Inside the ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Season 5 Mystery Hook

Since its inception, Only Murders in the Building has been about loneliness, says John Hoffman, who created the series with its co-lead, Steve Martin. In its most recent season, its fifth, which wrapped in October, the Emmy-winning series continued to hit all the familiar marks as its main trio, Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), Charles-Hayden Savage (Martin) and Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) uncover both the murder of a beloved yet overlooked doorman, Lester (Teddy Coluca), and a major conspiracy involving Bobby Cannavale’s mobster character, Nicky Caccimelio, that threatens the very building that brought them together in the first place. Before the show launches its sixth season later this year, Hoffman unpacked a scene in the season five opener that sets up the surprising mystery the podcasters scurry to solve.

This episode is an example of what makes the murder mystery conceit of OMITB special, Hoffman says. “I’ve watched so many brilliant writers come in and they look at the task ahead and they think, ‘Wait a minute, comedic set pieces, arcs that are personal and emotional for the main characters, ridiculous twists, and the whole thing has to unspool over 10 episodes of a real mystery that has to keep people on their toes!’ Episode one is so critical. At the end, you want to go, ‘Are you on the ride?’ We have a lot going on in these two sequences that has all kinds of answers to questions that [the audience] didn’t see coming, hopefully.”

“It all ties into the personal elements. Charles has this history with struggles, when he’s been at his lows, losing money gambling in Atlantic City, and we’re going to learn that in episode two,” Hoffman says, recalling Charles’ discovery of a hidden map on the playing cards visible only through a red lens. “He’s got a facility with cards and we’re discovering that right before these scenes. In many ways it’s a character-based scene as we’re heading toward this collision of mystery when everything is like buttressed up against each other.”

Time and again, the show’s creators split the trio apart to display their loneliness and bring them back together in interesting ways. Before this sequence, Mabel, Oliver and Charles are on their own digging into the mystery and their own histories. “There’s always this idea of ‘When are we going to be done?’ ” Hoffman says of the relationship among the three lead characters. “Because of their own interest, their own curiosity and their own wish to get back together with a purposeful cause, they’re driven toward investigating in their own spheres. All of them start to come together in these last two scenes.”

“Realizing that Lester was found in the fountain, what happened to him is such an open question. The notion of this envelope that they find in that drawer, and understanding they’ve seen a picture where he was getting that envelope, they’ve answered a huge thing, which opens up the whole mystery story for them,” Hoffman says. “That tee-up of ‘We need to find Nicky Caccimelio [Bobby Cannavale]’ coincides immediately on the other side with Oliver finding Nicky Caccimelio in a way that I think a lot of people, hopefully, didn’t expect. I think they’d assume we were going to be in pursuit of this character. I don’t think a lot of people expected him to be the next body to drop. That was interesting to me.”

Highlighting the class and power dichotomy in New York was a major focus for the writers this time around. “In this season, thematically, it really is about all the ways in which you’re ignoring the things that you should be focusing on,” Hoffman says. “Oliver, for instance, is realizing, ‘Oh my God, I’m caught up in myself and I am a complete narcissist … And then he’s looking at the picture and remembering Lester in that moment, and there’s something compelling him to go clean [Lester’s doorman] cap. He’s doing something that is motivated from a very personal place that leads into the mystery reveal to come in that laundromat late at night.”

“Voiceover in the show is a big multitasker for us. It can help focus the episode in a singular POV, as by its nature, it feels deeply personal and acts as a way for us to bookend each episode with our themes related to the case or characters,” Hoffman explains. “In the same breath, it can also put the light of suspicion on the person speaking, offering a way to take the personal and flip it, adding a twist on our theme as well as our narrative.”

This story first appeared in a June stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.