I forgot how funny Only Murders in the Building is

I decided to go back and rewatch the whole thing before London, and I had forgotten how funny these three are. Not prestige funny. Living-room funny. The kind that makes you look over at the other cushion to see if the line landed the same way for your person. In our house it did, every time.

Charles is the washed-up TV cop who still thinks a camera is on him. Oliver is the Broadway director who cannot walk through a lobby without staging it. Mabel is the young one who keeps the other two tied to the ground. I used to think the show could have run on any pair of them, a Steve-and-Marty two-hander or a Mabel-and-Oliver mismatch. Watching it again, the reason it works is the third person always standing in the frame, making the other two sharper. The murders are just the excuse to keep those three in a hallway together.

A quick rewatch, one season at a time

Season one is where the three of them meet, three strangers in the same New York building who share one true-crime podcast obsession, and then a neighbor named Tim Kono turns up dead and they start recording their own. It is the setup that should not work and completely does.

Season two hands them a body they cannot outrun. Bunny Folger, the Arconia board president who spent all of season one being rude to everyone, is killed, and the three podcasters are the prime suspects clearing their own names. Cara Delevingne and Amy Schumer wander in, and a valuable painting hidden in Charles’s apartment turns into the clue.

Season three moves to Broadway, which is Oliver’s natural habitat and his personal cliff edge. His play loses its leading man, Ben Glenroy, on opening night, Meryl Streep shows up as a nervous actress named Loretta, and Oliver falls in love at exactly the wrong moment. This is the season people quote at me.

Season four takes the show to Hollywood, because a studio wants to make a movie about the podcast, and the joke of watching famous people play our three heroes is too good to pass up. It also carries the saddest hook of the run, the death of Charles’s old stunt double Sazz, so the laughs sit on top of something real.

Season five, which ran last fall over ten episodes and landed a 90 percent on the Tomatometer, is the money season in the literal sense. Lester the doorman is found dead, a missing mobster turns up dead too, and a trio of billionaires is fighting to drop a casino on top of the Arconia. Christoph Waltz, Renée Zellweger, and Bobby Cannavale get to play rich and dangerous, and the mayor turns out to be the one holding the answer. I laughed, and then I felt bad for Lester, which is the exact recipe.

Credit where it is due, Disney and Hulu

I want to say this plainly, because it is rare. Disney and Hulu have kept this show great for five straight years. Most series this old have swapped out the cast, moved the furniture, and called the decline growth. This one kept its three leads, kept the writing sharp, and let the thing stay itself. Steve Martin is eighty and still the best dry read on television. That does not happen by accident. Somebody upstairs protected the show, and it shows on the screen.

The wait, with the date straightened out

My husband and I are both waiting on the next one, and I had the wrong month in my head. I kept saying October, because that is when this show usually wraps a season. Hulu set season six for December 8, streaming on Hulu in the States and on Disney+ around the rest of the world. For the first time, the case pulls the trio out of the Arconia on purpose, all the way across an ocean.

The premise is almost too tidy. Cinda Canning, the smug podcast star who set the whole thing in motion back in season one, turns up at their door and drags them to London to solve a killing, her own. Tina Fey plays her, and the guest list reads like a London dinner party you would crash: Olivia Colman, David Tennant, Nicola Coughlan, Martin Freeman, Jennifer Saunders, Simone Ashley, Sharon Horgan, Richard Ayoade, Jim Broadbent. Meryl Streep is back as Loretta. That is a lot of talent, and the reason I rewound season one is still the three at the center of it.

Steve Martin on his own is a raised eyebrow looking for somewhere to land. Give him Martin Short and the eyebrow has a target, and give both of them Selena Gomez and the whole thing stops being a bit and turns into a friendship you believe. That last part is the trick nobody talks about. Three people who each know exactly when to step back and let one of the others have the room.

So we will be on the couch on December 8, two cushions, waiting to see what London does to them. If Oliver breaks into a song on a bridge over the Thames, I will not be mad about it.