Only Murders In The Building Season 5 Review: A Great Cast Spins Its Wheels

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The first season of "Only Murders in the Building" remains one of the most charming things I've ever watched. Created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, the series smartly pairs longtime friends and collaborators Martin and Martin Short with the sardonic, deadpan Selena Gomez as three true crime podcasters who live in a luxurious New York City building, the Arconia, that's home to way too many murders. Gomez, Martin, and Short make a delightful main trio who team up to solve the murder of Tim Kono (Julian Cihi). I'm not the first person to point out that, with each season of "Only Murders," the returns have ... somewhat diminished, but I say "somewhat" because it's still a pretty delightful and often funny comedy starring three really good actors.

Those actors are still good in the fifth season of "Only Murders in the Building," which premieres its first three episodes on Hulu on September 9 — but I'm sad to say they're spinning their wheels on a show that feels like it's fading. In the aftermath of last season's murder mystery, which focused on the death of Charles Haden-Savage's (Martin) former stunt double Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch), Mabel, Charles, and Oliver Putnam (Short) are back at work as amateur detectives and podcast hosts after the Arconia's longtime doorman Lester Coluca (Teddy Coluca) is found dead in the building's courtyard fountain. 

Though his death is officially declared an accident, Lester's death raises some questions for Mabel, Charles, and Oliver, who start investigating as they meet Lester's widow Lorraine (Dianne Wiest) — and when a second body turns up and it's deceased mobster Nicky Caccimelio (Bobby Cannavale), it makes the trio curious about his wife Sofia's (Téa Leoni) request to track Nicky down in the season 4 finale. This is all a decently fun set-up for a new season of "Only Murders" on paper, so how does it pan out in practice?

Season 5 of Only Murders in the Building brings in returning and new guest stars, but does it feel fun or overstuffed?

Ever since the first season of "Only Murders in the Building" became a runaway hit, Steve Martin, Selena Gomez, Martin Short, and the powers that be at Hulu have been calling up all of their super-famous friends to appear across various seasons. Meryl Streep is the most obvious example here after she joined as a special guest star in season 3, and it's unfair for me to point to her fellow Oscar winner Da'Vine Joy Randolph as another piece of stunt casting considering that she's actually been a part of the show since its inception (Randolph, who plays harried New York detective Donna Williams, won an Academy Award for "The Holdovers" in 2023). Besides Streep and one of her contemporaries, Dianne Wiest, season 5 of "Only Murders in the Building" adds a murderer's row of famous faces: most notably, it brings Renée Zellweger, Christoph Waltz, and Logan Lerman into the mix. (If you're keeping count, by the by, that makes four Oscar winners thus far when you include Zellweger and Waltz.)

Waltz plays AI "expert" Bash Steeg, who's said to "own the internet," doesn't eat after 11 in the morning, and has a farm of teenagers that provide him with plasma for infusions. (Waltz's surprisingly ageless face lends itself well to jokes about how nobody can figure out how old he is.) Zellweger's Camila White is an interior decorator with a surprisingly sinister edge, while Lerman's Jay Pflug is the heir to a dubious "faucet fortune" that once gave a bunch of people lead poisoning. This inverted and potentially evil trio, who seem to know more about Lester and Nicky than they should, easily square off against Mabel, Charles, and Oliver, even cleverly trapping them with a plot twist involving ownership of their podcast, but just like the Eugene Levy-Zach Galifianakis-Eva Longoria Cerberus in season 4, it just feels like the show is ... showing off instead of actually coming up with cool stories.

I don't mean to say that these three venerated guest stars don't have their moments. Honestly, one of the funniest side quests in the entire season is when the gang visits Bash's house, only to meet his bizarre and seemingly haunted children who do things like whittle and stand in empty swimming pools (before all of the cast's superstars play a bunch of increasingly riotous board games). Beanie Feldstein is also a new cast member for season 5, and as her pop star character, The — short for her real name, Althea — she's a genuine delight, tormenting her former best friend Mabel with her wealth and influence at every turn. A couple other great character actors pop up throughout the season, and I won't spoil who here, but it's quite fun. My biggest misgiving about season 5 of "Only Murders in the Building" isn't its performances, which are uniformly good; it's the material the actors are given.

Maybe the characters on Only Murders in the Building should move — and perhaps we should move on

The biggest pitfall of season 5 of "Only Murders in the Building" is, frustratingly, its script. I worry that the series is taking notes from Netflix movies and using its dialogue to let the characters spell out exactly what they're doing as they do it; Mabel, Charles, and Oliver over-explain almost every plot point, and turning Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez into walking exposition machines just feels disrespectful. The central mystery is decent, but it's undercut by clunky dialogue and frankly stupid plotlines like the Arconia's resident busybody Howard (series regular Michael Cyril Creighton) introducing a robot doorman to the building that's also named Lester. It's frustrating, because the show has assembled such a great cast, and Martin, Short, and Gomez are reliably excellent performers with crackling chemistry. It just all feels ... wasted, somehow.

Again, I want to stress this — even the most irksome and overwrought moments of "Only Murders in the Building," even five seasons in, are still sort of charming, and a few jokes got genuine chuckles out of me across the nine episodes provided to critics. Still, I'm worried about this show's future, because it's truly just spinning its wheels at this juncture. If you'd asked me back when this show started, I likely would have told you I'd watch Gomez, Martin, and Short read the phone book if they were paired together. Now? I'm not even sure I want to watch an entire season of them solving mysteries if the script isn't going to let them shine ... and trust the audience to pay attention in the process. After season 5, I'm sort of hoping that Mabel, Oliver, and Charles move out of the Arconia, and we, as a television-viewing society, move on and remember the series with some fondness.

/Film Rating: 6 out of 10

"Only Murders in the Building" season 5 premieres on September 9, 2025 on Hulu with three episodes; the rest will air weekly on Tuesdays.