Only Murders in the Building 1x09 Kiss Scene - Mabel and Oscar (Selena Gomez)

Only Murders in the Building: Selena Gomez, Steve Martin murder mystery series. Everybody is a suspect. Only Murders in the Building premieres on August 31st, only on Hulu! Starring Selena Gomez, Steve Martin, and Martin Short. Mabel and Oscar kiss.

Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez together in a Hulu murder mystery-comedy? Sure, why not. Anything goes in 2021.

The three actors make an appealing, adorable trio in "Only Murders in the Building" (streaming weekly on Tuesdays, ★★★ out of four) a comedy about three murder podcast devotees who investigate the death of a neighbor in their Manhattan apartment building – and (of course) make their own podcast about it. Subscribe to Kino book on Youtube for more Only Murders in the Building season 1 scenes!

Martin and Short have years of chemistry and collaboration behind them and are an easy sell as the series' headliners. And surprisingly, Gomez, decades younger and best known as a singer, smoothly rounds out the cast, thanks to their natural rapport and a script that avoids generational clichés and awkwardness.

Only Murders in the Building – Steve Martin’s hit-and-miss whodunnit

only Murders in the Building, Hulu’s 10-part whodunnit, has an immediate hook in its seemingly mismatched stars – comedy veterans Martin Short and Steve Martin, both in their 70s, and millennial superstar Selena Gomez, in her first scripted television role since Wizards of Waverly Place, the late-2000s Disney show that launched her career.

The series, created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman (a producer on Netflix’s Grace and Frankie), and produced by Dan Fogelman, creator of This Is Us, is less murder mystery than showcase for cross-generational repartee, with the added mystery of how, exactly, Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez were persuaded to perform and produce a show about true crime aficionados turned amateur detectives.
That question never quite feels resolved, at least not in the eight episodes available for review, though it does lose urgency; despite a lot of gesticulating, rolling punchlines, sitcomy irreverence and inventive direction, Only Murders in the Building amounts to a whodunnit with the lull of podcast voice.

Martin’s Charles is a former TV detective on the downward slope of fame, fond of dropping his washed-out tagline (“this sends the investigation into a whole new direction”) and keeping people at arm’s length. Short’s Oliver is a loquacious, financially strapped Broadway producer who struggles to maintain relationships (his apartment is “all I have, it’s who I am,” he tells his son). Gomez’s Mabel is a 20-something curiously living in the swanky Arconia (this is addressed) who masks a questionable past with sarcasm and Beats headphones.

Though set in a non-pandemic alternate January 2021, the show harkens to 2015 – all three are devotees of a true crime podcast called Everything is Not OK in Oklahoma hosted by the “queen of true crime”, Cinda Canning (Tina Fey), a spoof of podcast touchstone Serial and its narrator par exemplar, Sarah Koenig. Serendipitously united by their true crime enthusiasm, the trio take a too-vested interest in the shooting death of a young man in their building, which police dismissed as a suicide. They turn their haphazard, slapstick investigation – sorting through trash, light breaking and entering, generally snooping around – into their own true crime podcast, focusing on “only murders in the building”.

Only Murders in the Building 1x09 Promo/Preview, Mabel and Oscar
Only Murders in the Building Season 1 Episode 8 Promo/Kiss Scene
Only Murders in the Building 1x09 Promo, Selena Gomez (HD)