Resisting Main Character Energy: Friendship and Community in Only Murders in the Building—J. E. Bartel

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by J. E. Bartel

In 2012, John Koenig coined a neologism for his blog, Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: “sonder,” the idea that everyone we meet has a life as complicated as our own, despite our personal understanding of it, and the realization that our presence in the lives of others—those we pass on the street, or those we stand next to in an elevator—is just as fleeting to them as theirs seems to us.

The term encapsulates a feeling that has perhaps been enhanced in the digital age: Our round-the-clock access to technology allows us to connect with anyone, anywhere, while we simultaneously feel more isolated and lonely than ever before. It is this dilemma that frames the unusual friendship at the heart of Hulu’s award-winning murder mystery series Only Murders in the Building. C. S. Lewis famously said that “friendship is borne of the moment a man says to another, ‘What, you too? I thought I was the only one.’” In this case, three friends are thrilled to find that they are not the only ones asking, “What the——is in Bo’s mouth?”

Bo, of course, is a dog who makes an appearance in a true crime podcast beloved by three residents of the Arconia, a lavish Upper West Side apartment building. The trio—septuagenarians Charles Haden Savage (Steve Martin) and Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) and millennial Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez) would, if they could otherwise help it, not be speaking to each other. Despite their shared residence in the Arconia, the trio’s earlier interaction in an elevator reveals the fact that, like many of us caught up in the sprawl of urban life, they would rather avert their eyes and clap headphones over their ears than bear a conversation with a stranger: even a familiar one whom we see in the elevator every day. It takes an accidental fire alarm for the three to meet for real. Once they’re in the same room, they find out that they’re all obsessing over the same podcast: why not enjoy it together, rather than alone in their apartments?

Only Murders in the Building is quick to impress a sense of sonder on the viewer. Life in the Arconia is, as Charles points out, a “stacked on top of each other” kind of organized chaos: The building’s residents have every opportunity to get into each other’s business, to form a community, or to become friends. Yet, at the beginning of the show, Oliver, Charles, and Mabel are solitary and lonely figures. Their moment in the elevator feels sadder and more ironic juxtaposed against the scenes that come before, as the camera follows each person through their daily routine, ending with each of them settling into their separate apartments to listen, alone, to the podcast. We learn that Charles is a washed-up actor whose past success in a detective show fails, to his chagrin, to earn him any real attention or care from those around him. Oliver’s glory days as a theatre producer are over, leaving him on the verge of bankruptcy and on poor footing with his son and grandkids. And Mabel trudges through the city in big coats that the costume designer Dana Covarrubias imagined “like armor.” After losing her father to cancer at age seven and her best friend in a tragic accident at the Arconia, Mabel feels haunted by misfortune and bats away any attempts at connection from others.

Making matters worse, the three are also estranged from their families in various ways. Oliver haphazardly shows up at his son’s place with piles of toys for his grandkids, disregarding his son’s time, then returns to the vastness of his quiet Arconia apartment. Mabel has frightening daydreams about being attacked in the apartment where she lives by herself without any family or friends to keep her company. Charles repeatedly cooks the same omelet he used to make for the daughter of an old flame who’s no longer in his life. These details feel relatable and all too human: They drive home how lonely and in need of a friend these three are. In an ocean of humanity, they are each an island—each too preoccupied with their own concerns to realize that real friendship and connection is only one or two shared moments away.

But friendship is not always so easily won. Even once the three hatch a scheme to start their own podcast investigating a murder in the Arconia, they still have to fight through layers of sarcasm and cynical wisecracking before they can get to the real substance of companionship. In the same vein as legendary comedies like Parks and Recreation or The Office, Only Murders in the Building takes a group of misfits and spins them, charmingly and hilariously, into a found family. Watching friendship bloom amongst the three reads as a study in what it takes to lower the guardrails of self-preservation and comfort in order to become open to caring for, and being cared for by, someone else; it’s delightful, clumsy, sincere, and often hilarious. Their tentative longing to connect with one another is matched in strength only by their reflexive need to snark and nitpick one another. When Oliver breezily leaves his door unlocked despite a murderer running loose, Mabel jokes that “white guys are only afraid of colon cancer and societal change.” Oliver and Charles, meanwhile, make fun of Mabel for her Gen-Z lingo like “hot goss” and “Manhatty.” The generational gap between their understanding of how the internet works is fodder for many jokes.

And yet, driven by a common goal, Oliver, Mabel, and Charles gradually learn to make space for each other and find their lives greatly enriched for it. It’s not often that intergenerational friendship is depicted on screen with such richness and joy. While they aren’t looking or perhaps even trying, they become the very best of friends, and their friendship shapes them into people who see the true value of connection over isolation. Encouraged by Mabel, Charles takes the brave step of reaching out to the almost-stepdaughter whose presence he misses so much. Mabel finds the courage to try out a romance with a childhood friend. And Oliver asks his son if perhaps they can start over.

But, of course, Only Murders in the Building isn’t just about these three: It’s about the Arconia on the whole. When the three become friends, it has a domino effect on the rest of their community. As the other denizens of the Arconia get involved with the murder investigation (for better or for worse!), Only Murders becomes a love letter to humanity in all its diversity and strangeness. As much as Oliver, Charles, and Mabel feel like main characters in their own stories—and are literally the main characters of the show—they’ve been oblivious to the stories going on all around them.

Only Murders plays with this notion through episodes told entirely from the perspective of side characters scattered throughout the Arconia: Bunny, the building’s prickly but secretly lonely board president; Theo, the deaf son of a Greek deli owner, who feels overlooked but becomes a vital piece of the murder investigation; and Howard, whose shyness and eccentricity hide a warm and loving personality. By focusing on people who might otherwise be relegated to the sidelines of the story, Only Murders suggests that no one is truly unimportant to the narrative. Everyone we meet is a unique universe of hopes, dreams, and hurts, and the things that separate us are often more arbitrary than they seem. If anything, the common thread that binds each person in the Arconia is how much they long for connection. And because of the friendship of Mabel, Charles, and Oliver, many people find it, and the Arconia becomes a warmer place.

Ten years after “sonder” entered the lexicon, another neologism appeared: “main character energy.” Born out of TikTok, it’s the idea of putting oneself first and acting with the confidence that would suit the main character of a story. Main character energy signifies individuality and a prioritizing of one’s own goals and well-being. But it can also denote being selfish, vain, or obsessed with oneself. As Elisabeth Oldfield writes in Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times, “Getting our way all the time does not make us happy. It makes us lonely.” Only Murders in the Building urges us to reconsider whether living life as a main character is really all it’s cracked up to be, when there is so much joy and beauty to be found in the “non-playable characters” around us: those we can never really be, but who nonetheless make life more beautiful for all their annoyance, stubbornness, and one-of-a-kind-ness. It’s telling that Only Murders in the Building refuses to choose a main character from amongst the trio. In laying down the urge to be the main character, they find instead that it is so much richer to share the spotlight.

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J. E. Bartel is a recent graduate of the University of St Andrews' Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts. Hailing from Canada, she now lives and writes in Scotland, where she is working on a novel manuscript. She is a huge fan of any movie starring Oscar Isaac and is probably knitting something right now.

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Photo from Only Murders in the Building on Disney+/Hulu