Only Murders in the Building Review: Melissa McCarthy, Eva Longoria and Other A-Listers Add Energy to Season 4

Charles, Oliver and Mabel head to Hollywood in the star-studded season 4 premiere of Only Murders in the Building!

In the season's first episode, Hulu’s nimble hit series follows true crime podcasters Charles-Haden Savage, Oliver Putnam and Mabel Mora (Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez) as they briefly leave their home base — Manhattan’s Arconia — to visit sunny, starry Hollywood. Once there, they sign on with a brassy producer (Molly Shannon) to have their story turned into a movie, in which they’ll be played by real-life stars Eugene Levy (as Charles), Zach Galifianakis (as Oliver) and Eva Longoria (as Mabel).

Mabel isn't sure she wants her life adapted for the big screen by two glib, shallow directors known as the Brothers sisters (Catherine Cohen and Siena Werber). The fame-loving Oliver, on the other hand, is thrilled.

“You get one shot at a biopic,” he quips. “Maybe two, if you’re someone special, like Marilyn Monroe or Jeffrey Dahmer.”

There’s nothing wrong with having Murders become a kind of Love Boat docked on the Upper West Side, not when the cast list is this stacked. Melissa McCarthy turns up this season, too, as Charles’ sister out on Long Island, and Meryl Streep reprises her season 3 role as actress Loretta Durkin.

Shannon is wonderful as the producer, who is hilariously pushy and punctuates every gesture with a wildly electric energy. Additionally, McCarthy hasn’t lost her lovely gift for bringing out a role’s absurd humor, then giving it a light dusting of pathos. And Longoria, Galifianakis and Levy add a nice effervescence, just as you'd expect from the talented trio.

But all the business about moviemaking never quite clicks — wouldn't it be more in tune with the show's meta leanings if the podcast were adapted into a series streaming on Hulu? It also feels whimsically precious at times.

“A great movie moment can live in your head forever,” Charles says, using a clip from Once Upon a Time in the West to illustrate his point. This is irrelevant, and it ignores the fact that a bad movie can live in your head forever, too. (See Showgirls.)

(And, please, no more ghosts of recent murder victims weighing in with theories about how they met their demise. Anyone who lives in Manhattan is too busy and preoccupied to listen to spirits, even on matters of life and death.)

The show remains at its best when the core trio gets down to mapping out the mystery, which will remain under wraps here. It can be said, though, that the renters in what’s referred to as the Arconia’s West Tower are a suspicious batch of misfits. Among them are Vince (Richard Kind), a grump with chronic pink eye (although his eyepatch is constantly shifting), and Rudy (Kumail Nanjiani), who never takes down his Christmas decorations.

As to the performances of the central stars (all Emmy-nominated this year), Short, 74, is delightful and Martin, 79, is somewhat less so — you might describe his delivery as deadpan, but another word would be leaden. By consistently underplaying the show's hijinks, Gomez, 32, is more intriguing than either of them.

The show still doesn’t make enough use of Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Detective Williams, who has a thing for Galifianakis. With a slow, savoring smile, she refers to him as “that scrumptious, f---able baklava.”

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Only Murders in the Building season 4 is now streaming on Hulu.