Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Hulu began releasing Only Murders in the Building’s new season (its fourth) a couple of days ago, so the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is “Son of Sam (The Tell)” from Siddhartha Khosla’s score to the 2022 OMITB episode “The Tell.”

The This Is Us composer, who has a wordless cameo as the pianist at a Hollywood party in this week’s fourth-season premiere, did an enjoyable ’70s version of his theme for Oliver for the scene where Oliver imagines himself and everyone else in ’70s outfits at a party he crashes to try to trick Alice, Mabel’s pretentious artist love interest, into confessing that she killed the elderly and cantankerous Bunny Folger. (Spoiler: She didn’t kill Bunny.) I recently found out that Khosla was inspired by the Beach Boys, Donovan, and the Beatles when he came up with the bouncy chords that evolved into OMITB‘s main title theme, and now I can’t stop seeing some similarities between the theme and the Beach Boys’s “God Only Knows.” Meanwhile, “Son of Sam (The Tell)” makes me think of O.C. Smith’s “Blowin’ Your Mind,” the main title theme from Shaft’s Big Score! (The exclamation mark isn’t me shouting like Billy Mays. It’s part of the film’s title.)

Real-life best friends Steve Martin and Martin Short love to insult each other, whether in interviews (my favorite Short character is Jiminy Glick, and Glick’s amusing and completely improvised interviews with Martin from Short’s period when he tried twice to be a talk show host will get you stuck in a Glick rabbit hole on YouTube) or during their 2017 comedy tour, which was captured by music video director Marcus Raboy in the solid 2018 Netflix special Steve Martin and Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life. Their filmography together is a mixed bag: John Landis’s Three Amigos! was frequently imitated on my school’s playground when it was in theaters in 1986, but in 2024, it’s a dated white savior movie. (However, its songs by Randy Newman, who co-wrote the movie with Martin and Lorne Michaels and came up with Martin’s favorite joke in the script—El Guapo opening a birthday gift from his henchmen and cheerfully saying, “It’s a sweater!”—are still some of the best he composed for film.) The Father of the Bride remake is okay, but I never watched Father of the Bride Part II, especially because it had the non-Arab Eugene Levy playing an Arab stereotype. That’s one of the reasons why I was late to OMITB. I assumed it was going to be another Martin/Short project where I’d have to sit through racist shit or retrograde junk just to enjoy the chemistry between Martin and Short. I was dead wrong (no pun intended).

OMITB, which Martin co-created with showrunner John Hoffman, a writer from Looking and Grace and Frankie, is the most entertaining (and least cringey) project Martin and Short have starred in together. Short insults Martin at least once in every episode, and it’s always charming, of course. (Charles’s idea of adding a twee concertina to the original score for the podcast-within-the-show in “How Well Do You Know Your Neighbors?” causes Oliver to quip, “You are scoring a murder mystery, not DJing a hobbit’s wedding,” and “It transports me back to 1800s Ireland. I feel like I’m in the middle of the potato famine.”) I’ve never seen Selena Gomez act before. As Mabel, she’s a great straight woman to Martin’s antics as Charles, an introverted old man who refers to texts as “text communications,” and Short’s shtick as a self-absorbed theater director who makes the worst career choices, a familiar type of showbiz character that hearkens back to Short’s days on SCTV, the legendary sketch comedy show where everything that the likes of Jackie Rogers Sr., Sammy Maudlin, and Lola Heatherton touched turned to shit. Oliver would also fit right in with the vain or ditzy Angelenos in Martin’s screenplays for L.A. Story and Bowfinger. He’s like a Broadway version of those characters.

It’s a relief to have a crime series on TV where none of the lead characters are cops. They’re instead true-crime podcasters—one of whom is an actor who used to play a genius cop on a CBS procedural. I spent the last week getting caught up on OMITB so that the fourth season will be the first OMITB season I watch as it’s being released weekly on Hulu. OMITB‘s first season was a lot of fun. The second season had some low points (I’d rather eat a glass lumpia than sit through a guest appearance by Amy Schumer), and I know Season 2 was despised by this site’s comments section while certain parts of it were criticized by Scalawag, but for me, the chemistry between Martin, Short, and Gomez (and I would add to that trio future Oscar winner Da’Vine Joy Randolph whenever she would reprise her role as Detective Williams) made Season 2 worthwhile.

