CHARACTER ASSASSINATION
How "Only Murders in the Building" Killed One of Its Own -- and Got Away with It
(If you’re spoiler-wary, be forewarned.)
Murder in comedy is all for the good. Crime comedies couldn’t exist without it. That death should befall any of the main leads, however, is verboten, lest the lighthearted tone be disrupted. Yet this is the high-wire act that Only Murders in the Building (2021-), a farcical satire of the true-crime craze, pulls off with one of its three protagonists in the hit Hulu series.
The death-prone character in question is seventy-something Charles Haden-Savage (played by Steve Martin), one of the show’s trio of amateur sleuths cum first-time producers of a true-crime podcast meta-titled Only Murders in the Building. The building in question is the Arconia, an upscale, monstrously large Manhattan apartment complex in which each of the three podcasters rents a separate suite. Charles’s fellow gumshoe auteurs are Oliver Putnam (Martin Short), an aging, down-on-his-luck theater director, and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), a youngish, wannabe artist. Charles, the schlimazl (bumbling fool) to Oliver’s schlemiel (lovable loser), one-ups both his Arconia cohorts in career success, having starred in a popular 1990s TV crime drama titled Brazzos, named after his police detective character in an apparent play on the Greek-descended Kojak. But this accomplishment subjects Charles more to ridicule than respect from his partners in crime-solving due to its deriving from the low-brow medium of broadcast television. Nor does his somewhat dour and ineffectual personality, especially compared to the uber-exuberant Oliver, help him rise in his peers’ estimation. But he’s a likeable fellow, winningly portrayed by Steve Martin, and there-in lies the key to Charles’s surviving three attempted slayings in this thus-far two-season streamer.
Both seasons’ finales feature Charles’s near physical demise. The first attempt on his life comes at the hands of Jan (Amy Ryan), a fellow Arconian with whom Charles had broken out of his shell and begun a passionate affair but who turned out to be a femme fatale par excellence. She’d gotten the Only Murders in the Building podcast and TV series rolling by murdering Mabel’s friend, Tim Kono (Julian Cihi), and when found out by Charles, she wasn’t content with poisoning him but tried to blow up the Arconia and all its inhabitants.
Charles’s near-death experience in the Season 2 finale occurs in a climactic scene recalling The Thin Man comedy-crime films of the 1930s and 40s, where all the murder suspects are gathered in a room at the end and the culprit is revealed. In this case, Mabel points the guilty finger at Alice (Cara Delevigne), an avant-garde artist with whom Mabel had a rocky affair, causing Alice to go berserk and stab Charles in the gut. As blood spurts from his midsection, a gasp goes out not only from those in the room but likely from many viewers. And when Charles breathes his last and is covered with a sheet, I for one felt the need to come up with an explanation for this stunning breach of comedy’s cardinal rule. Perhaps Steve Martin wanted out of the show, I surmised. Or maybe Charles will be resurrected next season as a ghost that haunts the Arconia.
Fortunately, no such drastic measures were required to restore the comedy genre to its proper place in the cultural pantheon. Charles’s stabbing was a hoax, performed with fake knife and blood, as part of an elaborate theatrical ruse scripted and rehearsed by the podcasting trio to expose the true killer and which, of course, it succeeds in doing.
Yet as I mentioned, Charles has so far survived three assassination attempts. And the third attempt, earlier in Season 2—on his character’s character rather than his physical person—had been resolved with greater difficulty. The season had gotten off to an ambivalent start, with the podcasting trio “persons of interest” in the Arconia’s latest murder, of Bunny (Jane Houdyshell), the irascible building manager. But for Charles, especially, things were looking up. Thanks to his and the podcast’s role in solving Season 1’s murder, the Brazzos series has been rebooted. Charles even gets used to his rebooted character’s being wheelchair-bound—a nod to the actually disabled Raymond Burr in the TV crime drama Ironside (1967-75). Unlike Burr’s Robert T. Ironside, and harder for Charles to accept, his physically infirm title character is now also suffering from dementia.
Which is where art imitates art, and then some.
In Episode 5 (“The Tell”), Charles responds to phone texts from the incarcerated Jan and visits her in prison—only hoping, he says, to gain some info on who the most recent Arconia murderer might be. And when she gives him an intriguing clue but seems more interested in reviving their romantic relationship, he’s at first dutifully stand-offish. With a stern face he asks her if she’s insane, given her trying to kill him and all the rest, which she dismisses with a demoniacal grin as mere “details” that distract from the “big picture”—their love for each other and his helping her get out of jail.
