Hey guys, remember podcasts? It’s like radio, except you can listen to episodes of your favorite show whenever you want! Haha! Well, septuagenarians Steve Martin and Martin Short know about podcasts, and they also know about murder, so they combined the two like peanut butter and jelly and made us all a murder mystery show! Even if it did debut seven years after Serial came out! Even if it did debut five years after Serial‘s peak popularity! Whatever, it takes a while to make a show, you guys.

The Premise

Steve Martin plays Charles Haden-Savage, a washed-up TV actor who starred in his own ’90s Kojak-like detective show Brazzos. Martin Short plays Oliver Putnam, a washed-up Broadway director who is basically just 70-year-old Martin Short. Martin Short plays himself. Selena Gomez is Mabel Mora, a young woman living in her aunt’s apartment while she works on renovating it. She says “fuck” a lot, breaking away from the squeaky clean Disney Channel upbringing that likely screwed her mind up significantly and permanently. Their shared love of the same murder-themed podcast brings them together, and a mysterious murder in the apartment building that they share only brings them even togetherererer. Hilarity and antics ensue. Martin Short often raises his voice flamboyantly. Steve Martin acts like kind of a dumb guy. Selena Gomez is visibly unhappy that she has to spend a lot of time with two men who are forty years older that her. Nathan Lane is in it too, he’s the best part of the show!

Cower, my friends, in the intimidating presence of Nathan Lane.

My Half-Baked Thoughts

I unironically really like Martin Short, only kind of like Steve Martin, and I couldn’t care less much about Selena Gomez. I tried to imagine Chevy Chase playing a role in this and I couldn’t picture it whatsoever. Never mind the fact that Chevy Chase is Hollywood’s Biggest Asshole Whom Nobody Wants to Work With Anymore and, Frankly, Nobody Would Mind if He Just Keeled Over and Died Tomorrow Following a Fentanyl Overdose (Laced with Heroin and Crushed-Up Sweet Tarts), but he also looks like Dick Cheney now and nobody wants to see that face on their TV screens anymore. They’d shoot their sets like Elvis.

The show’s plot, though, I’m a bit lukewarm over it. I’m not much of a murder mystery kinda guy in the first place, and I’m not particularly interested the kind of investigative reporting that gets packaged as a 20/20 or Dateline special, or a podcast series. Usually, my morbid curiosity of these kinds of stories begins and ends at a Wikipedia article. FOR INSTANCE, I’d rather read about the whole JonBenét Ramsey thing than hear someone talk at me about it! That one’s a real humdinger, though. Absolutely nothing about it makes any sense STILL after over 25 years! It’s insane.

Our three heroes meet in the elevator. From this point, the plot thickens like so much starchy gravy.

However, plot aside and all the various twists and turns therein, there’s much that I did enjoy to make it all worth it in the end. The relationship dynamics among the characters, specifically between Oliver Putnam and literally anybody Oliver Putnam came into contact with, were tremendously entertaining. Clearly, the old guys stole the show. Steve Martin’s strengths with playing the straight man, undercut by occasional moments of absurdity, reach the climax in the season finale when he lumbers around on his back during his gas leak-addled urgency. Martin Short is just as cartoonish as he always is, yelling like an easily frustrated lunatic. Both these guys have aged well into their schticks, having based their respective comedy careers on the “young guy acting like a complete idiot” character. Now they’re old guys acting like complete idiots and it suits them well.

Speaking of old guys stealing the show, the constant references to Sting were fantastic. What was it, episode four or five, where they actually questioned him in his apartment to rule him out as a suspect? I would have lost my shit if they circled back around to him, nabbing him as the killer all along. Also, in real life. We can’t rule out that Sting didn’t fucking murder someone back in the ’70s.

Tim Kono is dead, and the Chief of the Police is a suspect!

Oh yeah, and Amy Ryan, aka Beadie Russell from The Wire, aka Holly Flax from The Office, aka Jan the unassuming bassoonist from Only Murders in the Building, she does a good job of playing a role that reminds me exactly of my own grandmother. Right down to the pleasant smile and the homicidal tendencies! Haha, but I kid! Hey, there’s a spoiler for you. Shouldn’t have read this, should you?

Worth the Watch?

I will watch Season 2 if none of these actors dies by then! I went into this show expecting fluff, and that’s exactly what I got. It did the job.

If you like murder podcasts or Dateline specials, you’ll like this more than I did. I was only in it for the funny joke-abouts.