I was a fan of the 2016 one-season wonder Pitch, which was co-created by OMITB co-executive producer Dan Fogelman, whose hit show This Is Us never interested me. Pitch, which has vanished from streaming, starred Kylie Bunbury as the MLB’s first woman pitcher, Mark Consuelos in a career-best turn as the San Diego Padres GM who takes a chance on her, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar in a career-best turn as the aging Padres catcher who mentors the ceiling-breaking pitcher through a tumultuous rookie year. (The late-in-the-season scene where Gosselaar’s character receives a standing ovation from the entire stadium on his final day as a catcher will leave you with a lump in your throat.) Consuelos, best known these days for Riverdale and co-hosting Live with Kelly and Mark, guest-starred in OMITB‘s second season as Mabel’s deceased, X-Files-loving dad, and his dramatic guest turn kept making me think, “God, Pitch didn’t deserve to get pulled from the game by Fox.”

OMITB‘s third season contained the show’s funniest episode so far, which I first watched three days ago: “The White Room,” in which Charles’s lack of stage experience—all he knows is how to act on CBS procedurals—horrifies the cast and crew of Death Rattle Dazzle, the musical-within-the-show Oliver hopes will be his ticket out of director’s jail. (“Entering the White Room,” which Charles repeatedly experiences in “The White Room,” is actual theater lingo I didn’t know about prior to the episode, and Broadway pianist Seth Rudetsky defined it as the feeling that “there is nothing but whiteness around you. Nothing to grab onto” when you forget your lines on stage.) I don’t like musical theater, but I liked Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and OMITB‘s third season was just as funny and imaginative as Crazy Ex. Season 3 was very “Mathnet solves a mystery in the Broadway theater world.”

The fourth season moves from Broadway to Hollywood, where a Paramount exec played by Molly Shannon has a meeting with Charles, Oliver, and Mabel because she wants to greenlight a buddy comedy flick based on their podcast, but the trio’s trip to Hollywood is cut short by yet another murder back home at the Arconia. (There’s a possibility that the murder is a hoax. We don’t see the victim’s corpse, and I have a feeling that the victim is still alive somewhere.) “Once Upon a Time in the West,” the season premiere, is named after a spaghetti western I loved since I was 16, when it was in rotation on Bravo—back when the channel, an unwatchable reality TV trash heap since the birth of the Real Housewives franchise in 2006, was a home to artsy movies and Twin Peaks reruns. Now this shit is what I’m really into: OUATITW, not show tunes. Ennio Morricone became my favorite film composer mostly because of the brilliant score he wrote for Once Upon a Time in the West—a score Sergio Leone played back on the set so that Henry Fonda, Charles Bronson, and Claudia Cardinale could mean-mug perfectly in time to the music. John Carpenter, an OUATITW fan, used Morricone’s theme for Cardinale’s character as wedding ceremony music when he got hitched to Adrienne Barbeau.

Charles falls asleep while watching on TV OUATITW‘s legendary opening credits sequence and later gushes about the 12-minute sequence (seven of those minutes are the credits) in the season premiere’s closing narration (“Once you see it, you never forget it”). OUATITW‘s opening sequence contains no music or dialogue. It doesn’t even flash the film’s title. (OUATITW was one of the earliest films that delayed showing the film’s title until the very end, a thing that is now common in present-day blockbusters.) The sequence is just three outlaws—two of whom were nicely played by Woody Strode and Jack Elam, while the third guy, Al Mulock, who died before OUATITW was released, was merely okay—waiting for a train to arrive. Strode’s character stands under a water tower that leaks and puts on his hat to keep the tower’s water from dripping down his face. Elam’s character gets annoyed by a fly that interrupts his nap, so he attempts to trap it. It’s marvelous. Younger generations can’t stand this sequence. I saw younger moviegoers walk out of OUATITW as the film wore on when I rewatched it in a theater in the late ’00s. Fuck them. OUATITW is too offbeat for these folks who would rather watch The Bachelorette on their phones. Fuck the Bachelorette franchise.

I wonder if the OUATITW opening contains a clue or two to the season’s new mystery, but Season 4 has already won me over by including clips from it.

Today’s prompt: OMITB didn’t experience a sophomore slump, while a lot of shows have. What are some of the worst sophomore slumps you sat through as a viewer? Jaime Weinman considered The Rockford Files‘s second season to be “probably the weakest season — co-creator Roy Huggins gave the younger co-creator, Stephen J. Cannell, more control, and Cannell miscalculated by making Rockford too much of a luckless schlemiel in some episodes. The ratings went down… But Cannell recognized the mistakes and got the show back on track in the third season, with the help of writer-producer Juanita Bartlett and a new addition to the writing staff, David Chase.” For me, it was either Mork & Mindy‘s disastrous second season or Human Target‘s second and final season under a new showrunner who thought naming a new main character “Ilsa Pucci”—after Poochie the Dog—would be a cute joke about network exec interference, but it failed to distract me from how much of a mistake the new character was.