“Only Murders in the Building,” Hulu’s murder-mystery comedy starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez, has been a favorite of mine since it was first released in 2021. It has tight, consistent humor, a quirky ensemble, unexpected celebrity cameos and most of all, outstanding mysteries. Each episode, new details are revealed: a shocking twist or a new piece of evidence that makes the viewer wonder how they hadn’t seen a critical clue and constantly shifted suspicions between a host of equally likely suspects. For four seasons, I was excited to turn on the television every week to get a step closer to figuring it out, and to see if I could piece together the puzzle before the characters in the show did — and even if I didn’t, the “whodunit” answer still felt like a satisfying conclusion each season.

That is, until season five.

On Sept. 9, 2025, the first three episodes of “Only Murders” season five aired and I quickly understood that this season would not be a new favorite — although I had yet to realize how far the show had fallen. As the season went on, it became harder to finish the show, to the point where I eventually stopped watching for several weeks. While there were moments of clever humor from previous seasons, many of the jokes felt forced and predictable. The season was plagued by writing that asked the audience to turn off their critical thinking and just enjoy the spectacle while also having countless smaller problems that wouldn’t have individually tanked the season but collectively made it extremely difficult to get through. To really understand my point I am going to take you through the episodes in season five and critique them. I’ll bring up the good moments and some problems that I had with the season from the perspective of someone who once adored the series. 

Spoilers for season five after this point!

Episodes one through three: Many Mini Mistakes

The first three episodes of season five were underwhelming. Episode One was an okay setup for the season: Lester the doorman (played by Teddy Coluca) is dead. The episode opens with Oliver — Martin Short — reading his obituary, saying that Lester was born in 1948 and worked at the Arconia for 32 years. These details will be important in a moment, so store them away. Lester’s death is then marked as an accident. Saying Lester’s death was an accident is absurd, as that decision was made before any closed-circuit television footage was looked through and it looked unlikely that Lester could have simply fallen into the fountain with how he was sitting. Then, a subplot that goes nowhere: Oliver’s fear of the mob. I was really excited to see how this would affect the show; the idea that Oliver doesn’t want to investigate because of some bad choices he’d made in the past was interesting, but it’s turned into a one-off gag instead of being taken seriously. 

If you couldn’t tell, there are a lot of little problems starting from the first scene of the season. Steve Martin and Martin Short have some excellent moments in this season, but plenty of jokes fall flat. Selena Gomez’s Mabel, a standout in earlier seasons, has also been toned down. Either because of writing, directing, acting or a mixture of all three, Mabel, who is normally the powerhouse that moves Oliver and Charles forward, feels monotone and uninterested in the entire podcast which is a big disappointment. 

A little further into the episode is the introduction of the most exhausting characters in the “Only Murders” franchise — the podcasting mafia sons. The initial juxtaposition of having the brothers introduced as intimidating and then being revealed as dummies was somewhat funny, but after their first introduction, I would sigh with frustration every time they came on screen and wait for the scene to end. Then, in a dramatic ending, Charles and Mabel enter the underground casino below the Arconia and Oliver goes to a closed dry cleaners where the body of mob boss Nicky Caccimelio — Bobby Cannavale — falls on him. 

Episode two had a glaring problem. It is an “Only Murders” classic from-the-victim’s-perspective episode and is told like a documentary celebrating doormen. I liked the concept and there were some strong performances in this episode. There’s good humor, such as Steve Martin going out for auditions against actors saying, “there’s no way I don’t get it” over the years. It gave me some hope after the first episode. But there was one issue I could not ignore. Remember the information about Lester’s age? Well, according to that information, Lester should be 45 when he starts at the Arconia. But from the flashbacks he looks, sounds and acts as though he’s only in his early 20s, dreaming of becoming a movie star. A simple fix to avoid this confusion would have been to make Lester look a little older and seem like he’d been trying to be an actor for a while instead of it being some fresh dream. Lester’s aging also looks accelerated — he appears too young at the beginning to look as old as he does when he dies. The end of the episode reminds the audience of the absurdity of Lester’s death being marked accidental, as Charles exclaims, “I mean, the guy fills a fountain with blood in the most murderous building in New York and they say it’s accidental?”

