John Robert Hoffman makes comedy out of people who would rather be solving a murder than living their lives, and he is kinder to them than the joke requires. Only Murders in the Building is warm, funny and well dressed; the mysteries are the excuse.
Fi1m perspective
Three neighbours in an old block of flats on the Upper West Side, a body somewhere in the building, and the first thing any of them reaches for is a microphone. That is the joke at the centre of Only Murders in the Building (2021), which Hoffman created with Steve Martin, and it is a good one: the people who listen to true-crime podcasts would rather be in one. Charles has been living off a detective he once played on television. Oliver directed Broadway musicals until one sank him. Mabel is stripping wallpaper in her aunt's flat and would like to be left alone. The podcast is meant to be about the death. It turns out to be about the three of them.
Hoffman came to this by a roundabout route. He began as an actor, playing the Mad Hatter in the children's series Adventures in Wonderland in the early 1990s, moved to Los Angeles in 1991 and turned to writing. His first feature as writer and director was Good Boy (2003), a family comedy we have not reviewed. The work that formed him was television: writing and producing on Looking (2014), then several seasons writing, directing and producing Grace and Frankie (2015). Those years taught him to run a large cast and to move from a joke to a hurt without the join showing, and that is the skill Only Murders rests on.
His habit is to make each episode about one thing. He has said he likes to hold an episode in his hands and ask, "This is the episode that is about what?", and the best hours of Only Murders do exactly that, taking one neighbour and one loneliness and hanging the plot from it. We sat down to the first series expecting to want the killer and found, a few episodes in, that we had stopped counting suspects and were simply pleased whenever the three of them were in a room together. Martin and Short deserve much of the credit for that, and Gomez for stopping them running away with it, but it was Hoffman who decided the friendship was the story. The cost is the mystery. When the series is obliged to actually solve something, it becomes less interesting, and the solving is the least persuasive part of any given run.
Everything he has made since Good Boy has been television, and television suits him: the pleasures he deals in, company and repetition and people getting slowly used to each other, need weeks rather than a single evening. If he returns to features we will be curious whether the warmth survives without the neighbours. For now the recommendation is simple. If you want to know whodunit, look elsewhere; if you want somewhere to live for a few evenings, the Arconia will take you.
Biography
John Robert Hoffman is an American screenwriter, director, producer and former actor. He co-created the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building (2021–present) with Steve Martin, on which he also serves as writer, director and executive producer.
Hoffman began his career as an actor, appearing as the Mad Hatter in the Disney series Adventures in Wonderland (1992–1995). He wrote and co-starred in the Disney Channel film Northern Lights (1997) and made his feature directorial debut with Good Boy! (2003), which he also wrote. He contributed as a writer and producer to the HBO series Looking (2014–2015) and the Netflix series Grace and Frankie (2016–2022). Hoffman received a Primetime Emmy nomination for his work on the writing team of the 81st Academy Awards (2009).
He was born in Brooklyn, New York City.
