The Arconia Might Just Be Hell

Let’s stop pretending Only Murders in the Building is a comedy.

This article was published on October 2, 2023. Only Murders in the Building has since received 21 nominations for the 2024 Emmy Awards. Read all of Vulture’s Emmy-race coverage here.

I’m pretty sure Only Murders in the Building is supposed to be a charming television show where two septuagenarians partner up with a millennial to make a cute true-crime podcast for which they become mildly internet famous. But as Only Murders turns the page on its Broadway-centric third season, which ends on yet another killing that leads into yet another renewal, there can only be one reasonable conclusion to draw. The Arconia is hell, and what we’ve been watching all along are the plights of three poor souls bouncing around the inescapable rings of Dante’s Inferno.

Don’t be fooled by its cozy veneer and Selena Gomez’s glorious coats: Only Murders in the Building is a brutal, merciless show. We’re talking Saw levels of apathy toward anybody that isn’t a protagonist. (In Saw’s case, the hero is the Jigsaw Killer. In this case, it’s our podcasting trio.) Have you been keeping count of how many murders have taken place in this building? Five. Five. Six, if you include a cat.

Go ahead, count it out. There’s Tim Kono, whom you’ll recall was poisoned and subsequently shot through the side of the head by a jealous Jan Bellows in the first season. The show even lingers on this grisly detail: The dude continues to be missing a whole chunk of his head during lengthy scenes in which Mabel hangs out with him in her imagination. There’s the perfectly innocent cat that keeled over after drinking Kono’s poisoned blood, which is an indirect killing, but I’ll count it as murder. And even before the events of the first season, Mabel’s fellow Hardy Boy Zoe Cassidy was accidentally shoved off the roof by neighbor Theo Dimas, whose father would later try to pin her killing on Mabel’s other friend, Oscar Torres, who has since unceremoniously disappeared from the show. (Along with Cara Delevingne, but who’s complaining? Related: Why can’t Mabel maintain friendships with her peers?)

Don’t forget poor Bunny Folger, stabbed multiple times in the chest with a knife and a knitting needle by a fame-seeking podcast producer — truly the saddest and among the most New York ways to go. This third season started by making us think Ben Glenroy would be the first murder in the series not to take place in the Arconia, but that turned out to be a feint. Having miraculously survived eating a cookie Donna Demeo laced with rat poison, he would ultimately meet his end after being shoved down an open elevator shaft by her son. All that, of course, is capped off with a season cliffhanger that closes on Sazz Pataki — Charles’s longtime stunt double, friend, and romantic frenemy, who has popped up throughout the show as a comedic presence — getting shot through the chest by a sniper, presumably having been mistaken for Charles in the dark of his apartment. Absolutely nobody is safe.

Actually: It’s probably safe to assume Only Murders will never kill off its three main characters. The show has fallen too in love with itself to do anything so interesting, burrowing deeper into the solipsism of its characters such that everybody’s more worried about the success of a play than the fact that a human actually died. Sure, zany comedy is mined from this tension, but that takes us further from the perfectly calibrated balance of comic and severe that made the show so initially memorable. It assumes too much of its likability to the point it’s become unlikable.

Even if they’re safe from manslaughter, this doesn’t mean our podcasting trio won’t suffer. Beyond Pataki being felled by a bullet we’re assuming was meant for him, Charles seems doomed to a life of loneliness, alternating between dating murderers and emotionally closing himself off to perfectly non-murderous women. Oliver’s heart condition is such that he almost certainly won’t be able to enjoy the fruits of his (cursed) Broadway hit. Even if he wanted to stage another show, a new mess of production stressors could ultimately kill him.

Of the Arconia trio, Mabel may well have the worst of it. She’ll forever be haunted by the loss of friends to death and story reasons. She’s unable to stay in her swanky apartment because her aunt needs to flip the thing. She remains generally stuck in life in a manner typical of the millennial generation, behind on savings and with few prospects. And soon, she’ll be staring down the barrel of a fourth season, confronting two terrible options: fall back into yet another toxic cycle of relying on a murder to build an entire identity around, or follow a guy named Tobert to Los Angeles. Nothing’s more infernal than that.