Note: This story has spoilers for Season 3, Episode 10, of “Only Murders in the Building.”
The Season 3 finale of “Only Murders in the Building” saw the Hulu comedy’s central trio of Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) solve the murder of Ben Glenroy (Paul Rudd), a Hollywood action star whose Broadway debut was cut short by his untimely death.
After learning in Episode 9 that Donna DeMeo (Linda Emond) poisoned Glenroy with a Schmackary’s cookie, the Season 3 finale revealed that her son Cliff (Wesley Taylore) was the one who finished Glenroy off by pushing him down the elevator shaft to protect his mother.
Executive producer John Hoffman spoke with TheWrap about the “theatrically grand” finale, and what’s to come in Season 4 following the murder of Charles’ stunt double Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch).
When did you decide that Donna and Cliff DeMeo were both going to be the killers for Season 3? Were you worried that revealing Donna in Episode 9 would point audiences toward Cliff?
Without question. It was all of these questions we have to ask ourselves and then balance that against what we’ve done before. Season 2 unspooled very quickly like rapid fire… and then landed with big revelations like that. So we didn’t want to do that again and, very much like we did with the cookie and Ben’s conversation, you might have been onto something. Our audience is so clever and now there’s a template they can go to, but we try to do everything we can to work within that template and change it up as much as possible tonally. It might not be the fact, it might be the motivation or the execution in the way this happened. So that felt, to me, like our best way to go here to make it different from other seasons.
The theme of mothers and sons was running through the season in the play of “Death Rattle” and “Death Rattle Dazzle,” through the nanny… you’ve got the Loretta and Dickie story and then you’ve got Cliff and Donna who’ve been riding this thing all along and so it felt like “OK, I can see the weave of that all coming together in the finale that we can set trails for across the season.” So that felt intriguing to me.
My mother passed away last year, so emotionally I was ready to think about the scale of a mother’s love. That helped guide the writing of this season, because I knew there was a theme underneath it that felt primal in some way, that would potentially motivate people to do things that they wouldn’t normally do — poisoning a cookie — just to stop and pause things and not know where that was going. Everything that follows thereafter for Donna is nothing she expected and the reveal to her in the moment, the hanky being presented to her, guts her because she realizes who did the thing.
I always like to try and give illumination to the surprise for the audience. It’s not the person sometimes that is the most surprising, it’s the way in which the person did it. The motivation for Cliff to stand up and take the moment, and defend his mother, in a panicked way felt right for what we were seeing through the season for that character.
What was it like having a surprise duet between Paul Rudd and Meryl Streep in “Death Rattle Dazzle?”
That weave felt very exciting to me and a little bit on the edge of like ‘Wow, can we pull this off in some way?’ I was very intrigued by the angst [Cliff] has been feeling and what’s going on in his mind. It’s all cracking open at that moment as he’s looking down that hole to the stage that Jerry Blau saw a rehearsal from. So it was nice to find bookends for things seeded through the season that way.
We had Paul as a pretty strong factor in the season, as opposed to other victims that we’ve had. He was amazing in Episode 9 and again in Episode 10. The specter of him in the number with Meryl felt justified to remind the audience that this production is happening, and it would never have come to be had he not collapsed on opening night of the original. So bringing him back in a specter-like way through the eyes of the killer, who thinks theatrically already; and then letting that play out and giving Paul a great chance to sing with Meryl — when I told Paul, he was like ‘are you kidding me?’ — and the weave of having Paul there, with Meryl, to be tossed over the edge of the lighthouse railing while you’re seeing him get tossed down in the way that ultimately answers the question of how he died felt theatrically grand and appropriate for musical theater as well.
Only Murders in the Building has been renewed for Season 4. What can you tease?
It’s so sweet to have the opportunity to tell a season long mystery. You can take big swings and go to the theater and dive into incredible stories. The arc of the characters through Season 3 was so much about the tension between the trio and their different wants and needs, romantic entanglements and everything else, and you felt this magnetic pole which was very intentional — get that trio back together to the thing we love — and in some way it feels very much like were home again (by the end), but also in a very new situation potentially for a Season 4. That excites me, along with a lot of other ideas that can really open up the show in a new way but keep the trio tighter, which I’m sure will make a lot of people happy, but also not shirk on the lovely opportunities to get with incredible people who already are in my mind and being teed up as possibilities for brilliant opportunities.
