Steve Martin

In Only Murders in the Building (2021) Steve Martin wears a blazer he never undoes. Charles-Haden Savage played a television detective once and has been dining out on it for decades, and Martin plays him buttoned, lonely and faintly ridiculous, letting each of those through a little at a time. Beside him Martin Short cannot say good morning without blocking it. The man whose stand-up act ran on absurdity now stands still and gives Short the scene, and it is the best decision the series makes.

He began as a writer, on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1967 and 1968, and he has written most of what he has done since: the stand-up, the screenplays, plays, books. The routines of the 1970s came out of a question he set himself: "What if there were no punch lines? What if there were no indicators? What if I created tension and never released it?" The Jerk (1979), which he co-wrote, put that stage character on film. Carl Reiner directed him four times, and All of Me (1984) is the one built on his physical comedy. Then he started writing gentler things for himself: Roxanne (1987) balances the farce against a man worth caring about, and Bowfinger (1999) puts him opposite Eddie Murphy in a Hollywood satire he wrote himself.

The turn came in the late 1980s. Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) sat him beside John Candy on a long road home and let the sentiment in, and Father of the Bride (1991) made him a father whose worrying was the joke. He was good at warm, and the films kept asking for it. The Pink Panther (2006) and the Cheaper by the Dozen films have a reputation for running the same formula again, and we will not argue with it.

Which is why Only Murders in the Building is such a relief. He and John Hoffman built it on a small, true observation, that people who listen to true-crime podcasts would rather be in one, and he gave himself the one of the three who most needs the company. He and Short have performed together for years and the ease shows. We expected to laugh at Charles and found we felt for him instead, a man in a tidy beige flat still living off a part he played decades ago, and it was Martin's refusal to ask for the sympathy that earned it. Selena Gomez, deadpan and watchful, stops the two of them running off with it. As a whodunnit it sits closer to Murder, She Wrote than to Christie, and that is not a complaint.

A comedian who set out to build tension and never release it has ended up in a mystery series where the murders hardly matter. Take it an episode a night. He is in no hurry, and there is no reason you should be.