The first three episodes of Only Murders in the Building season 5 arrived on Hulu today and wasted no time reminding us why this series is such a reliable mix of mystery, humor, and eccentric New York character studies. Instead of easing back in, the show kicks things off with a death that feels both shocking and deeply personal: Lester, the Arconia’s longtime doorman, is found dead in the courtyard fountain. The police are quick to treat it as an accident, but Charles, Oliver, and Mabel are equally quick to disagree. From the start, the season frames Lester not as a side character but as someone central to the building’s history, the keeper of secrets who may have finally paid the price for knowing too much.
Lester’s funeral doubles as a political stage for Mayor Tillman, who awkwardly shoehorns campaign rhetoric into a eulogy, underscoring the season’s satirical edge. His widow Lorraine, played with quiet gravitas by Dianne Wiest, adds emotional weight and depth, showing how Lester’s life extended beyond his front desk duties. That grounding is essential because the show also begins to weave in bigger, bolder threads involving mobsters, billionaires, and hidden worlds beneath the Arconia.
Episode two leans more into these threads, fleshing out the mystery with new suspects and connections. Bobby Cannavale’s Nicky Caccimelio, a Brooklyn dry-cleaning magnate with mob ties, disappears just as Lester’s case heats up. Téa Leoni appears as his wife Sofia, whose brittle charm makes her feel like someone equally suspicious and sympathetic. At the same time, Mabel crosses paths with her old friend Althea, a character who brings personal tension into the mix and complicates Mabel’s already fraught relationship with the building’s social ecosystem. These character beats keep the mystery human, even as the scope expands outward into organized crime and the city’s political machinery.
By the third episode, the story escalates with the discovery of Nicky’s body at a laundromat. What initially seemed like a one-off tragedy with Lester now looks like part of a larger pattern, and Oliver stumbling into this second death underlines how the trio always end up knee-deep in danger whether they mean to or not. The Arconia itself once again reveals hidden layers, this time literally: beneath the building lies a secret underground casino. It’s here we meet a new crop of suspects, including Christoph Waltz’s Bash Steed, a slippery tech billionaire, Renée Zellweger’s icy real estate mogul Camila White, and Logan Lerman’s privileged heir Jay Pflug. Together they represent “new New York” wealth and power, a foil to the “old New York” mob-tinged secrets that Lester and Nicky’s deaths point toward.
What makes these opening episodes effective is the way they balance that larger-than-life scope with the series’ trademark humor and character interplay. Charles’s anxious quirks, Oliver’s theatrical flourishes, and Mabel’s dry pragmatism remain the beating heart of the show, ensuring that even as the mystery expands into billionaires and hidden casinos, the story always feels rooted in these three unlikely sleuths. The season also seems keenly aware of the city’s contrasts: loyalty versus opportunism, tradition versus reinvention, the intimacy of a building community versus the facelessness of wealth and power.
I like that these first three episodes immediately reestablish momentum and layer in enough suspects to fuel weeks of speculation. With Wiest lending poignancy, Cannavale and Leoni injecting mob drama, and Waltz and Zellweger playing up sinister billionaire vibes, season 5 feels both fresh and comfortingly familiar.
If these episodes are any indication, this season is aiming for its most ambitious mystery yet, a story that ties together the past and present of the Arconia, pits the old guard against the city’s power-hungry elite, and challenges Charles, Oliver, and Mabel to once again prove that no one unravels a murder quite like them.
Only Murders in the Building is now airing Tuesdays on Hulu.
