If you want to see a very creative, smartly-cast, visually-stylish, amazingly-musically-scored, atmospheric, superfunny comedy with a neat murder mystery, look no further than "Only murders in the building". It's very pleasant viewing, just a delight to watch (and listen to). My opinion is also that its dramatic elements range from inspired and excellent to lame and paint-by-the-numbers, and the acting slips on occasion. Now, my cultural-geographic and age-related demographic profile means that I only know Selena Gomez of the three leads, I've listened to a few of her songs, and I like at least one ('Good for you", with ADollar-SignAP Rocky), she's a perfectly decent singer. She's a pretty decent actress too, as it turns out, but she stumbles at times and needs to develop a bit more range. People sometimes seem to think that playing an emotionally-reserved character means being a bad actor, which is absolutely dumb, but Selena's not entirely without fault here. To be fair, I also would say that about Steve Martin, and he has decades of experience, and as such fewer excuses. In the meantime, while Martin Short's character has cringier moments, for the most part he's an absolute joy to behold, a charming, jovial aesthete and wheeler-dealer of the art world, a formidable theatre director past his prime. He outshines the other two a little bit for me, I guess I'm a "Putnut" by the show's own terminology.

This series is in a way a love-letter to New York's elite classes' scene, where intelligentsia and bourgeoisie mix. I'm not sure whether I'll ever watch through "Russian doll", which taps into the same captivating surroundings, while a seemingly worse series, but this one surely sates my appetite for a while. The premise is as follows: three "bohemian layabouts" (if you know, you know), two of them very elderly, live in a big housing complex, the Arconia. They share a passion for "true crime" podcasts and, befriending each other by chance, decide to launch their own when a murder occurs in the building. They won't cover any other murders, "only murders in the building", see? In a way, the tidal wave of podcasting is presented as a modern reimagining of the classic "American Dream", or "conquering New York", where even your average Jane, or some have-been down-on-their-luck losers can have a shot at grabbing a huge audience, and captivating people's minds. To be fair, the podcasting stuff is more of a backdrop: it informs a lot of things, but the series is very liberal with assumed time-skips, so we mostly see the sleuthing, not the recording, and a lot of events happen off-screen. But this unlikely trio not only desperately tries to solve the case (or figure out whether there is at all a case), they also legitimately develop chemistry, and help each other grow. Here the show loses me a little bit: Mabel's story is interesting (Zoe is a great character with a very cool plotline, mostly told in the most creative episode of the show with minimal spoken dialogue), but is executed a bit handwavily, and Charles' story occasionally is quite lame and cringy. The actual, central mystery is, however, pretty neat, even if there are some simplistic, cliche-ish parts. Something to fix for the upcoming Season 2, hopefully. They have a true jewel with this series, it just needs more refinement.

Finally, as to the overall presentation of the show: the colourful, stylised intro sequences and outro stills are great, and the music that plays sporadically throughout the series and during some of the outros is absolutely euphoric - outros of episodes 2 and 3 especially brought me total bliss, I really gotta find the OST on YouTube. Additionally, a neat little detail is that episodes typically begin with some abstract ponderings by a character, typically a supporting one, new each time. It's not a hugely important detail, but I found it a nice bit of flair.