‘Only Murders in the Building’ Brought the ‘Dazzle’ to Death for Season 3

Jim Hemphill

August 10, 2024 at 5:30 AM·13 min read

‘Only Murders in the Building’ Brought the ‘Dazzle’ to Death for Season 3

In its first two seasons, Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building” became one of television’s most beloved comedies. The chemistry between mystery-solving neighbors Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez yielded not only big laughs but suspense, poignancy, and sweet (if often thwarted) romance. For Season 3, a whole new element was introduced into the mix as “Only Murders in the Building” added another genre to its story and became, at times, a musical.

“My all time favorite project of the season was creating the look and scenery for the Broadway show from scratch,” production designer Patrick Howe told IndieWire, noting that the key was to tie not only the backstage areas to what was happening on stage but to connect the show-within-a-show to the larger narrative. “I chose to make all those spaces tie together and tie the whole season up nicely by the way we’re presenting a Broadway musical within a TV show.”

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“We were told at the very beginning of the season, ‘Heads up guys, we’re gonna produce a full musical,'” assistant costume designer Abby Geoghegan told IndieWire. In Season 3, “Death Rattle,” a play Short’s character Oliver Putnam initially intended as a straight murder mystery, becomes “Death Rattle Dazzle,” a Broadway musical that is, in keeping with the series’ overall tone, simultaneously ridiculous and endearing. “We wanted to go for it and make it big and sparkly and a little over the top, but we wanted to find this balance of reality and camp,” Geoghegan said, noting the tricky tonal balance the filmmakers needed to calibrate.

To write the songs for the show-within-a-show, the producers turned to master songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, whose experience writing tunes for Tony-winning musicals (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and Oscar-winning movies (“La La Land”) was applied to the most absurd storyline they had ever worked on. “At the start of writing the music, our goal was, how do we come in and introduce ‘Death Rattle Dazzle,’ which is this crazy, cockamamie idea of a Broadway musical, and yet not disrupt the music of the show, which is almost another principal character and has such a specific sound and palette to it,” Paul told IndieWire. The songwriters felt that the key was to start with composer Siddhartha Khosla’s score to ground the songs in the universe of the show. “Our goal was to spring from where Sid’s score led, and then gently guide the audience toward what ‘Death Rattle Dazzle’ was meant to be.”

Choreographer John Carrafa also took his cues from Khosla’s music for a key dance sequence modeled on Bob Fosse’s “All That Jazz.” “I was talking to [showrunner] John Hoffman, and he’s like, ‘I’m trying to figure out what song we should use.’ I was like, ‘Wait, wait. You don’t need a song. Fosse would make dance breaks out of nothing,'” Carrafa told IndieWire. “I said, ‘Why don’t I use Siddhartha’s themes from the show, and you write the text for it? And I’ll do what Fosse did and play around with the text with the different performers doing it and repeating words.’ It wasn’t like, ‘Here’s the song, just choreograph it.’ It was really creating something from the ground up.”

In the videos below, watch how Howe, Geoghegan, Pasek and Paul, and Carrafa brought the show-within-a-show to life and took the comedy of “Only Murders in the Building” to a whole new level.

The Production Design of ‘Only Murders in the Building’

Only Murders in the Building S3 - Production Design - Craft Considerations

Production designer Patrick Howe felt particularly liberated by the flamboyant nature of Season 3’s characters when approaching the sets for “Only Murders in the Building. “Usually in my designing, I try to be more restrained, but the characters are a bit eccentric, so there’s license to add more flair to the visuals of a lot of spaces,” he said, noting that one of his favorite aspects of the season was returning to sets he had designed before and reimagining them. “I loved designing the makeover of Mabel’s. It was a fun new look to give it, and while the apartment would look nice, it wouldn’t necessarily look like what people would imagine Mabel to choose for herself.”

Since Mabel (Selena Gomez) was trying to sell the apartment this season, Howe had to find the right intersection between her personality and what she was trying to convey to the world. “The fresh look that it was going for was a universal appeal of what we call staging apartments for sale, which tend to be limited to a neutral palette, but then it was trying to sort of give it certain Mabel qualities and certain Arconia qualities to reflect a little bit of her personality,” Howe said. “And what I liked about the original design in the unrenovated state is that it had a lot of depth to the space because the walls were open between the rooms. So I wanted to preserve that look, but have it be finished.”

Howe also returned to the penthouse set, which has been occupied by a different character in each of the series’ three seasons and thus required a completely different look. This time around, the apartment belongs to Paul Rudd’s self-absorbed movie star Ben Glenroy, whose living space is a monument to himself. “The whole point of his space was to present the egotistical side of Ben Glenroy,” Howe said. “Fortunately the writers had written something like, ‘Open on a Hard Rock Café worth of memorabilia to the Cobra character.’ So that was enough information right there.” Howe and decorator Rich Murray riffed on real Paul Rudd projects to create fictitious ones for Ben Glenroy, but for Howe, the actual cobra snake figure that greets people as the elevator doors open was key. “It was the right thing to do for that character, conveying the narcissism. This is my third time in this apartment. And I’ve never loved it more.”

In the video above, Howe elaborates on the sets of “Only Murders in the Building” and how he took them in new directions for the series’ third season.

