Only Murders in the Building - 2021. Disney+/Hulu
Dr. Death - 2021. Showcase/Peacock
Podcasts are mainstream at this point. Even the proverbial grandma who isn't hip to what's happening today knows that podcasts exist, even if they don't quite know how to access them. There's a podcast for everything, and it seems like a podcast from everyone. Do I have a podcast? (Our dear friend Jeremy tried to provoke Toast and I into turning this blog into a podcast, like, 10 years ago).
Comedy podcasts, for a long time, were the chart leaders, with political podcasts coming up closely behind. That all changed with Serial in 2014. Suddenly True Crime podcasts supplanted them both and started drawing in a whole new audience to the medium, one that wanted not to be entertained, but titillated with sensationalized stories. Over a half decade later and True Crime is still topping the charts.
Only Murders in the Building is not a podcast, but a TV show created by Steve Martin and John Hoffman, and starring Martin, with best friend Martin Short and Selena Gomez as an unlikely trio of True Crime podcast buffs who come together in their New York upscale condo building to investigate a death that happened there... and then create a podcast to document it all.
Martin plays Charles Hayden-Savage, a long out of work actor who starred in a semi-popular detective procedural ("Brazzos") for a few years in the 1990's (I'm disappointed in the show's restraint at not producing more "cut-to Brazzos" jokes). He's become a bit of a hermit and isolationist, without any real friends or family to speak of. He's a sad figure who seems to miss both being out in the world and connected to people, but also afraid to do so again. Short as Oliver Putnam, meanwhile, is his polar opposite: vociferously upbeat and outgoing, a producer/director of multiple failed broadway productions, and destitute despite his austere apartment (he subsides off of, specifically, dips). Gomez is Mabel Mora, a young woman who is fixing up her aunt's condo while she's living in Europe. Mabel is secretive and sardonic, deflecting most attempts at getting to know her, but endearing in her dark sense of humour. They are an unlikely trio to investigate what they think is a murder, and an even more unlikely trio to create content about it.
Rather than just being a whodunnit, Only Murders... is more interested in the when, whys, hows, and whats. They investigate fellow tenants (famous person Sting is among them), other incidents that may or may not be connected, plus personal connections get teased out. The podcast could have proven to be a wrong move on the creators choice, but the show handles the absurd production, distribution, commercialization and audience reaction quite well and basically Only Murders in the Building itself is structured largely as both parody and homage to True Crime journalism.
It's been a while since I watched anything with Steve Martin in it. His general tastes in stories that he wants to participate in (or get paid for participating in) aren't really my wheelhouse or demographic. Martin Short, on the other hand, is held up as a comedy legend, but one I've always found a little grating. The pair of them are longtime friends and collaborators and they clearly love working together. Here they start as virtual strangers, as noted quite opposite personalities, but they do form a bond, their shared background in show business, but also their loneliness bringing them together with similarly lonely Mabel. As much as the murder mystery pulls you through the show, it really works because of the connection these three characters form. Martin is both sympathetic and funny, every now and again edging into the goofier side of himself that made him famous so long ago, but also which he compartmentalized sometime around the turn of the millennium. Short is as aggressively extra as he always is, yet there's a potent undercurrent of pathos that really undercuts his more annoying predilections, as if to say he acts the way he does to hide the darkness within. Gomez I have limited experience with but her performance here is very understated and used well as a counterbalance for both Short and Martin. There are times I'm not sure about Gomez's performance only to discover that her behavour was intentional because of the hidden depths to Mabel that slowly get revealed.
There's some great guest stars in this - the aforementioned Sting, Nathan Lane as Oliver's benefactor/neighbour, Tina Fey as a celebrity True Crime podcaster of the Sarah Koenig mold, and a surprise late-stage appearance by Charles' stunt double that is best left as a surprise (but it's so great, and not just as a sight gag, but as a character, just fantastic). It's also not just celebrity guest stars, but smaller roles, like Mabel's mother or the group of "Only Murders in the Building" podcast fans, and of course the cadre of other tenants with their own quirky personalities that really make the show feel lived-in rather immediately.
The show also toys with format a little, and even gets daring with a brilliantly executed "silent" episode that focuses on Nathan Lane's son who is deaf, a contemporary of Mabel's. The episode is told from the perspective of Theo (played by actor James Caverly) and therefore largely silent with some audible percussive sounds. All the dialogue is inaudible and only if you're able to lip read do you know what is being said, you have to pick everything up from context. When Theo is signing with his dad, or others, that is subtitled, since it's from his perspective. It *could* be gimmick-y, but it definitely leans more towards empathetic than sensational or exploitative.
The show ends with resolution but also with a big, BIG set-up for season 2, but also a set up that is not just sprung on the audience but teased innocuously throughout the season. It's exciting to know there's more on the way. Streaming services almost made "appointment television" disappear, but Disney Plus (mainly with Marvel and Star Wars shows, but with surprises like this...I should note that Only Murders aired weekly in Canada, but I can't say how it was run in the US on Hulu) has really brought them back, to the point that I checked way too early every week for the new episode of Only Murders....
Dr. Death doesn't actually feature any podcasting within the show, instead it is based on a True Crime podcast of the same name. It was a podcast I heard a random trailer for and became rapidly intrigued because of how different it was. It wasn't so much a *murder* podcast, but one of medical malpractice, and of a system that allowed surgical butchering to happen to far too many people in far too many places.
The podcast ran in 2018 and presented over 6 episode a profile of Dr. Christopher Dunsch, giving voice to his victims, detailing the horrifying ineptitude of the procedures he performed, celebrated the two doctors who found the courage to speak out when no one else would, and scrutinize the industry norms that make it far too easy for someone like Dunsch to persist. He would bounce around from hospital to hospital, becoming someone else's problem, because any hospital reporting him would face liability lawsuits from the patients that were supposed to be under his care.
