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Hulu‘s Only Murders in the Building took a big leap into Season 3, centering the crime-solving podcasting trio Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short) and Mabel (Selena Gomez) and the season’s crime around a massive theater production led by newcomer Loretta, played by Meryl Streep.
The risks paid off. The series created by Martin and John Hoffman received a whopping 21 Emmy nominations in multiple major categories including Best Comedy Series, Best Lead Actor nods for Martin and Short, Best Actress for Gomez and Best Supporting Actress for Streep.
Outside of the acting categories, the Television Academy recognized composer Siddhartha Khosla, songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, as well as choreographer John Carrafa. All four joined Deadline as part of Contenders Television: The Nominees to discuss working together to create sweeping musical dramedy at the heart of Season 3.
“Justin and I have described this as being like going to theater, sleep-away summer camp and it being just the best summer of our lives,” said Pasek, who alongside Paul and their collaborators Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman were nominated for Best Original Music & Lyrics for the song “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?”
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Khosla, who has served as the show’s composer since its inception, revealed what it was like to introduce multiple new original songs created for the stage production, increasing the total of the show in comparison to Seasons 1 and 2 immensely.
“I started early on. I heard demos of the songs that Justin and Benj were creating; John would share them with me,” he said. “I remember with the song they wrote for Meryl, there was a little demo that we got that had Sara Bareilles singing it and I remember being just blown away by what I heard.”
Paul adds, “Do you remember thinking, ‘This feels like it was inspired by my score?’ Because it was.”
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In order to complete the vision of the musical numbers, Caraffa contributed his Broadway choreography skills. He is nominated for Best Choreography for Scripted Programming for “Oliver’s Dream Sequence / Creatures of the Night.”
“The fun of it for me in this project was that I got to be involved fairly early in doing what a choreographer does in helping to shape the music, which is really rare in most of the television that I do,” Caraffa said. “A good example is … ‘Oliver’s Dream.’ John Hoffman came to me [and said] we’re trying to license a song for this dream sequence, or write something. We don’t really know what to do. And I said, It’s a Fosse sequence, you don’t need to write anything. We’ll take Sid’s themes from the show and we’ll build something. I told John to write some text and we’ll do some percussion, and we’ll use Sid’s piano-playing theme and we’ll build a Fosse, Ooh, you know, kind of classic Fosse breakdown.
“I think it’s what I’m most proud of in probably anything I’ve done for television because I got to be part of the musical process of creating that.”
Check back Monday for the panel video.
