer and a dedicated fan of Puccini’s Tosca, while Beanie Feldstein plays an old frenemy of Mabel’s, who’s since become a Sabrina Carpenter-type pop sensation. There are plenty more charming, oddball characters to fill the ten-episode arc, like the gaggle of Sofia’s manchild sons (“Ma, I tried salad!” you hear one of them cry at dinner) and Bash’s own son Algernon, who may or may not be a little Victorian ghost.
Most importantly, the celebrities are all still gluttonously eating up the scenery. Meryl Streep returns for a few episodes, as Oliver’s new wife Loretta, so she can try out some insane accents, while Zellweger and Waltz, both two-time Oscar winners, are having so much fun they’re practically bouncing around those sets. You get the sense that, if Only Murders were to keep steaming on ahead (and the show’s future is currently unclear), anyone and everyone in Hollywood could pop by for a cameo and fit right in. So place your bets for season six now.
