ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING opened its third season last week. I've written about the show a few times before. (Okay, more than few times. It's a great great show.)
One of the show's signatures is its use of narration. The first season opens with a moment given to each of the three characters which reveals their own unique takes on the universe. In the current season, Steve Martin's character Charles-Haden Savage narrates not his own story, but that of a new character, an actress who was smitten by Broadway as a child and then worked her ass for decades to make her own mark, without success.
As is always the case on MURDERS, it's a beautifully written narration. So often when a show regularly uses narration, most of it ends up just going in one ear and out the other. But MURDERS really works. And I think the key is that its narration actually matches what we're seeing. Whereas say on GREY'S ANATOMY, Meredith may be dropping some wisdom but what we're being shown is I don't know, people waking up, people hurrying to work, people have uncomfortable (or very comfortable) moments on elevators, here we're watching a little girl fall in love with Broadway as Charles is talking about how people who love the theater usually fall in love early. So we're getting his mysterious character's version of that. (And it's such a lovely scene—the girl who can't see sneaking right up to the stage to watch. Remember that, because we're going to come back to it...)
Then as Charles says, "Once smitten though, then comes the work," we watch her as an older kid, as a young woman, etc., trying to make it happen. And Charles tells us what the dream is, in a really specific and poetic fashion—to have that moment in the spotlight and have someone "really see you, and say those magic words, 'Where you have been?'"
And he follows with a question: "But what if those magic words never come?...How do you keep at it with any hope?", as we watch her facing an endless series of rejections.
We haven't even met this character yet formally, and yet we know everything need to about her. We know her dream, we know her journey, and we know her problem. It's a perfect set up.
But that's only the first half of the opening. The second half shows that character, Loretta Durkin now revealed to be Meryl Streep (it's a wonderful choice to keep that bit of information back until now), auditioning for a role in Oliver Putnam's new play. And it basically mirrors the structure of the first half.
First, we get the audition, the moment in which Loretta has suffered so many rejections. Then, we get Oliver, stunned by Loretta's performance, walking down the aisle to the stage, just like she did as a child, and with the same kind of awe. And as she finishes her monologue, she looks toward Oliver, just as the actress on stage looked at her (by the way, that's supposed to be Diahann Carroll, performing in "No Strings," Richard Rodgers' first musical after Oscar Hammerstein died, and also the first musical to involve an interracial romance). And he stares at her, and says "Where have you been?"
It's a perfect short story, in and of itself.
But writers John Hoffman & Sas Goldberg aren't done. Because there's one more beat to the structure of the first half: the "But ...." question that Charles poses. In the first half it's what if you never get what you wanted; in the second, what if you do. "But when you finally do land your dream, your moment in that spotlight, how far would you go to hang on to it?"
It transforms the fairy tale into something darker—or maybe changes it from a Disney fairy tale to something produced by Grimm (or Sondheim). An entrance into murky woods. Which is what you want at the start of a season of television: not something tied up in a bow, but a question, a mystery, a dilemma.
As writers, I think there's lots we can learn here. There's the way the writers on the show construct the narration, the way it matches the story and also adds a layer of emotion and later, mystery.
There's that mirroring of structure. An audience might not even notice that, but in a sense it doesn't matter. As I've written here before, great craft naturally produces a feeling of satisfaction. And even if an audience does see it, it still surprises because it ends not on the happy resolution we expect but on the further question.
Finally, related to structure, there's the choice of beats the writers present. They strip the story back to its purest form: The performance and walk to the stage; the dream with the line "Where have you been?"; the auditions and rejection; and the end question. It's so clean it seems simple, but in fact I'd guess it's the product of many rounds of editing. So often that's the key to a great script, editing and editing and editing. Editing is distillation.
Two Other Notes:
What a great choice to let Oliver be a really tremendous director. All we've ever seen or heard suggests he is a disaster; to see him really locked in like this gives a whole other layer for the show and Martin short to play with.
Also, how great is it that Loretta's monologue is all about whether or she's capable or murdering someone. Every single moment in a script is real estate, and it's all so fucking precious. The writers could have given her some other kind of monologue that also demonstrated her talent, but why do just that when you can also be building out other aspects of your story.
For me, it's a key writing lesson that my profs would talk about at UCLA. You want every moment in your script to be serving at least two different ends.