It’s hard to beat Meryl Streep and Paul Rudd. How do you plan to top yourself?
That’s a good question and I genuinely have said it myself and then I stopped myself because I’m like, ‘I can’t think of it that way.’ Because I’m like, ‘Okay, if I say that, then I’ll just disappoint myself,’ because it’s really hard to top what we just did here and we really went went for it.
I feel like it can easily be misunderstood how challenging the scale of that show for is, for a half-hour comedy. You need such support, Hulu and Disney, everybody. I can’t even tell you. But we kept it within our means for our show, which is also incredible. It just felt very ensemble, from the cast outward to composers to everybody else coming in to do something kind of magical this season. So it is hard to top. I can’t mention anyone but we’ve been so lucky to have a comedy murderer’s row here who can pull scenes off that are both comedic and poignant.
At the end of the episode, we learn that Tobert and Loretta are parting ways with the trio and moving to Los Angeles — though the latter suggests she’d like to stick around instead. What prompted the decision to have those characters move to L.A. and could we see Loretta return in Season 4?
Nothing would make me happier than [working with Meryl again] and same with Jesse [Williams], who plays Tobert. What was created this season is this beautiful relationship in both cases where we all invest and we’d be remiss just to say “OK, next one, what are we doing next?”… Of course, [Meryl’s] a very busy woman but I’m sure we’ll find ways if we can. Nothing would make me happier.
We haven’t really touched that idea [of Los Angeles]. Certainly, the events of the end of Season 3 point directly to our building and all of that. Yet the person on the floor has ties to L.A. as well. So post-strike and opening up a writers’ room for Season 4 off an official renewal today we’ll see, but there’s touchstones there that might make sense. The practicalities of the television show in two coasts is tricky, but you never know.
The L.A. touchstone was intentional and how we might be able to see that I don’t know yet, but there might be a way that would be exciting. I don’t have a plan yet though.
Speaking of the murder victim, how did you decide that it would be Sazz Pataki (Jane Lynch)?
I think that pitch came from our stalward partner-executive producer Jess Rosenthal, and it came early in the season and it ticked a lot of boxes for me as far as doing something new that we hadn’t done before. And also it brought it back to the Arconia in a specific, interesting way that I immediately started tethering out thoughts and ideas about. And we hadn’t done a beloved character as someone in the crosshairs potentially. So that felt new.
The ultimate thing is it’s very helpful to have a deep, personal connection for the trio to the victim and it makes it all feel a lot more profound and necessary, and raises the stakes in ways that I’m excited to explore. I love that we get the opportunity to sort of dive deeper with her next year.
Nothing was sweeter than her reaction… she just immediately lit up. She’s like, ‘Oh my God, that’s fantastic.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, thank God.” It’s very awkward to tell someone you’re either going to be the killer or the victim… but in our situation it’s always a bit of a boon. So we’re very lucky that we get to dive a little deeper with Sazz.
You previously told me that there was a cut storyline for Meryl Streep’s Loretta in which she was a Macy’s gift wrapper. Were there any other storylines that didn’t make the final cut this season?
There was a storyline I had a big wish about before our season became massive as an undertaking. One thought we had was that we would tie in the Arconia further by discovering an old defunct pool that was put in the basement, which you could actually find in old pre-war apartment buildings [in the city] sometimes. That was another thread we were going to try and do was, “Oh my God, was there a Plato’s Retreat episode we could do that would take us back in time at some point,” but that would also be where they could rehearse the musical because there was no other place to do it and Donna wasn’t paying.
So we thought it was really funny to put something over this crumbling pool down there where they could dance on or do performances on, and then use the pool as a thread throughout the season to bring the pool back to life and then use the pool in some more significant way at the end of the season… the trio goes down for a swim and there was the thought that someone hits something in the deep end, and they’re like, ‘What’s that? I don’t know, what is that?’ and up pops a victim.
So it was a fun trip down that way, and there was also a funny opportunity for once the pool gets up and running again and they’re still rehearsing just for Jackie Hoffman to come down in a swimsuit with a towel over her. All things started to get very thin in our imaginations until we realized with Patrick [Howe], who was very excited about the idea of designing a pool like this, what scale of expense and complication and where to put that on our stages all might be. But boy, was it fun going down that road for a long time.
All three seasons of Only Murders in the Building are streaming now on Hulu.
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