Yes, Charles. Yes, they do.

Episode three begins and immediately dashes any hope that episode two had revived when Oliver sneezes on the body of Nicky Caccimilio. 

Unfortunately for “Only Murders,” this is season five, not season one. I will not accept that Oliver Putnam, the true crime podcast lover and host, would be so stupid as to forget that you don’t want to get DNA and fingerprints all over a body. Once Charles tells him not to touch the body post-sneeze, Oliver takes the corpse inside a rolling dry cleaning basket back to Charles’ apartment. Clearly, what the writers wanted was for Oliver, Charles and Mabel to have an autopsy scene, like other crime shows. But Oliver sneezing on a body and bringing it back to the Arconia, and then Charles, Oliver and Mabel doing a successful basic examination of Nicky’s body is unbelievable to me. It doesn’t help that there is an added element of pressure because the trio realizes that they have to get the body back to the dry cleaners by seven in the morning. The episode finally ends with a “big reveal” — three of New York’s biggest billionaires are gambling in the Arconia and are now the top suspects in Lester’s murder. 

Episodes four through seven: Subplots of No Substance

Episodes four through seven are easier to summarize together than the first three, in large part because not much happens. Episode four starts with commentary on billionaires, which I liked. Then the trio escapes from the underground gameroom where the billionaires are, without getting caught. This is where the season introduces a theme I call “slow running,” where the protagonists can go as slow as they want but the antagonists won’t catch them. 

We’re also introduced to LESTR, the doorman robot that Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton) becomes especially attached to, in a character development move that made little sense. Howard seems like someone who would be heavily against a robot taking a doorman’s job, which is another theme of the show, but in this season, he defends the robot. LESTR’s inclusion is another subplot that doesn’t feel necessary other than to be commentary on Artificial Intelligence and robots taking jobs. The explanation given later in the season is that, for some reason, the Arconia board ordered this super-intelligent AI bot to assist as a doorman and it has been kept in storage until now. LESTR did witness one critical event, but that did not come to light until episode nine. Outside of that one moment, LESTR is only an annoyance and an unimportant subplot that could have been removed. 

All three billionaires ultimately go to Oliver’s apartment — apparently, anyone can just go past a doorman to an apartment — and we spend most of the episode watching cliché caricatures of billionaires and learning no information about the mystery before Camila White (Renée Zellweger) magically redecorates a room of Oliver’s apartment. There is no explanation as to how this is achieved and the audience is just supposed to accept that it happened. 

Episode five brings back Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s detective Donna Williams, one of the shining lights of the season. It feels like whenever she is on screen, she is actively calling out the ridiculousness of the show. Besides her return, episode five can be summarized as “people versus machines,” and “Charles is on testosterone?” The first summary is clear — in an effort to get more information, Oliver and Mabel talk to the workers of the building to see what they know, having a building meeting to remove LESTR and show the staff that they support them. This is when a lot of the anti-robot commentary comes out, which does get a thumbs up from me. 

Charles, on the other hand, is investigating Sofia Caccimelio (Téa Leoni), Nicky’s wife, by meeting her for dinner, a subplot that started in episode one. It’s revealed that he’s been taking testosterone, which explains a lot of weird behavior from the season that seemed very out of character for Charles. It’s later revealed that Charles was on a placebo, leaving Charles’ personality shift to be internal confidence in the most clichéd way possible. The testosterone subplot was once again unnecessary as he doesn’t learn anything from Sofia and instead has sex with her off-screen, forgetting his phone in the car and conveniently giving her his passcode. 

