In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the identity of the potential murderer in the apartment complex is never ambiguous. Confined to his wheelchair near the courtyard-facing casements of his Greenwich Village apartment, our protagonist, L.B. “Jeff” Jeffries (Jimmy Stewart) believes that the man living in the unit across the way has murdered his wife. There’s no body, there is no evidence. For the dozens of other residents in the complex, there isn’t even any suspicious activity. Only Jeff, who sits at his window all day and night, with his giant long-range-zoom lens attached to his camera, notices enough to begin to suspect this plot. Still, Jeff applies the same method in studying his potentially-murderous neighbor that he uses when watching all his neighbors—rather than gathering information from visible, out-of-place clues, as in a traditional mystery, Jeff gathers information based on what isn’t there. It’s the absences he logs that leads him to formulate theories about the inner lives of the complex’s residents. Only one of them happens to be a killer.
I always found this interesting about Rear Window: the balance between all the neighbors’ stories. A film professor once pointed out that all the different rectangular scenes that Jeff sees when he looks out his window look like miniature movie screens, each with its own story in its own genre. He’s only watching a crime story unfold when he watches that particular window. But he’s also responsible for turning the events into a crime story in the first place: searching for indications, speculating about motivation. Until Jeff comes along and pokes his camera into his neighbors’ business, there isn’t even a mystery. There’s just a murder.
The charming new Hulu series, Only Murders in the Building, asks (literally in the third episode and thematically everywhere else) “how well do you know your neighbors?” The show, which takes place in a sumptuous, Beaux-Arts Upper West Side apartment complex called the Arconia, chronicles the collaboration between three true-crime junkie neighbors who investigate a murder that takes place on the ninth floor. Based on its basic premise, Only Murders and Rear Window are related only by their obvious juggling of setting and genre. But the credits—a blocky, brightly-colored animation that travels up the side of the building and glimpses all the cartoon-ized neighbors through their own windows as they lead their private lives—feels a bit too reminiscent for me to ignore? At the very least, it underscores so clearly the foundation that Rear Window labored to lay: that the apartment building, and particularly the New York City apartment building, is a place which, as the literary scholar Sharon Marcus explains in her study of 19th century metropolitan apartment dwelling, “embodie[s] the continuity between domestic and urban, private and public spaces.” The big-city apartment building is a caved-in microcosm: a home that is never fully personal, a city that is also never fully accessible. What seems to be someone else’s business is liable to become your business. What you do with their business is up to you. What they do with your business is up to them.
Only Murders in the Building, which releases a new episode every Tuesday on Hulu, is the brainchild of the actor Steve Martin and writer-producer John Hoffman. Martin plays Charles-Hayden Savage, a washed-up actor known for playing a famous TV detective (from a Kojak-style show called Brazzos that I would definitely watch with my grandpa if it were real). He’s a bit standoffish, a bit shy, a bit type-A, and still is the type of person to leap into attempting to solve a murder mystery, when an even less likable resident winds up shot in the head. Reluctantly, he winds up befriending Oliver Putnam (a vivacious Martin Short), an equally washed-up Broadway director with a cash-flow problem and a passion for crudites—and while they bond over their love of a particular public radio true crime podcast, they also wind up hitting it off with another of the show’s ardent fans, their neighbor Mabel (Selena Gomez), a dry, quippy millennial who seems way too young to be able to afford a unit in such a grand building. They all have their secrets, of course, but are happy to keep such things hidden while they sneak about the building, searching for clues.
The investigation makes their lives feel more exciting, approximating the suspenseful entertainment that their beloved podcast spins out of a tragic eventRight away, the show offers a comment on the life-giving nature of a grisly community murder. To be sure, the investigation makes their lives feel more exciting, approximating the suspenseful entertainment that their beloved podcast spins out of a tragic event. But the murder in Only Murders also provides its characters with tangible gains as they pursue their leads: it gives Mabel a chance to find some closure about her past, it gives Charles a chance to let people into his life again, and, crucially, it gives Oliver a new, financially-viable project: a podcast of his own (called, by the way, “Only Murders in the Building”).
This last gain is a big one, and it’s one of the shrewdest things this otherwise smart and lovely show accomplishes: it frames the “murder mystery” as a “production.” There’s no mystery until the characters decide to make one; the police are sure that the dead man died of suicide and the case is closed. When our trio decides that the death is suspicious and that there is crucial information missing from the story, that’s when the mystery gambit really takes hold. That’s when Oliver rents a bunch of equipment and starts recording dialogue with Charles in his soundproof walk-in closet, swiveling the series on the whole to become sharp exploration of the narrativization and commercialization of real-life tragedy.
Nothing reinforces the conflation of private and public spaces, and the politics of accessibility, more than the true crime podcast as a form. By definition, the genre takes an event that usually happens behind closed doors and brings it out into the open—exposing the seedy underbelly of a particular place, the rippling pain and heartbreak born from a violent crime, the false leads and breakthroughs of a criminal investigation. More than a documentary film, the true crime podcast conveys an experience of actually conducting an investigation; split into episodes, frequently without an ending or definitive answer in sight, it approximates (and centers) the thought process of the searcher, in most cases, prioritizing it over the investigation itself.
True crime podcasts also have a deputizing, democratizing effect; it makes a detective not only out of its hosts, but also listeners. In an era where the lack of efficacy of traditional law enforcement is painfully obvious, the true crime podcast is often framed as the only recourse to bring about justice. But of course those attributes also make the true crime podcast a questionable endeavor in terms of journalistic ethics. By broadcasting every thought that the investigator has along the way, without the certainty of a clear resolution, it frequently points fingers in the wrong directions, turning private citizens into characters and potential suspects for its resolution-hungry audience. It delivers a very private-seeming experience, collected from in-the-moment recordings and personal testimonies, designed to seem as intimate as possible, while doing so to catch as public an audience as possible.
