Get Excited! A Favorite SNL Alum Just Joined The Cast of ‘Only Murders in the Building’
Will the show trade in the Arconia for La La Land?
Season 4 of Hulu’s hit murder mystery comedy Only Murders in the Building is currently in production, and fans could not be more excited to see what happens next. Now we’ve got an even bigger reason to be impatient for the next season: Saturday Night Live alumna Molly Shannon is joining the cast for a recurring role!
Hulu announced their decision to produce a fourth season of the popular show on October 3, 2023, the same day that viewers finally learned who killed Ben Glenroy (Paul Rudd) in the season 3 finale. Production was delayed for months due to the Writers Guild of America strike, but now it seems that showrunners are moving full steam ahead with season 4.
In typical Only Murders style, we already know who season 4’s primary murder victim is. The season 3 finale ended with fan favorite Sazz Pataki, flawlessly played by Jane Lynch, entering Charles Haden-Savage’s (Steve Martin) apartment in the Arconia to grab a bottle of wine. Unfortunately for Sazz, who happens to be Charles’s on-screen stunt double, her uncanny resemblance to Charles proves fatal when someone shoots Sazz in the chest through a window.
As she lies dying on Charles’s kitchen floor, Sazz uses her own blood to scrawl a message. What will it say? No one knows yet … not even the show’s writers.
As for Shannon, Hulu is keeping details of her role under wraps for now, but according to Deadline’s sources, she’s believed to be playing “a high powered LA business woman who finds herself drawn into the world of the investigation in NY.”
Which cast members will return next season?
At the time of this writing, Shannon is the only new cast member to be added to the next 10-episode season. One thing we know one thing for certain is the show’s three main stars will return for season 4. Martin Short (also an SNL alum) will return as Oliver Putnam. Steve Martin (never an official cast member, but he’s appeared in nearly three dozen SNL episodes as host or special guest) will reprise his role as Charles, and Selena Gomez returns as Mabel Mora. Other regulars in the cast will also appear, including Michael Cyril Creighton as Howard, James Caverly as Theo, Jason Veasey as Jonathan, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Detective Dee Williams.
The jury is still out on whether Nathan Lane, who played Teddy Dimas, will appear in the new season (he sat out season 3 due to scheduling conflicts), and we never know when Tina Fey’s hilariously self-involved podcaster Cinda Canning will pop up, but here’s hoping! The only character we know for sure won’t return is, sadly, Paul Rudd’s Ben Glenroy. While he managed to be resurrected a few times during season 3, both in the storyline (how many characters get to die not once, but twice?) and in flashbacks, we’re pretty sure he’ll stay dead in the next season.
But there’s good news for Jane Lynch fans. Showrunner John Hoffman told The Hollywood Reporter that despite Sazz’s bloody demise in the Only Murders in the Building season 3 finale, she’ll be heavily featured in the next chapter, thanks to the beauty of flashbacks.
“We’ve loved writing Sazz so much, and that’s the beauty of the show is, you get a lot more time with the victims,” Hoffman said. “They’re not gone when some ill fate happens to them. And that’s, I think, also why Jane said she was excited because it’s a good opportunity to go deeper with Sazz and find out what the whole big life and everything else was with her and the world of stunt doubling.”
A new location for the action
At the end of season 3, Loretta Durkin (Meryl Streep) and Tobert (Jesse Williams) decide to part ways with the whole New York City scene and move to Los Angeles to find their fortune. Showrunners previously hinted that our fearless detectives might head to L.A. themselves while investigating Sazz’s murder, and Disney television group president Craig Erwich recently confirmed this fact in an interview with Deadline. The season will open in L.A., but rest assured that the gang will return to New York and The Arconia to solve the mystery.
Will the main characters get more time together this season?
The three separate storylines in season 3 found Mabel, Charles, and Oliver running in several different directions at once. Even Oliver notes the chaotic subplots at one point, pausing the action in season 3’s ninth episode to ask, “Can we just take a beat to appreciate how magical this is? The three of us, reunited at last, investigating as one?”
Hoffman acknowledged that elephant in the room in an interview with Variety, stating that it did “feel weird” to write the characters individually instead of as a crime-busting team, and he missed the dynamic the writers had created for the group.
“It was hard, and sometimes we missed it, so we’d create moments to keep it alive,” he explained. “And did we want the audience wanting that too? Absolutely. We just got picked up for season 4. So the room where we are now, having earned this understanding of themselves and what the trio means to them, feels like a great springboard into next season where they are back together fully on the case—and for good reason, because it feels pretty close to home.”
How long do we have to wait for more Only Murders goodness?
There’s no official release date for Only Murders in the Building season 4. So far, all of the seasons have dropped in the summertime, so hopefully, we’ll get new episodes in the summer of 2024. We’re looking forward to seeing who might join Shannon as a newcomer to the building this season!
(featured image: Hulu)
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