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Only Murders in the Building is becoming an honest-to-goodness New York City series. In the first season there were New York touches—the Upper West Side, the NYPD, a subway mugging, a Chorus Line reefer—but it didn’t feel like New York the way 30 Rock or Mad Men or even Succession felt like New York. Now all that has changed, and Only Murders has become thoroughly and triumphantly New York.
For one thing, after an odd sojourn at the United Palace Theatre in Washington Heights as a stand-in for Broadway in Season 3 and a glam but brief tour of Los Angeles in Episode 1 of this season, Only Murders is back home in the Belnord/Arconia. And the show is using its Upper West Side building spectacularly well, having its stars peer skeptically across the Arconia courtyard to their neighbors’ apartments—very James Stewart in Rear Window—and using a crowded, lively West 86th Street for dramatic comings and goings. As the plot unfolds it becomes clear that the Belnord's architecture is crucial to understanding the latest murder. Pondering the interior court, Mabel (Selena Gomez) queries, "Someone shot from the West Tower, came all the way over here, cleaned up the crime scene, and disposed of the body, all in 12 minutes?"
With each succeeding season, Only Murders has used the Belnord courtyard more effectively, starting in Season One with the stars dragged off in handcuffs across the courtyard by the NYPD. But until now, the show has stayed on the ground. Now, almost surely inspired by Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the stars stare out of their own windows to their neighbors living across the courtyard, wondering—much like James Stewart in Greenwich Village—whether malign activities are going on.
And indeed they are. Peering across to the West Tower, Oliver had correctly surmised that a sniper could have been the murderer, shooting Sazz in Charles' apartment from the distance of the courtyard. Here is a murderer using architecture to his advantage–even Hitchcock never built on this possibility.
While the series has always made generous use of local guest stars—Tina Fey, Sting, Amy Schumer, Nathan Lane—this season offered an amusing but unremarked surprise. To test the murderer's timeline, Oliver comes racing out of a Belnord service entrance—meant to be the actual entrance of the Arconia's lower-income West Tower—and barrels his way through a group of leashed children, yelling "Move it! Kids on leashes should be illegal." He’s severely reprimanded by passer-by–tennis great John McEnroe–who first shouts, “Nice outfit, jackass! Yelling at children?” then repeats his immortal lines from Wimbledon, “Are you serious? You cannot be serious,” before chasing Oliver to the front gate.
Series co-creator John Hoffman told The Wrap that the encounter may have been seemingly crazy, but McEnroe and Martin Short are good friends and McEnroe happened to be returning from Flushing Meadows, Queens when they were shooting: “So we just basically threw him into the show because Marty was wearing something that was such an homage and John’s an Upper West sider. So it was a perfect moment.”
Testing the timeline in James Bond fashion, Charles (Steve Martin), like Oliver, exits the West Tower and strides down 86th Street. It's night so there are no leashed children to worry about but plenty of seductive New Yorkers to divert him temporarily. He enters the lobby and expertly distracts the doorman, Lester, with a birdcall. “Why that sounds just like a black-capped chickadee," says Lester. "What’s a forest songbird doing in my lobby?” This is a sweet local touch since so many West Siders are avid birders who spend their dawns in Central Park.
Perhaps excessively fond of metaphors, Only Murders names the eighth episode Lifeboat, after Hitchcock’s 1944 "film set entirely in a small boat filled with disparate characters who learn how far they’d go to survive the rough waters of their perilous circumstances," says Professor Dudenoff (Griffin Dunne) as narrator, watching clips from the film.
“Whether or not everyone makes it back to shore in the movie Lifeboat I’ll leave for you to discover," he says. “But what the film is really about is found families fighting together for their survival in waters that can be really tough to get through if you’re all alone.”
Earlier this year writer Phoebe Maltz Bovy criticized Only Murders for being insufficiently Jewish, showing the Upper West Side as "a Jewish neighborhood without Jews." And, of course, the Belnord itself, says Bovy, is a who’s-who of Jewish artistic history including Nobel-prize-winning writer Isaac Bashevis Singer, actors Walter Matthau and Zero Mostel, and Lee Strasberg, father of Method acting.
Bovy suggests that a better title for the series might be "Only Gentiles in the Building."
But the gorgeous wedding of Oliver and Loretta (Meryl Streep) apparently involves a Jewish ceremony since Lester announces that the chuppah has arrived. I watched the filming of the wedding and didn't spot the mandated canopy with four corner poles representing the couple's future home. There was definitely a flowered arch, just no poles.
Only Murders had many wonderful moments with the Oliver-Loretta romance, which also flourished in real life, according to Page Six, New York's pre-eminent gossip column.
And for those who are worried about whether the adorable bulldog, Winnie, who was the ring-bearer, was safe in the bright afternoon sun, never fear. They used a mock-up, which looked startlingly real, when the temperature soared.
Engaged New Yorker that he was, Lester was also an excellent name dropper. And he didn't just mention Mapplethorpe casually but added the delicious tidbit, "Of course, you won't recognize me behind the gimp mask, but, uh, it's me in there." Lester would have been awfully young if he was posing in the late 1970s or early 1980s for Mapplethorpe, who died at age 42 in 1989.
The idea seems to be that Lester was involved with shady people and questionable activities. And perhaps that's correct because the next person we meet is a mobster's wife, played by Téa Leoni.
Striding out of the elevator looking magnetically elegant, Sofia Caccimelio (Téa Leoni) tells Charles and Mabel that she wants to hire them to find her husband, Nicky. "We're not a detective firm," says Mabel. "We only investigate murders in the building."
"I'm disappointed," says Sofia, pointing out that Nicky's death has everything to do with the Arconia/Belnord. If so, it won't be the first time that a mobster has been portrayed as associated with the Belnord. John Cassavetes got there first. In 1980's Gloria, Gena Rowlands heads to the Belnord to beg mob boss Mr. Tanzinni, in his opulent apartment, for the life of a child she is trying to protect. That Téa Leoni bears a resemblance to Gena Rowlands makes the entire story more fun. Vincent Canby in the New York Times described the film as "Hollywood-style hokum" that transforms New York into Never-Never Land, a New York "that's no less enchanted than Snow White's forest." That's probably not a bad description of Only Murders either.
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