Only Murders represents the kaleidoscopic dynamics of such podcasts when its desperate characters decide to make one. Besides doing it for themselves in every sense, the production itself requires countless privacy violations—of building residents, employees, and even the dead man himself. When making a true crime podcast, which prioritizes “the investigation,” the most important thing is ferreting out secrets—and not simply secrets that will lead to the correct solution, but also secrets that will build a gripping narrative, creating and eliminating suspects, insinuating countless possibilities and even potentially endangering the lives of others. Nothing underscores this more comically than when Charles and Mabel wind up interviewing a potential suspect, Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton—fun fact, my 9th grade English teacher’s son). Unsure if they have to disclose that they are recording their gossipy conversation, Charles winds up sticking the phrase “you’re being recorded” in nonsensical rhetorical flourishes. But he’s only so afraid to baldly state their intent because it’s pretty obvious that Howard would refuse to participate.
In this way, Only Murders frames its protagonists in believing that, as detectives, they have the right to everyone’s information (the secrets about their lives), and, as podcast hosts, they have the right to broadcast this information. What they’re doing is turning a tragedy into a spectacle, justifying their voyeurism and their scandalmongering with the insistence that they are about to unmask a killer.
We learn, in Episode 3, that Oliver even sees the investigation, in his mind’s eye, as a Broadway show. After Charles, Oliver, and Mabel decide, rather hastily, that the murder must have been an inside job, and that the killer must be one of their own neighbors, Oliver mentally arranges all of the neighbors in a row, not in a police line-up, but in a chorus line. This clearly identifies that our protagonists have made the mystery not merely focused on the identity of the dead man’s killer, but about revealing all of the secret lives happening around them in the apartment complex. Oliver underscores the trio’s commitment to making the mystery about their residence, and its residents, by insisting on an ensemble cast.
In keeping with this, the most interesting scenes in the series are the ones where the three amateur detectives get to know the neighbors—and by extension introduce them to us, because we absolutely want to know who can afford to live in such a place! That’d be the lure of this podcast in the first place, its ability to multiply the potential for learning secrets: true crime in such a posh and unattainable place. There’s a hilariously dysfunctional building meeting in the lobby, a few awkward visits, and, through this all, a litany of character actors and celebrities making cameos. Our cast is large. No one is above suspicion, not even musical legend Sting, who plays himself. As the series moves forward, it becomes clear that the most interesting aspect of the Arconia, to everyone who lives in the Arconia, is not the sweeping staircases, polished brass accents, or meticulous courtyard: it’s the people who literally (as the credits suggest) are its building blocks. The Arconia is a community, even if its particular community is composed of many people who wish to keep to themselves: a general public made of a few hundred extremely private entities who are about to finally have their secrets exposed.
The fictional Arconia, filmed at The Belnord on the Upper West Side and 270 Riverside Drive in Morningside Heights (and also presumably nodding to the UWS’s famous complex, The Ansonia), is an opulent patch of real estate. Oliver reveals that it had always been his dream to be successful enough to live there. Mabel acknowledges that it became a wish-fulfilling home-away-from-home. Her flashbacks teach us that she is not wealthy, just wealthy-adjacent; her aunt lives in the Arconia apartment building, and she used to visit it on breaks from school, dreading the moments when she’d have to go back to her much less luxurious life on Long Island.
In a way, their detective-playacting and podcast-making is a kind of authoritative move: an attempt to be protective and all-knowing about a property which is highly exclusive and commonly-desired (and which Oliver is in danger of being evicted from). Just as their attempts to figure out what has gone on inside the Arconia are gestures of ownership and insidership, their determined crusade to figure out which of their neighbors is the killer is a fervent attempt to expose a kind of impostor living among them. Seemingly, it’s because they themselves all feel like they don’t belong that they’re hell-bent on finding the person who definitely does not.
In a way, their detective-playacting and podcast-making is a kind of authoritative move: an attempt to be protective and all-knowing about a property which is highly exclusive and commonly-desiredFinding out the secrets of someone’s life is a power-move. Only Murders tracks its characters’ desire for this kind of power, and this helps pinpoint why they are so insistent that the killer has come from their own stock. No one embodies this dynamic more than Mabel, who loves to pry into people’s business. As a teenager, she and a few of the building’s nosy teenage residents (two rich kids and the super’s son) copy keys and sneak all over the building, stealing things and roaming around like the whole place belongs to them. She winds up doing the same thing with Charles and Oliver—sneaking around using service elevators and picking locks to get into other units. Oliver even advertises that he leaves his own apartment door open, and treats his neighbors’ apartments in the same fashion. Having access to the whole (exclusive) building—knowing more about it than others—is a way to legitimize their own presences, and subvert others’. But nothing subvers this dynamic more than providing access to these secrets to the masses.
Only Murders plays with all of these dimensions very handily in its first few available episodes; like Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff, its main characters become stand-ins for the audience, treating the other characters as subjects, observing them go about their days. But of course, Only Murders knows—if its characters are so focused on watching their neighbors, they might not notice when their neighbors watch them back. “Watching” might seem like a private enough pursuit, but it’s in blurred spaces like the Arconia where private activities draw the most attention. Especially when they’re, you know, podcasted.