The jailhouse telephone limit foregoes further discussion, but when she calls him later at the Arconia and reminds him how good they were in bed, his body language and softening tone indicate that he might actually be succumbing once again to her seductive charms. “You know, Jan,” he all but coos, “neurotics make very good sex partners.” If raising psychopathic Jan to the level of neurotic isn’t off-putting enough, he reacts to the prison’s abrupt termination of their salacious confab as if it were coitus interruptus.
As cringe-worthy as Charles’s cozying up to Jan appears, one is still left with the hopeful possibility that he’s just playing her (remember, he’s an actor) to help solve the murder in the building. Episode 6 (“Performance Review”) leaves little doubt that he’s one sick Arconian.
If he’s still performing when he revisits Jan, then his twirling his fingers around the prison telephone cord and smirking like a young boy with an erection are way over the top. Jan even comments that “people who play with telephone cords are either teenagers or deeply uneasy. Do I make you feel like a hormonal teenager?”
“It’s just,” he meekly responds, continuing to twirl the cord, “should we be doing this? We are broken up, after all.”
“What?” she retorts, sounding hurt. “We never broke up!”
Charles looks shocked: “Well, I guess I just always assumed . . .”
“I still love you,” she insists. “Is that crazy?”
“I mean,” he mutters, “it’s a little crazy, but . . .”
Sorry, Charles. No ifs, ands or buts. It’s more than a little crazy. It’s demented. And while it might help his Brazzos characterization, it utterly shatters —or should—Charles’s likability quotient. He’d always been insecure and a bit goofy, but not a pathetic creep in need of psychiatric care. The series’ creative team, to which Steve Martin himself belongs, clearly sensed the blow to Charles’s character caused by his rapprochement with Jan, and attempted some damage control soon thereafter.
When his two cohorts learn that Charles has been seeing Jan for more than investigative purposes—“I think we’re only dating now,” he confides—Oliver mocks his judgment and intelligence but Mabel is horrified. “What is wrong with you!” she demands. And his feeble explanation, that his father had abandoned the family and ever since “I can’t bring myself to leave anybody,” doesn’t satisfy her—nor should it, on two counts. First, while childhood abandonment certainly might contribute to fear of breaking up in general, feeling the slightest compunction about turning one’s back on a maniacal murderer like Jan is grounds for intensive psychotherapy at the very least.
Second, and even more damning, recall Charles’s stunned look when Jan said they hadn’t broken up. That this triggered his break-up complex we realize in retrospect, but Charles had fallen again for Jan and seemed unable to extricate himself well before this “disclosure.” In other words, his abandonment excuse itself is bogus, adding dissimulation to his mounting character flaws.
The unappetizing situation is ostensibly laid to rest when Charles has his Brazzos double, an elderly lesbian named Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), stand in for him in a farewell prison meeting with Jan. I personally found this lame “punchline” only faintly funny, and for Charles’s condition another insult, as it turned his mental illness into a sick joke. One also wonders, as an aside, what Charles’s stepdaughter, Lucy (Zoe Margaret Colletti), might have made of Charles’s antics. For starters, she’d likely have amended her previous pronouncement that among her five fathers, he was her favorite.
But the series moved on and all was forgiven, if not forgotten, among the three podcasters. And even I—after getting the druthers off my chest—resumed my qualified enjoyment of this utterly silly but surprisingly charming series. It helped that Mabel had chastised Charles in no uncertain terms for his indefensible behavior, and also that the series symbolically upbraids him as well. After all, it’s he alone among the podcasting trio who comes close to dying in Season 1 and plays dead in Season 2. Whether this “punishment” measures up to the “crime” is for the court of popular opinion to decide.
The main reason for letting Charles so readily off the hook, I believe, is casting. It’s doubtful that a no-name actor, or one noted for playing shady or downright dastardly figures in film and television, could have gotten away with what the beloved Steve Martin, known primarily as a standup comic and comedic actor, manages to do with comparative ease.
Or maybe art imitating art has the final say. In an epilogue to the Season 2 finale, the smash success of the Brazzos reboot leads to the eponymous detective’s release from the wheelchair and the remission of his dementia. Or as Charles’s step-daughter Lucy puts it, he’s been “de-demented.”
Now let’s hope this “recovery” applies to Charles as well from here on out.