The TV miniseries (streamed on Peacock in the US this summer, airing weekly on Showcase in Canada this fall) places Joshua Jackson in the role of Dallas-area neurosurgeon Chris Dunsch, while Christian Slater and Alec Baldwin play Dr Randall Kirby and Dr Robert Henderson, two experienced neurosurgeons who encounter Dunsch's fallout and decide to do something about it, risking reputation, primarily, and possibly lawsuits in the process.
I recall the podcast being much harsher on Dunsch, whereas the TV show seems to take a lot of pains to try an understand him, at times even paint him as someone who struggles with his own intelligence. And that's the think, Chris is incredibly intelligent, but also incredibly egotistical as a result. He has a brilliant mind for medical thinking, but there's a blocker in his brain when it comes to spacial orientation and hand-eye coordination, among other things. It's a limitation he's blind to, and he has a stubborn tenacity to persevere through adversity, without ever seeing the true problem before him.
His brilliance also make him a borderline sociopath. He's completely incapable of registering any fault in his work, or accepting any blame for anything in his life. He explains away his botched surgeries with hand waving, deflection, or reassigning blame to staff or even patient. It's upsetting how nonchalantly he does this and Jackson is very good at showing the darting eyes as he spins his lies. For all his nefariousness, Chris can also be very, very charming, and it's another large part of the problem. His charm and smarts allow him to talk circles around his patients in such a casual demeanor as to push them past any doubts about him they may have. He manages to tap into that part of our nature that defers to authority, and he knows that if he talks a big enough game people will believe him... until they don't.
The cast of the show is wonderful. Slater, as the sarcastic and witty Kirby hasn't been this alive in a role in a long time. Balwin, for all his gameshow mugging and Trump impersonating, and 30 Rock-era Republican lampooning, returns with his former steely smolder and shows he still has the acting chops to hold focus and attention on screen, while still having a light touch when needed. The remainder of the sprawling cast are likewise great, imbuing a humanity into some small roles that represent real people. These are just archetypes or cliches, and the show adopts a lot of the text direct from the podcast for the scripts, putting the real emotions into place.
If there's a weakness to the proceedings it's the time-jumpy nature, where it bandies back and forth in time, and inconsistently so. The podcast did this too, but host Laura Bell managed to compartmentalize the episodes thematically and talk the audience through the different cases and the background information with relative simplicity. The show has a harder time keeping the audience's clear on where it is in its timeline (despite on-screen dates, which become a jumble of letters and numbers very quickly), especially as it relates to the medical cases and Dr.s Kirby and Henderson investigate and or try to get Dunsch shut down. Did Dunsch perform more surgeries even after Kirby and Henderson started intervening? I honestly couldn't tell you because of the show's structure (but I believe he did, which is terrifying).
The show seems built for the "drop-at-once" streaming methodology, it is an inherently bingeable watch. It's been painful watching it week to week because the hour, to hour and a quarter really fly by. It's captivating and upsetting, and while Dunsch is ultimately punished for his crimes (which isn't really a spoiler) there's a whole lot more people complicit in the situation that will continue within their prosperous careers, within a system that leeches upon the people who need them.
(Didn't know where to fit it in, but the composer on the series, Nick Chuba, also does a bang-up job).
Hey! I am aware of podcasts AND how to access them, I just don't listen to many of them. I try, and have enjoyed a few popular storytelling ones (just started watching the Amazon adaptation of Lime Town) but cannot get into it all really. D&D ones all seem hinged on comedy. Movie ones seemed often hinged on parroting back what they learned in school (got to get yer money's worth) or ... comedy. True Crime was never my thing.
ReplyDeleteBUT this show WAS. I will do my own write up of it, but even with its challenging and uneven aspects, I really REALLY enjoyed the week to week. I will mention Mabel's coat since you didn't ;)
The film podcasts I listen to, generally, don't sound like "film school parroting" but do tend to have some form of comedy relationship. I find that the film pcasts with a comedian or comedy-adjacent person involved smooths out the dryness that some film reviewers can have.
DeleteIf you want a film review podcast that has no comedy bent and is just about reviewing films, Lenoleum Knife is probably the one on in my list that best fits the bill. They're two guys, married to each other, who are professional film reviewers. They're delightful, in our sort of age range, have some nerdy predelections (Alonso is an old school comics fan, Dave is more of a horror guy) and review all kinds of movies. They don't do film school bullshit, but instead talk about what they do and don't like in a movie.
Their latest episode they talk about Dune, both 1984 and 2021. Also their episodes usually clock in at an hour or less.
Or it just may be that podcasts aren't your thing and you'd rather just read a book on transit or listen to music, and that's just fine too.
(My favourite film podcast currently is Blank Check, as referenced in the Carpenter 10-4-10. The barrier to entry is their 2+ hour long episodes, typically longer than the movie they're watching.
Host Griffin is an actor/comedian/film nerd (he played Arthur in the recent Tick series) and David is a film reviewer for The Atlantic. Their special guest each episode is usually another film reviewer. There are bits, but the show is really, really, really nerdy about films. They dive deep into the directors and actors of a film, trivia about the film and the people involved, and pick apart what they like and don't like (Griffin zones in a lot on story structures, how thing could have worked better, kind of like how we do). It's kind of "expert level" podcasting, not introductory lol).
I've never much gotten into the storytelling or scripted story podcasts. I'm almost done the Orphan Black one (as read by Tatiana Maslani), but that seems like a book on tape more than, like, a radio show.