Review: Only Murders in the Building, "Nail in the Coffin" | Season 5, Episode 1

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Only Murders in the Building’s fifth season, the first three episodes of which are now streaming on Hulu. As always, this first review is free to all, but subsequent reviews will only be available for paid subscribers. We are currently running our yearly subscription drive, where annual subscriptions are at their lowest price. Find out more here.

With four seasons of Only Murders in the Building down and a fifth now underway, how many more secrets can the Arconia conceal? It has to be a question that occurs to the series’ writers and producers whenever they start plotting out their latest whodunit, a creative challenge posed by the protagonists’ commitment to exclusively investigating and podcasting about slayings that occur within the walls of their swanky Upper West Side digs. The fifth-season premiere, “Nail in the Coffin,” provides its answer by taking the “within the walls” part to heart, all the while bringing Charles, Oliver, and Mabel into an entirely different, yet still-well-acquainted-with-homicide genre. Trying on the clothes (and one iconic filming location) of a mob story is a clever way to keep Only Murders fresh, even if this first episode occasionally allows its main trio to get lost in the sauce.

If the remainder of the episodes follow the lead of “Nail in the Coffin," season five will be an experiment in multiple genres. The disappearance of legitimate businessman Nicky “The Neck” Caccimelio (Bobby Cannavale) and its connections to the "accidental" death of beloved Arconia doorman Lester (Teddy Coluca) bring us onto the mafia’s turf, but there’s also a dash of spy-movie and technothriller to the way Charles and Mabel discover the Arconia’s secret underground casino, and a bit of detective noir in Charles’ flirtation with Nicky’s femme-fatale wife, Sofia (Téa Leoni). However the final blend shakes out, it points toward a possible strategy for extending Only Murders’ lifespan: slotting the main characters into roles closer to those of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, or Lieutenant Columbo, where their established personalities and quirks keep us coming back for future seasons while their individual arcs take a backseat to the investigation and the stories of the people orbiting it.

Mind you, I don’t think that’d be an entirely positive development. The trio’s relationship is the true core of the show, and the way they’ve each blossomed from and in some ways held onto a defining emotion—Charles’ loneliness, Oliver’s desperation, Mabel’s searching—colors each season in ways I find distinct and appealing. So for all the promise (and the welcome break from the showbiz inside-baseball of seasons three and four) that this new direction represents, it’s also a good thing that the opening passages of “Nail in the Coffin” spend sone quality time with the people who brought us into the Arconia in the first place. 

There’s some sparkling Steve Martin-Martin Short-Selena Gomez banter in the cold open, building to the reveal that the piece of jumbo shrimp that Oliver is about to dunk into cocktail sauce (in anticipation of eating only the sauce) is actually a human finger. It’s a deliciously (no apologies for the pun) macabre note to start from, and expertly camouflaged both in the cross-cutting between the three stars and by the way Short has been waving prop shellfish around for the entire scene. It’s the first in a string of misdirects and sleights of hand, running through the “look over here” hijinks at Lester’s wake and the podcasting bait-and-switch the Caccimelio’s large adult sons pull during their Gordon-Willis-low-light first meeting with the hosts of Only Murders in the Building. As an added cherry on top, the motif culminates in some genuine prestidigitation from former Disneyland magic shop employee Martin.

It’s in the second of those two scenes where we get a good look at our initial round of guest stars/possible suspects. I wouldn’t point the finger at any of Nicky and Sofia’s progeny just yet: Braden stands out from the pack for breaking the game of the boys’ stereotypically Italian-American names, but in the premiere, he and his brothers function as too much of a hive mind for any one of them to be the killer. Granted, we could be looking at a Murder on the Orient Express situation, but right now the boys are basically the yoked, Staten Island equivalent of the daughters from Evil for any one of them to be the culprit. (Though, knowing how things turned out with the Bouchard sisters, maybe I’m onto something.)

Back at the Arconia, we meet a trio of newcomers: Keegan-Michael Key as Mayor Tillman; Jermaine Fowler as Lester’s successor, Randall; and last but not Wiest (cue series of escalating punch-ins on Andy Samberg and Joe Lo Truglio before Lo Truglio saying “like least” is disrupted by the Brooklyn Nine-Nine theme), Dianne Wiest as Lester’s widow, Lorraine. There’s not much time for any of them to make an impression while Lester lies in state in the lobby—the set piece is much more focused on humiliating Charles and Oliver through, respectively, physical comedy and the lack of a snapshot with the deceased—but I did appreciate Randall doing the body-man thing of whispering names and apartment numbers into Lorraine’s ear while the trio paid their respects.

We’re no closer to identifying the finger’s owner after Charles goes fumbling around in Lester’s casket, but Oliver’s flailing attempt to locate the photo that will prove his bond with Lester has an unintended effect: the blurry candid he pulls up from his wedding establishes a connection between the late doorman and the missing mobster. There’s a lot of fun in watching Only Murders dip its toe in these waters, and considering its self-aware depictions of the podcasting, theater, and film worlds, there was little doubt that the show’s trip to gangland would be steeped in the iconography of the Corleones, the Sopranos, and other fictional crime families. I detected a whiff of The Godfather’s final shots in Leone’s exit from the fourth-season finale; what I didn’t expect is that season five would go so far as to book the house where that legendary coda is set. (The house that serves as the exterior of Don Vito’s primary residence, at least.)

