Welcome back to this season of Only Murders in the Building! For season 3, we’re moving from the Upper West Side to the Great White Way as Oliver and Charles’ Broadway production of Death Rattle deals with creative changes/some light murder while Mabel undergoes her biggest challenge yet: entering her 30s.
To kick off season three’s double-sized premiere, let’s pull out this season’s edition of the CableTV.com Only Murders in the Building (OMITB) Suspicion Power Rankings. As always, we’re ranking characters from most to least suspicious using two metrics:
- Do we think they killed Ben Glenroy?
- Did they have something to do with the murder?
Who killed Ben Glenroy on Only Murders in the Building?
#1: Loretta Durkin
The season premiere opens with a flashback to a young Loretta Durkin (Meryl Streep) discovering her love of the theater, which leads her to a lifelong career as an actor. Putting aside the slyness of casting Meryl Streep as a struggling actress, the premiere spends ample time laying out her backstory: she’s been chasing auditions for decades but still lives in a shoebox-sized studio apartment. Oliver’s also smitten by her onstage (and off-stage, potentially!) presence.
Death Rattle is Loretta’s big break, but between read-through and opening night, things went south between her and Ben Glenroy (Paul Rudd)—they exchange bad blood at the opening night party, and she’s the first to leave.
It’d be a surprise if OMITB showed its cards this early in the season, but after a premiere that kept subverting expectations with Ben’s first fakeout death, what’d be a bigger shakeup than having the Special Guest Star be the murderer?
#2: Kimber
The season premiere doesn’t have much time for its supporting cast, but we still got the broad strokes for Death Rattle’s other players. Kimber (Ashley Park) potentially had a relationship with Ben, while Ty (Gerald Caesar) and Bobo (Don Darryl Rivera) are Ben’s other major co-stars. We’ll keep a pin for this trio for the rest of the season.
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Others receiving suspicious votes
- Cliff (the producer’s weird son)
- K.T. (the beleaguered production assistant)
Playbill notes
- OMITB’s never been shy about pulling talent from Broadway—we just learned that Jackie Hoffman has a Cameo page, and we’re delighted that a bunch of videos have her fake-yelling at someone—and this season looks to lean further into this relationship. Oliver’s dream sequence features Mabel, Charles, and Will sporting Liza Minnelli/Bob Fosse-inspired outfits, while the premiere’s opening number (“The Sweetest Sounds”) comes from 1962’s Richard Rodgers musical No Strings.
- This talent pool also carries over behind the scenes, as composers Benj Pasek, Justin Paul, Marc Shaiman, and Scott Wittman worked on this season of OMITB. While their exact contributions haven’t been confirmed, the fact that Oliver’s pivoting Death Rattle into a musical makes it easy to do the math.
- Ben’s fake security guard/stalker was played by Adrian Martinez, who starred in ABC’s unjustly short-lived Stumptown and maintains a strong “Hey, It’s That Guy!” character actor living across films and shows like Renfield.
- This episode’s opening credits easter eggs, courtesy of @motionlessani: stage lights on top of the Arconia and blue flames coming from the water tower.
- GirlCOP wasn’t Paul Rudd’s first time playing a Cool Undercover Cop. One of Rudd’s earliest films was the 2000 Hong Kong action flick Gen-Y Cops, which featured Rudd dropping some surprisingly not awful Cantonese dialogue—Paul Rudd’s easily a top-five dream person to have in a dim sum rotation.
Eric Chiu is a CableTV.com senior writer who covers internet tech, entertainment, and sports news. He’s written about consumer technology for nearly a decade for outlets including CNN Underscored, Wirecutter, Newsweek Media Group and TopTenReviews/Future. In his free time, he enjoys playing any instrument he can find, rooting for the Michigan Wolverines, and hunting for the best hole-in-the-wall restaurants.
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