Review: Only Murders in the Building, "Rigor" | Season 5, Episode 3

I give Only Murders in the Building a lot of credit for sticking to a schedule. At a time when other television shows are making viewers wait multiple years (give or take a pair of simultaneous, extremely justified labor strikes) between seasons, we’ve been able to rely on a new Arconia-set mystery every August since 2021—except for the time the second of those mysteries landed in June, a mere eight months after the Tim Kono case wrapped. Those subsequent seasons haven’t always been quality TV, but they have been TV TV: entertaining, episodic comfort food delivered at regular intervals and featuring characters we’ve come to regard as old friends.

But Charles Haden-Savage, Oliver Putnam, and Mabel Mora are still bound by some of the medium’s contemporary realities: new seasons of Only Murders in the Building arrive at the pace of yesterday’s shows, but at today’s industry-standard abbreviated length. Having to weave these mysteries within 10 episodes is how I imagine we wind up with something like “Rigor,” whose three acts each have enough material in them to sustain their own half-hours of snooping and sleuthing. Maybe I’m just being cranky because I feel like we were robbed of a suspenseful, farcical Only Murders bottle episode where the trio performs an amateur autopsy on Nicky while hiding his body in Charles’ apartment, or maybe “Rigor” truly is the most over-stuffed of any season's opening chapters.