Only Victory Laps in the Building

I’m behind in my TV watching, so I’m only just now catching up with the new season of Only Murders in the Building. What an absolute delight of a show; what a joy to watch a cast full of old pros turning out the best work of their careers.

There are a lot of pleasures to this show, not the least of which is finding out that Selena Gomez is the real third Amigo.

But in many ways, it’s a career victory lap for a whole group of comic actors, More creative people should get to do a victory lap like this—not a greatest hits tour, but a final showcase of everything they’ve learned how to do over their careers, a best possible version of everthing they’ve ever done.

(As an aside, the all-time best victory lap is still David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, which spends 18 episodes moving through a riff on just about every movie he’s ever made with long stops at both Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, an experimental movie about the atomic bomb, all full of actors he’s worked with before or wanted to ork with and never had a chance to, before turning out a surprisingly satisfying Twin Peaks movie. More people should get one of these.)

While the cast is stuffed full of old pros (Andrea Martin! Nathan Lane! Jane Lynch! Tina Fay!) the centerpiece of course is the pair of Steve Martin and Martin Short.

Both Steve Martin and Martin Short have their respective personas they’ve mostly stuck with over the last 40 years—Steve Martin as a self-important blowhard who’s not nearly as important as he thinks he is, and Martin Short swinging from frantic/neurotic to unhinged. Here, though, they play mostly in the same space, but let their age add some extra notes. Steve Martin plays this particular blowhard with a deep sadness in his eyes, as if he can’t quite muster the energy to keep up the act, but doesn’t have anything else to fall back on.

Martin Short is the absolute standout, though. He does his array of wacky antics and neuroses, but adds a weight to all of it. On the surface, “Oliver Putnam” is a Martin Short character, but weighed down by decades of failure, a character who is just self-aware enough to be unhappy, but not self-aware enough to be able to do anything about it. It’s everything he’s ever done before, but better than you’ve ever seen it, refined to absolute diamond purity. It’s an absolute masterclass in comic acting and character work.

And this year, he manages to take it up even further, more than holding his own against Meryl Streep of all people, conclusively proving how good he’s been all along.

So, hypothetically speaking of course, if a big web outlet whose name rhymed with Plate asked me for a 1500 word hit piece on my choice of the cast of OMITB, for most of them I can kind of see what shape such a hit piece would take. I wouldn’t agree with any of this, mind you, but I can see how you would do it. Steve Martin—“been doing the same schtick for 40 years!” Selena Gomez—“Disney Channel go home!” Nathan Lane—“should have stayed in animation!” Paul Rudd—“go back to ant man!” Even with Meryl Streep you could do something like “let someone else have a turn!” But Martin Short? I wouldn’t even know where to start with that one. He’s always been good in everything. The bad movies he’s been in, and he’s been in quite a few, he’s always the best part. Even Clifford, which might legitimately be the worst movie I’ve ever seen, is the kind of bad that required an actual genius to just completely take the governor off. The thing he does with his face when Charles Groden shouts “look at me like a real human boy!” is pure art.

Anyway. The good news is that everyone has been sharing their favorite Martin Short bits, which mostly means a whole bunch of Jiminy Glick I hadn’t seen. A perfect Martin Short character, deeply weird, very silly, willing to make himself look very stupid, and a masterclass in improv… combat, basically?

The best part about the Glick bits was the way Martin Short was blatantly trying to crack up the people he was interviewing, and he’d just continue escalating until they broke. And I’d love to know what the behind-the-scenes of filming these was like, because when they start the guest always has this stunned look on their face that seems to say “I was just talking to Marty, and then he just turned this on.”

So I’ll take this opportunity to leave you with a couple of my favorites:

Nathan Lane, who tries hard at first to roll with whats happening and then gets completely sideswiped.

Stephen Spielburg, who also does pretty well, until Short hits him with something that cracks up the crew and then just gives up and surrenders to the flow.

Alec Baldwin, who is one of the very few people to manage to wrestle away control and then do his own material for a minute or two, to Short’s obvious delight. A couple big laughs from the crew in this one.

Also, go watch Innerspace.