‘Only Murders in the Building’ season 4 has finally added this one crucial missing ingredient

Our favorite podcasting trio has returned in Only Murders in the Building season 4, but there’s something a little different about them.

No, it’s not the glitz and glamor of Hollywood that’s affecting them—though Mabel (Selena Gomez) certainly seemed a little starstruck when she met Eva Longoria—it’s the grief that they’re experiencing after the loss of Charles’ oldest friend and stunt double, Sazz (Jane Lynch).

Spoilers ahead for OMITB season 4.

So far, despite chronicling their investigations and living in the same building as multiple murder victims and murderers, the Only Murders in the Building trio has gotten off lightly when it comes to experiencing grief. Sure, in season 1, Mabel’s old friend Tim Kono was quite brutally murdered, but Mabel even admitted it herself—they hadn’t really been friends for a while, and she felt disconnected from him. She still “spoke” to him occasionally after he died, of course, the same way Charles (Steven Martin) keeps seeing people who aren’t really there, but she wasn’t truly sad about his death. She was sad about the friendship that they had lost and never really recovered.

What Charles is experiencing, and what, by extension, Mabel and Oliver (Martin Short) are experiencing, is genuine, hard-hitting grief, the kind we haven’t seen before in this show. The scene in which Charles tries to preserve Sazz’s ashes after finding her remains in the furnace downstairs is as heartbreaking as it is tragically funny. He’ll carry that mason jar around with him forever, even once the police inevitably take it away as evidence.

Sazz died and saved his life. She was looking into someone who might want to hurt him. She’d protected his body throughout his entire career, breaking her bones again and again so that Detective Brazzos could live to see another day. Without a doubt, Sazz had a profound impact on Charles’ life, more so than Tim Kono, Bunny Folger, or Ben Glenroy ever did. How do you deal with such a massive loss?

Only Murders in the Building needed this emotional push

This season, the trio’s podcasting hijinks are as hilarious as ever. They’re also a little more uncomfortable to watch, and that makes the show all the better. There’s a sense that Mabel and Oliver are throwing themselves into the work because they just don’t know how to comfort Charles, and Charles is insisting on being helpful because he can’t deal with the fact that his friend is gone (and that someone is likely out to kill him).

Yes, Only Murders is a comedy show, but it’s a comedy show about death and murder and love and jealousy, too, and this season’s storyline is showing us that more pointedly than ever before. I truly believe that, if this season’s murder victim had once again been someone with a flimsy connection to one or all of our trio, the show would have run out of steam much sooner. At a certain point, the death that these characters were interacting with on a near-daily basis needed to hit them, and it needed to hit them hard. Emotionally speaking, this season is much more profound, and we as the audience are therefore much more involved in the storyline, too.

What if your best friend was murdered and you had the skills and the opportunity to find out who did it? Would you take that chance? Charles certainly will, and Mabel and Oliver will be there to help him. Though Sazz’s death is undeniably sad, the tragedy will help make this season’s journey all the richer and more emotionally satisfying.