The Costumes of ‘Only Murders in the Building‘

Only Murders in the Building S3 - Costumes - Craft Considerations

For the costume department, what made Season 3 exciting wasn’t just creating the musical but leaving the world of the Arconia apartment building in a significant way. Abby Geoghegan and costume designer Dana Covarrubias found a way to merge the worlds of the Arconia and Broadway in a character who didn’t even appear in “Death Rattle Dazzle,” Selena Gomez’s Mabel. “Every season, Dana comes up with a theme based on the ideas of the show,” Geoghegan said. “Mabel is the character that Dana uses to show the theme that we’ve come up with. This season, it was Broadway and musicals.”

To that end, all of Mabel’s costumes were inspired by actual musicals — but there was another underlying philosophy at work as well. “The idea with Mabel is she’s growing up a bit, and she’s trying to be a little bit more of an adult,” Geoghegan said. “She’s been hanging out with Oliver and Charles for three years now, and there’s this idea that she’s taken little bits of their looks. So we put her in a little bit more suiting this year, and there’s a little bit of masculine tailoring. She’s trying to figure out what comes next for her.”

Part of the fun of Season 3 was getting to dress new characters like Meryl Streep’s Loretta and Paul Rudd’s Ben Glenroy — though it was also a little tricky. “Getting new characters and having them fit right in is a challenge,” Geoghegan said. “With Loretta, there was the idea of her being an actress who’s been trying for years and years to get a break. Her general look was an actor coming to an audition where they’re not bringing character to their clothing yet — they’re creating this blank canvas that people can project something on.” For the musical that brings Loretta into the series, the idea was that Oliver wouldn’t have the resources to start from scratch after turning “Death Rattle” into a musical. “It was basically just taking what already existed and making it sparkle. We were hand rhinestoning shoes and hat bands until the bitter end.”

In the video above, watch Geoghegan go into greater detail about the costumes of “Only Murders in the Building” and what they say about each character.

The Songwriting of ‘Only Murders in the Building‘

Only Murders in the Building S3 - Songwriting - Craft Considerations

Like Covvarubias, Benj Pasek and Justin Paul were excited to pay homage to Broadway and the movies based on Broadway musicals. “John Hoffman really wanted to create a cohesive season that was all a love letter to creating a Broadway musical,” Pasek said. “So we were trying to be musical theater writers through the eyes of Martin Short’s character. Getting to write something that really is musical theater and something that a popular television show would embrace, that was really exciting for us.”

One of the cleverest — and funniest — songs in “Death Rattle Dazzle” is the Emmy-nominated “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?,” for which Pasek and Paul collaborated with two of their heroes, composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. “We knew the premise, which was Steve Martin’s character in this musical having to explore the question of which of these infants might have sent their mother to her demise,” Paul said. From there, the songwriters built the song piece by piece, riffing on whatever ridiculous rhymes they could come up with.

“When you have pure rhyme, it almost leads you to an inevitable conclusion in a weird way,” Pasek said. “Because ‘crime’ is only going to lead to certain rhymes, and then you just keep exploring to try to find that thing that feels right and delights the ear. So it was honestly one line at a time, and we built it over the course of several days.” For Pasek and Paul, the real pleasure was seeing how bits of the song were layered into the series and paid off in the end. “Steve’s character is meant to deal with the challenge of having to sing this patter song, and it happens over the course of the entire season,” Paul said. “We hear snippets of it planted throughout, and then you going to have this one hero performance. Getting to have the setup pay off so beautifully, that was a dream come true.”

In the video above, see how Pasek and Paul crafted the catchy and hilarious “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?”

The Choreography of ‘Only Murders in the Building‘

Only Murders in the Building S3 - Choreography - Craft Considerations

Choreographer John Carrafa was as excited as everyone else to create a Broadway show within the parameters laid out in earlier seasons of “Only Murders in the Building.” His approach was to treat the job as a real, deadly serious production. “The material itself was so ridiculous that the more stakes you can bring to it, the funnier it gets,” Carrafa said. “In the musical within the musical, Oliver Putnam was the choreographer, so I was filtering it through the eyes of someone who wanted to be the greatest Broadway director/choreographer of all time.”

Playing everything straight extended even to sequences outside of the Broadway musical. “There’s that dream sequence that Oliver does,” Carrafa said. “It’s loosely based on this song in ‘All That Jazz,’ ‘Change Your Ways.’ I have a natural sort of comic streak in my choreography, so I want to mess with things and play with them. But you have to approach it dead serious, and that ends up being funny.” For Carrafa, using dance to tell the story is one of the pleasures of his job. “A choreographer is really very much a writer sometimes because the script says they dance, and you have to fill in whatever that story piece is until the dance is over.”

For “Only Murders in the Building,” Carrafa felt he had the best possible collaborators with whom to “write” his dance numbers. “I’m going to work with these titans of physical comedy, so I have to be a little bit loose and jump into their mindset about how they work on physical comedy and dance,” Carrafa said. “They could not be more different in how they approach movement. Steve learned the dances and would repeat over and over and over and over again until it was perfect. Marty comes from improv, so Marty barely wants to rehearse. Selena’s was pretty specific choreography. She’s worked with a million choreographers. She’s done tours. So it was really easy. Boom, boom, boom. Learns it. Like nothing.”

In the video above, watch as Carrafa breaks down the choreography of “Only Murders in the Building.”