Episode six was sweet. The return of Meryl Streep as Loretta is another breath of fresh air and learning about Oliver’s past was nice. It didn’t add very much to the investigation, but the chemistry between Martin Short and Meryl Streep was very entertaining. There’s a great scene that shows why Oliver loves the theater and how it inspired him followed by a shot of Sofia and Lester’s wife, Lorraine (Dianne Wiest), standing in the mezzanine about to conveniently give Oliver and Loretta evidence of their innocence. I say it’s convenient because Oliver and Loretta had been tailing them, lost them and then happened to go into the same theater as them before Sofia and Lorraine willingly gave them information. The episode ends with the first progress in three episodes: the CCTV footage was terribly altered by billionaire Bash Steed (Christoph Waltz) who owns the security company.

Episode seven has the best jokes and also the worst moment of the season. We finally find out why the billionaires are teaming up — each wants to open the first casino in New York — but it’s all overshadowed by the awful writing choice to have Oliver first run away, then come in to save the day on the slowest tractor ever made. In a scene that had me shouting at the screen, as Charles and Mabel are running away from the billionaires who are chasing them, Oliver slowly drives through a gate and picks them up. In an egregious act of slow running, the billionaires stand still and let the tractor crawl away instead of continuing to chase our trio. The episode ends with Camila White arriving at the Arconia and telling the trio that she is going to buy out the apartments in the Arconia and build her casino there.

Episodes eight through ten: An Unsatisfying Solve

Up to this point, very little proper investigation has happened in the season, causing the final three episodes to wrap up the season in a rushed and unsatisfying way. Episode eight was my personal favorite of the season, with Mabel, Loretta, Detective Williams and Lorraine teaming up and going to “ladies night” at the downstairs casino, trying to get information out of Ms. White. The dynamics between the characters playing blackjack were really fun and the jokes were flying fast. Charles and Oliver spend the episode trying to convince a therapist not to sell his apartment to Ms. White, which gives good insights into both of their characters in a very touching way even if they fail to stop the apartment from being sold. 

Episode nine falls back into the patterns from the season a little more. Since Ms. White owns 51% of the apartments, she can now apparently evict everyone and build her casino. A time limit is placed: 18 days to move out. The episode then skips to one day left as the residents of the Arconia take out their boxes and begin moving out as if they’re going on vacation, not permanently leaving their homes. There are some heartfelt moments, particularly between Charles and Oliver. Episode nine’s problem, however, is pacing and plot convenience. A lot of the episode is told from LESTR’s point of view and it turns out that he has all of the answers. Randall (Jermaine Fowler), the new doorman, went into hiding at the end of Episode Eight, and everyone has been trying to find him for 18 days; LESTR delivers food for him and everyone happens to see it only on the last day. LESTR is overly intelligent and able to communicate with the residents in an unbelievably coherent fashion for current AI. He is included so the writers could lazily fill in the clues that Charles, Mabel and Oliver didn’t find while actively investigating.

The finale was disappointing. Since little setup had been done leading up to the ending, the big reveal of who the killer was — Mayor Beau Tillman (played by Keegan-Michael Key) — is underwhelming. His motive was weak, the reason Mabel figures out he’s the killer is even weaker and considering he lost his finger only four days before the season started, his hand healed very rapidly. The finger, which I have neglected to mention, is the driving force of this season. The season spends more time chasing this one finger than looking at any other clues. Tillman is stopped by a flock of pigeons and the billionaires are arrested for not providing information in an investigation, the Arconia is saved.

The best part of the finale is the very end, where we get our teaser for season six. Mabel, Charles and Oliver are listening to a true crime podcast when Tina Fey’s character is found dead just outside the gate of the building. Howard says that it’s such a shame she didn’t die in the building because of the podcast name until she grabs the gate and dies fully. It was a funny and dramatic moment that left me very cautiously optimistic for what’s to come. 

“Only Murders in the Building” season five is a discredit to the previous seasons. Filled with predictable jokes and characters and plotlines that go nowhere — so many, in fact, that even in this lengthy review I could not cover all of them — the season tumbles to the end lacking the tight writing and clever investigating that loyal viewers came to expect. I just hope that they don’t make season six as plot-convenience heavy as season five — or else the show may finally have overstayed its welcome.