The more amusing a murder mystery seems, the more disturbing it becomes when you think about it. In that sense, the wallpaper on Only Murders in the Building may qualify as the most morally depraved thing on television. Hulu’s hit whodunit features a frankly staggering amount of exquisite wallpaper—wallpaper that’s elaborate without being tacky, ornate without being busy, bold without crossing the line into Too Much. Very often, as I’m watching on my sofa, I’ll catch myself thinking, Holy cow, look at the scale of that floral pattern … why, it’s absolutely fearless … I’d love to hang that in a guest bedroom … And 30 seconds will whiz by, and I’ll think, Wait, did I just miss a twisted corpse at the bottom of that elevator shaft?
And I did, of course. There’s always a corpse at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Or on the sidewalk under the balcony. Or in a pool of blood on the floor. Only Murders, whose Season 3 finale aired on Tuesday, is a comedy, and a particularly loose, warm-spirited one at that. It’s the kind of show that loves guest stars (Meryl Streep!) and Easter eggs (gut milk!) and bulldogs named Winnie (Winnie!). It’s a show that wants to be both comforting and funny, probably in that order. But it’s still a show about murder, and if a comedy about murder always involves a little subliminal tension—are we really supposed to be laughing about human beings killing each other?—then a comedy about murder featuring reassuringly tasteful interior decor involves even more. Am I really so indifferent to the suffering of my brethren on this planet that I can tune it out in favor of literal chintz?
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You see what I mean about seemingly benign murder mysteries becoming disturbing when you think about them? Take a more viscerally upsetting murder series—say, Marcella, the acclaimed ITV show featuring a profoundly traumatized detective grimly trying to solve a string of brutal killings, each more horrifying than the last. (This description could apply to any of about 6,000 British murder mysteries in the past decade alone.) It’s a bleak, stressful thing to watch; compared to it, Only Murders feels like a long nap in a warm blanket. But then, isn’t murder supposed to be bleak and stressful? Shows like Marcella, in which the discovery of a child’s corpse stashed in a wall produces numbed-out thousand-yard stares and painful flashbacks, feel frightening to watch but also situate homicide within a coherent moral framework. Killing, they affirm, is bad and wrong. Shows like Only Murders, where the discovery of a corpse tends to produce fun little quips and cuts to even more nicely appointed rooms, feel soothing to watch. But what are those shows saying?
Maybe one thing they’re saying is that laughing at death is one of the ways we cope with the inevitability of it. In Season 3 of Only Murders, Oliver, the outrageously narcissistic Broadway director played by Martin Short, has two heart attacks, and in both cases, his response is to try to return to the theater as quickly as possible. The show must go on! The play he’s directing, a delightfully blown-out Broadway musical send-up called Death Rattle Dazzle!, is also a murder mystery—one in which the suspects, absurdly, are three babies. (“A story pretty gory for a nursery rhyme!” as Steve Martin’s Charles sings in the patter song that becomes one of the season’s funniest recurring jokes.) The murder plot revolves around a baroque set of parent-child pairings, including a secret-adoption story line involving Streep, who’s cleverly cast as a struggling actress, and an Oedipal comedy involving Death Rattle’s producer and her grown son, who exchange slightly-too-long kisses on the lips. There’s also, of course, a father-daughter bond of sorts between Selena Gomez’s Mabel and Charles and Oliver, her two podcast partners (who are mistaken for her dads in one scene). It’s probably a mistake to attribute complex thematic ambitions to a show that has an entire subplot about a goldfish named President McKinley, but Only Murders at least sketches out a world in which violence and death are present from birth to old age, in which murder is handed down from one generation to the next, and in which the only rational response to these tragedies is to live as exuberantly as possible. Flash your jazz hands, friends, for tomorrow we may die. After all, the real President McKinley was assassinated.
In this sense, Only Murders belongs to the crime subgenre known as the cozy mystery: stories that use violent death, somewhat counterintuitively, to reassure their audiences that the world is a fundamentally nice place to be. Short, Gomez, and Martin are the urban American heirs to a long line of amateur sleuths in quaint English villages: your Miss Marples, your murder-solving vicars, your inquisitive librarians who are never late for tea. Like other cozy mysteries, Only Murders depicts an idealized landscape, but where the English version tends to show us a pastoral world of rosebushes and thatched cottages, Hulu gives us an aspirational, faintly literary New York, an even sweeter version of Wes Anderson’s vision of the city in The Royal Tenenbaums. It’s a world of uniformed doormen, courtyards with fountains, antique theaters with comical ghosts. The neighbors are grouchy but charming; the bassoonist practicing nearby is first chair at the symphony. (She’s also a murderer, but leave that to the side.) Even the show’s title is rendered in a typeface clearly meant to evoke The New Yorker. And sure, that’s partly the show’s way of flashing a Bat-Signal to its desired demographic, but it’s also a legitimate piece of world-building, a way of conjuring the sort of romanticized domesticity on which the cozy mystery depends.
I’ve written about this before, but every detective story is essentially a test of the strength of the existing social order. In these tales, the death of the murdered person disrupts the calm surface of daily life, and threatens to destabilize the larger order represented in microcosm by the network of family, friends, and suspects the detective must investigate. The detective, by organizing the mystery into a clear narrative and imposing justice on the wrongdoers, works to restore the order that’s under threat. Some mysteries depict the social order as paper-thin, corrupt, or exploitative; these are the stories in which the detective is haunted by what they’ve seen, the ones in which the detective drinks too much and alienates everyone close to them and hears voices and barely holds it together. In cozy mysteries, by contrast, the idealized social order, centered on the charismatic figure of the detective, easily absorbs the momentary disruption represented by the murder. Life goes back to normal after scarcely missing a beat. There are no evil people, only eccentric ones; whatever darkness lurks within human nature is no match for the good manners and generosity of everyday people. The point of shows like this isn’t to reinforce our callousness; it’s to renew our belief in society.
Whether you find that a worthwhile goal will depend, of course, on how you feel about society. But it at least explains how a show with a stacked body count and a tendency to kill off beloved recurring characters—mild spoiler, but another one gets cashiered in Season 3’s cliff-hanger ending—also became the most deeply comforting series on TV. It also explains, I think, why Gomez’s character is so essential to the show—because Mabel, an unsettled millennial whose spectacular sweaters can’t wholly disguise her anxiety and sadness, isn’t quite at home in the cozy mystery genre. Like Only Murders’ audience, she’s too online. She’s living too precariously. Where her boomer BFFs inhabit a bubble of cheerful privilege, Mabel is just borrowing her rich aunt’s apartment. She’s tangentially aware that a significant part of the real world is currently on fire.
In this way, she reflects the unease of New Yorker–subscribing viewers who may sense that there’s something a little tactless about loving a cozy mystery in this historical moment, and her willingness to cast her lot with the older generation gives us permission to stay with them, too. (If only it were this easy between real-life boomers and millennials.) It’s a weird dynamic—as if the cozy surface of Only Murders has to withstand not only the murders themselves, but also a second, darker genre of mystery that keeps threatening to break out whenever Mabel is on camera—but the show needs someone like Mabel to keep it from seeming fatally, as opposed to just cozily, out of touch. Every room needs a window, no matter how gorgeous the wallpaper may be.
