When we last left Hulu’s hit comedy Murders in the Building, viewers watched their beloved investigators Charles (Steve Martin), Mabel (Selena Gomez), and Oliver (Martin Short) become murder suspects themselves. Showrunner and co-creator John Hoffman tells Final Draft that was part of the plan all along.

“At the end of our pitch to Hulu for the show, I said at the end of the season one [that] our crime-fighting trio finds themselves the suspects of a murder and the subject of their beloved mentor’s podcast,” Hoffman recalls.

Planning is King

Crafting a mystery was something new for Hoffman, who’s previously worked on projects such as Netflix’s Grace and Frankie, and says the structure of a crime podcast helped to inform the series’ own storytelling structure.

“It was about the order in which you were telling the story and what bit of information you were doling out. It became a task list for sure in season one that felt daunting. But at the bottom of it, I think you just trust your gut as you go through it. You ask, am I confused in the right way? Am I intrigued enough? Am I shocked by the expectation that I had compared to what just happened?”

He says those three questions were very big when it came to checking episode by episode and the whole season arc to determine the right element of suspense and mystery.

 “The other method is working backward so we realized quickly we can’t do this unless we know our target at the end of this. We need to know the killer and why they did it. So we had to twist our way to that and hide things in the reality that was happening.

We weren’t hiding the truth but we were focusing on other areas that one would investigate. Sometimes they would lead close to the truth and sometimes they would run parallel and sometimes they would lead to truths that were terrible but not related to the murder we were following, and some were funny, hopefully.”

Success is a double-edged sword

When it comes to the second season’s whodunit, premiering June 28, Hoffman admits there was some pressure from the show’s success and fandom that created some initial complications when it came to unraveling the new season’s mystery.  

“We had the double-edged sword that was this wonderful embrace of the show – and it felt very lovely and affirming in that way. And the other side of it was that people were watching it and discussing it on message boards and coming up with their own theories about what happened, so we knew people were really watching us."

"So in season two, we had to check ourselves a little bit,” he says. “At first we thought it had to be a really complex mystery because we knew everyone was watching us. But then it became too complex and murky because we were trying to hide things too much. We had to remind ourselves that there’s simplicity when it comes to motives and we need to balance that out with, ‘Are we shocked enough?’ So hopefully we do that in season two, that we twist our way through it and we stay truthful to the journey.”

Balancing comedy & mystery

Remaining truthful to the journey for the second season means not only figuring out the who, what, where, why, when, and how’s of the murder and murderers but also of the three central characters played by Martin, Gomez and Short, and learning more about their story.

“Once you take that step to get out of your apartment and be with people you wouldn’t think you would be with and do something you never thought you would do, that becomes an important step in your own personal journey in learning and making you vulnerable,” Hoffman says.

He shares that Charles, who was tasked with being more vulnerable in season one by dating his neighbor (and spoiler: murderer played by Amy Ryan) will now have a mystery involving his past in the new season. As for Mabel, she is “wanting to get out from under all the things she was constrained by in season one and so stepping out is all she wants in season two,” Hoffman says. “And Oliver is always looking for resurrection and all of his energy being matched by the Universe and saying to him, ‘We are interested in you again.’ That’s what he’s looking for in the world. So all of those emotional stories are going to be reflected in season two.”

As for how the writers are so successful with balancing mystery with comedy and creating truthful characters around the hijinks, according to Hoffman, it comes down to connection.

“You want to connect with the people who're watching,” he says. “And you want to connect the characters and you want to ground the characters who are doing ridiculous things and making these big leaps in their lives with a very universal and specific backstory that they are living within themselves so that allows for a new friendship between these three people to help each other out in unique ways. So that all felt like good building blocks.”

He also attributes his screenwriting background as well as the film careers of Martin, Short, and Gomez as a touchstone for creating rich characters.

“I thought, well, this is great we get to luxuriate across many seasons with the stories of these characters and keep unfolding the mysteries of these characters to coincide with the mysteries they are following on the show. That felt unique to the show. Most procedural and crime shows don’t dive deep into the personal lives of the investigators so it felt like an unexpected opportunity to do that with these characters.”

The second season of Only Murders in the Building premieres on Hulu 6/28!