‘Only Murders in the Building’ Co-Creator Unpacks the Season 5 Finale, the ‘Origin Story’ Coming With the Season 6 Victim and Why the Show Is Moving to London
SPOILER ALERT: This interview contains spoilers for the Season 5 finale of “Only Murders in the Building.”
Just in time for early voting in New York City, some news has come out about the mayor. He’s a murderer.
The mayor in “Only Murders in the Building,” that is. Season 5 of “Only Murders in the Building” concludes with the reveal of Mayor Beau Tillman (Keegan-Michael Key) as the killer of the Arconia doorman, Lester (Teddy Coluca).
The episode opens with Mabel (Selena Gomez), Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Teddy Dimas (Nathan Lane) confronting Sofia Caccimelio’s (Téa Leoni) mother about why she stole the mysterious finger out of Charles’ freezer. Since they first found the finger in a shrimp tower Oliver had ordered for his wedding, and they recently learned that Lester urgently ordered Randall (Jermaine Fowler) to deliver the shrimp right before he died even though the wedding was over, they believed Lester had sent them the finger as a clue. Sofia’s mother implies that the finger belonged to someone Sofia was sleeping with, so the trio lures billionaires Jay Pflug (Logan Lerman), Bash Steed (Christoph Waltz) and Camila White (Renée Zellweger) to the secret poker room in the Arconia basement to try to get some answers.
Courtesy of Disney/Patrick Harbron
Jay removes the bandages on his hand, Bash removes his ring and Charles checks Sofia’s gloves, proving that none of them are hiding that they’re missing a finger. But soon, Mayor Tillman enters the room. At the same time, Howard (Michael Cyril Creighton) sends Mabel a text saying, “Someone’s coming down. It’s Beautiful.” Then he adds, “Sorry, autocorrect. It’s Beau Tillman.” Mabel remembers that Teddy texted his wife “It’s Beautiful” moments before he died, and realizes what he was trying to say.
Tillman confesses, saying that the billionaires invite him to the Arconia game room whenever they need a favor, in this case a permit to replace the Arconia with a casino. In a flashback, we see the night of their last game, when Nicky Caccimelio (Bobby Canavale), who ran the secret gambling nights, realized that Tillman was sleeping with Sofia, his wife. He chopped off Tillman’s finger with a cleaver in a drunken, coke-fueled rage, and Lester intervened, stopping Nicky by hitting him with his elevator crank and threatening to go to the police. Nicky, stumbling and slurring, ends up putting the cleaver in Lester’s hands before falling on top of him — and on top of the cleaver, killing Nicky. While Tillman and the billionaires discuss what to do, Lester grabs Tillman’s finger and the elevator crank and runs.
Tillman runs after Lester, who has already hidden the finger. After decades of feeling guilty for working for Nicky, Lester is desperate for the truth to come out and refuses to give the finger back, despite Tillman’s pleas about his humble beginnings and how hard he worked to become mayor. Realizing Tillman is going to kill him, Lester realizes that the Arconia’s only security camera not owned by Bash is his bird camera in the courtyard. He runs grabs his bird whistle and runs outside, saying, “My friends are gonna catch you.” “You don’t have friends. You have tenants. No one cares about the damn doorman,” Tillman replies. As they struggle, Lester drops his whistle in the fountain and gets in the water to grab it, but Tillman pushes him into a sharp stone corner in the center and runs away. As Lester begins to bleed out, he blows his bird whistle to trigger the camera, which records the video that was revealed earlier in the season of Randall finding the elevator crank in the coutyard.
Courtesy of Disney/Patrick Harbron
The dirty cops Charles discovered earlier in the season chain up Mabel, Charles and Oliver in the secret passage Mabel previously found off the game room. Since the Arconia is about to be demolished to make room for the casino, they’ll die if they don’t escape. But Charles manages to climb up the pole he’s chained to, grabbing a clothes hanger from Nicky Caccimelio’s dry cleaning business above them, and uses it to pick the locks on their handcuffs. At the same time, in the Arconia lobby, Thé (Beanie Feldstein) crashes Camila’s press conference about the casino by announcing an impromptu concert in the game room, pushing past the crooked cops and bringing everyone downstairs. Mabel, Charles and Oliver emerge from the passageway and reveal Tillman as a murderer in front of all the press. Then Jay confesses to the police that he, Camila and Bash were involved in the cover-up — ruining the casino plans and saving the Arconia. He tells Mabel he’s probably not a good person, but that he thinks he’s different from the others.
As the episode ends, Mabel, Charles and Oliver get together to listen to a new London-set podcast by Cinda Canning (Tina Fey), the true crime savant who inspired their first-ever murder mystery together. In it, Canning describes “a young woman with curls as red as blood,” the prime suspect in the murder of a royal descendant, though Cinda believes her to be innocent. “I feel a strong need to protect her, to send her to America, which may be the only place she can be safe,” she says. As Cinda’s voice plays, we see a woman with curly red hair from behind. She runs down a New York City street while coughing and almost collapsing and with her hands covered in blood. She falls down in front of the Arconia, then crawls closer to the building, stopping right in front of the gate.
As Charles, Oliver and Mabel approach the gate, Howard tells them what he saw — then tells them she doesn’t qualify to be investigated in their podcast since she didn’t technically make it all the way to the gate. The woman, with a final gasp, puts her hand through the gate, turns over and dies. It’s Cinda.