As with the Arconia, there are layers within layers within layers to this little bit of location scouting. It’s an obvious flex on the production’s part, displaying Only Murders’ continued prominence and prestige within an increasingly chintzy television landscape. But it’s also a big, recognizable piece of real estate that the writers can hang a gigantic lampshade on, a visual punchline acknowledging that it’s hard to tell a comedic story about organized crime without also playing into and/or perpetuating Italian-American stereotypes. And so “Nail in the Coffin” goes big and exaggerated (Nicky bought into the image of a crime boss so much that he also bought “the goddamn Godfather house”) and turns clichés on their head (the Caccimelio kids project intimidation, but they’re actually a pack of mic’ed-up golden retrievers who loudly recoil at the sight of a severed digit). Nonna Caccimelio (Elizabeth D’Onofrio—Vincent’s sister!) is kind of a bust in the laughs department, so there’s still room for improvement—but on the whole, this aspect of the season is off to a solid start.

But it also highlights how “Nail in the Coffin” sometimes feels like it’s happening around the main trio. They suddenly have two mysteries on their hands, and even the one they’re most closely connected to they’re not that closely connected to—the shallowness of Oliver’s relationship with Lester is one of the episode’s running gags! It’s not like a new Only Murders arc has to kick off with the victim’s intimate ties to the leads already established; after all, we didn’t know Mabel’s history with Tim Kono until the second episode of season one. But it does contribute to a bit of remoteness at the edges here, the feeling that what’s going on with the trio is no longer the driving force of the series.

Charles gets the most story here, between his moment in the driveway with Sofia and his acknowledgement that Oliver and Mabel are moving on to new chapters in their lives, while he’s sort of stuck in the current one. But even then, that’s table scraps compared to all the setup required from the Nicky thread. And whatever steps forward Oliver and Mabel are taking, they’re pretty small. Sure, one of them’s a newlywed, but regularly scheduled phone calls from New Zealand are the only thing that’s pulling Oliver away from Charles and Mabel at this point. And Mabel… has started decorating her apartment? There’s a great moment late in “Nail in the Coffin” where she absentmindedly boards the elevator with her friends, only to remember they no longer live in the same tower, the show reinforcing its new status quo by blowing up one of its signature tableaux. But there’s not quite enough investment in pulling the trio apart yet to make that really resonate.

Besides, they’re pulled back together so quickly by what is by and large a rousing conclusion. None of the trio can leave well enough alone, with Mabel and Charles contemplating missing security footage and Nicky’s lucky deck of cards while Oliver tries to prove his devotion to Lester by getting the blood spatter cleaned off the doorman’s cap. It’s satisfying to watch Charles and Mabel’s paths converge, and Martin conjures up some of that old The Jerk/Dirty Rotten Scoundrels magic in his delivery of “Um, I drank the map.” And though there’s an inevitability of another body showing up once Oliver activates the dry cleaner’s carousel, I do enjoy that a) he’s too oblivious to clock that he’s in a Caccimelio-run establishment, and b) that once Nicky’s corpse has flopped on top of Oliver, the camera blocking and movement put an emphasis on the former’s gardenia boutonniere. Remember, Sofia said he had a fetish for that particular flower, and the end of “Nail in the Coffin” has me wondering what its significance is, along with that of Mabel declaring “I know this closet” shortly before she and Charles find the stairway down to the casino. (Unless I’m forgetting something from season two?)

Only Murders might feel like it’s starting to close some doors, but you can always rely on it to open new windows, and that’s enough to pull me into the next episode and the rest of season five.

Stray observations

• Speaking of windows opening up: Hey there! Perhaps you noticed, or maybe you read about it in the subscription drive newsletter (tell your friends! 20% off now and never again!), but I’m not Myles. I’m excited to be back onboard here at Episodic Medium, and look forward to watching this new season alongside y’all. Reviews for episodes two and three will post tomorrow and Thursday, respectively, and the rest will arrive with each new episode in the weeks to come.
• Considering the recent radioactive shrimp recall in the U.S., there are worse things Oliver could’ve pulled out of his reception leftovers.
• As much as I enjoyed our introduction to the Caccimelio family, Sofia’s line about Martin Scorsese’s shifting filmmaking priorities bumped for me. If she’s going to invoke Marty’s name, she should know well enough that while the man has given cinema some of its finest mob epics, he was never, ever, ever, ever exclusively a crime-movie guy! What is she, some Marvel superfan engaged in the anti-Scorsese flame wars of 2019? The nod to The Irishman would also have a little more punch were it not for the fact that Frank Sheeran’s ethnicity is notable enough to put in the title because, save for Frank, Jimmy Hoffa, and their families, practically everyone else in the movie is Italian-American. The Departed and Gangs of New York might be more accurately described as being “about Irish people,” but then that would muck up the (again, incorrect) logic that the director of Kundun and The Age of Innocence only recently turned his filmmaking attention away from the mafia. [/rant]
• The slogan for Clean-Ups Dry Cleaners—“We launder!”—has me thinking that the organization might not entirely be on the up and up.