Mabel never treated the podcast as a job, but she is realizing she might have to, especially what with Oliver and Charles distracted by Death Rattle. Cinda Canning tries to entice Mabel to join her podcast production company, but only as a solo act. Mabel refuses out of loyalty. What is she going to do to survive then? asks Cinda. Mabel, recalling Kimber, answers: “I might sell kombucha. Or open boxes on YouTube. You know, do a side hustle.” Canning, ostensibly a villain, turns to Mabel with a checkbook and says, “What I’m offering is structure. A paycheck.” The scene is meant to be an instance of the little guy refusing to sell out to the cynical big-money operation, but I found that difficult to parse at first, because, watching it play out, I found myself thinking: Why can’t this happen to me?
Though Only Murders in the Building has never been didactic, and the murders are never explicitly social in nature, the work of detection often leads our three heroes down a path of forensic sociology. As they investigate the people around them, Charles, Oliver, and Mabel learn just how incapable of sustaining life their environment has become. In the first season, we see the super’s son wrongfully accused of a crime by a wealthy resident and encounter an elderly woman who has no social world outside of the co-op meeting. In Season 3, the show turns its attention to working actors struggling to make ends meet in New York City. Indeed, a recurring theme in Only Murders in the Building is that a person does not have to wind up dead to have come dangerously close to not making it.
Yet at the same time, the show, and this season in particular, is a rousing defense of why art matters and why we cannot afford to lose the people who make it, certainly not to murder—but also, more broadly, not to the exploitative labor conditions that SAG and the WGA are currently striking against. At one point, Mabel confides to Charles that she is getting emotional about Ben’s death because the only way she and her mother could communicate during a turbulent time in their relationship was by watching Girl Cop. They watched the show at the same time, in separate rooms, but would laugh at the same lines at the same time. Art is an essential bridge, and, in its latest season, Only Murders in the Building has chosen to cheer on the very people who bring the show to life, whose art organizes us into fandoms today, and who knows what tomorrow.