Courtesy of Disney/Patrick Harbron
“Only Murders in the Building” co-creator and showrunner John Hoffman spoke with Variety about writing a murderous mayor, an aspirational billionaire and a dead true crime legend.
Now that you can talk through all of it, please explain how you arrived at the idea to have Lester kill Nicky and then Tillman kill Lester.
It was a big dance. Always, we have to start with what really happened and twist our way there, understanding Lester as the victim and what themes we were wanting to go into. The dance of power and the unexpected nature of a doorman being put in a position to feel a sense of protection for the people in his building. When things get out of control, the buildup of his relationship with Nicky Caccimelio and all of those things come into a head on this one night with every character in that gaming parlor. We had to really build histories as to what brought all of them to that point, and that’s oftentimes what happens when any crime occurs. The most dimensional, emotional, high-pitched moments just come together — if it’s not a (premeditated) murder. It’s built on in-the-moment passion.
Courtesy of Disney/Patrick Harbron
Why did you choose Tillman as the murderer this season? What was on your mind as you put the mayor of New York City at the center of your murder mystery?
The ways he’s played the game with with the powers that be in New York, and the sidesteps he’s needed to make, getting paid off (by rich people) — these kinds of things are unfortunately pretty prevalent in big cities. We did not plan to have the (real-life) mayoral election happening. I did not really figure that that would be happening as the finale dropped, but it’s intriguing to me that it did.
This is what his life is made up of and who he’s dealing with, and then there’s the big complication of his affair with Sophia Caccimelio. Obviously, he was very haughty that night, being in his full power knowing what those three billionaires were wanting from him. He was the man in control — until he lost a finger because of a bad move in his personal life. Once that happens, everything becomes magnified. “I need that finger. I can’t let it out what happened.” So those billionaires help him and cover it up and literally repair a finger. And he goes to Lester’s wake — it’s odd that he’s making an appearance there, and yet he’s doing it with the purpose of making cover for himself.
I found it really moving, the negotiation he has with Lester in that lobby, talking about his own father and finding the connections between two people in different spheres, but one rogue finger can bring it all down. It’s absolutely maddening to him. “This guy who’s a simple doorman is not going to end my career. I won’t let it happen.” And the night has gone off the off the rails anyway, so he goes a bit off the rails too.
Disney
It’s moving how determined Lester is to do the right thing when he could have just looked the other way like he’s been doing for decades and saved his own life.
There was a scene we shot that I would have loved to have kept in this this episode, but we have a very limited amount of time: It’s the photo from earlier in the season of Lester at Oliver’s wedding, and he’s having a good time, and Nicky comes out. He’s saying, “I need you to deal for me tonight.” And Lester’s like, “I’m done. Never. I’m not going anywhere near you anymore.” And Nicky actually says, “You come deal for me tonight, and you are done. I’ll let you go.” That’s why Lester went down there.
The billionaires already don’t come off well after their schemes to replace the Arconia with a casino, and then we find out they helped Mayor Tillman cover up Nicky’s and Lester’s deaths. Why did you decide to set Jay apart from the other two with his confession to the police and his words to Mabel?
Gosh, wouldn’t that be nice? I look at this the way the world is going, and you have less and less people with much more distilled power, and it’s very frustrating. When there is that much wealth and power, I just long for one of them to step up and confront and make the right choice and and reverse things. Mabel keeps asking, “Are you a good person? I don’t know if you’re a good person,” and it’s making him reflect in a way that he’s never really had to before. So on the personal level, that’s what’s going on. But on a more global level, it would be lovely if we had a few more of those people with great wealth and power to make a call that is for the greater good. So it’s absolutely yes. As Mabel says, “If you want to make the world a better place, stop making it worse.”
Courtesy of Disney/Patrick Harbron
What themes are you going to be exploring in Season 6 with the murder of Cinda Canning?
Season 5 really brought it home: The meaning of that building and their home and New York itself was very much explored in this season, so (we had) this idea that of taking it back to an origin story with Cinda being what brought them all together. Their fandom of her and her podcast was how it all started. And then taking it to (London), the origin of of mystery writing. Fiction-meets-true crime storytelling and podcasting became really intriguing to me, to mix those two worlds. It’s the land of Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle combined with our podcasters and what they’ve been successful with. Marrying those things in the place where the cozy murder mystery began felt really intriguing.
It’s a full-circle moment to kill off Cinda, especially with the conversation as the finale ends about whether her murder counts as “in the building.” Should we take this as a hint that Season 6 will be the end of the show?
The only way I look at the ending of this series is when we’re genuinely out of turns that take us into deeper territory. If (Disney says), “Enough is enough! Get out of here,” and, or if, our cast is done — I think we’re all gaming this and seeing how embraced we remain. I think we all want to be conscious about when the ending is, and whether that’s a situation that ends in London or ends in New York, is another question. So we’ll see.
You’re writing a new season now, so you’re clearly not out of ideas. As of this moment, would you still want to make a seventh season?
Full speed ahead. I’d be an idiot to walk away from this one. It’s been the most rare bird experience — not to bring up birds again, because you’ve had enough of those over this last season. But it’s rare air to have an opportunity like this with the with the people we get to work with and to love it as much as we all do. Who knows? It may be this season; it may be next; it may be somewhere down the road.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
প্রকাশিত: 2025-10-29 04:51:00
উৎস: variety.com
