With glowing write-ups from The New York Times to Rotten Tomatoes (100% Fresh!), Only Murders in the Building is one of the rare new shows that comes out of the blocks a winner. Created by John Hoffman and Steve Martin and starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez – who show instant comic chemistry – the murder mystery/comedy premiered on Hulu in August 2021 and quickly became a breakout hit for the streamer.

Centered on a grisly murder mystery, the show also traces the relationships between quirky neighbors and the friendship that emerges among three unlikely candidates – the finicky Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin), the struggling playwright with flair for the dramatic, Oliver Putnam (Martin Short), and the savvy and secretive Mabel Mora (not that she offers her last name), played by Selena Gomez. The show masterfully weaves in lyrical magical realism that makes the series not just funny and suspenseful, but also poetic. It’s a combination that depends on mastery from the spark of an idea to the final edit delivered by Julie Monroe, ACE, JoAnne Yarrow, ACE, and Matthew Barbato.

Only Murders in the Building’s showrunner and co-creator (with Steve Martin), John Hoffman, fosters an environment of creative collaboration where ideas are welcomed. Yarrow recounts that Hoffman was open to taking a chance on her even though her experience had primarily been in drama. “I told him that editors are naturally empathetic and that means having a command on the full range of human emotion,” Yarrow recounts. “To his credit, he heard what I said, acknowledged he had never considered it that way and agreed. Even better, then he hired me!”

Barbato tells how his feedback as a dog owner even made it to the final title animation. “Originally,” he says, “it was just the camera move from outside the building to inside the courtyard, past empty windows then back out onto the street. Bunny did appear at the beginning as she does now, walking her dog, but nothing at the very end. So I suggested to John that we see Bunny at the end walking her dog at night as well, because dog owners are always walking their dog! And that’s what’s in there.” The fact that all the editors are dog owners became a source of bonding for the team.

The spirit of collaboration from the top down empowered the editors from day one. The timing of the show, of course, was a huge challenge, coming early in the pandemic which meant remote work and Zoom sessions. But the editors relied on openness and communication to carry them through. “The three of us hit it offimmediately,” says Monroe. “We just kept talking to each other all the time. That was huge.”

Barbato and Yarrow had worked together before going into the project, but this was the first time the team of three came together. The cooperation was easy and immediate. Yarrow says, “When a script came out, we shared our thoughts and feelings about the scripts with each other. And when we were working, it was open – anyone could watch the cut if they wanted to.

And if I was scared about something, I was happy to go get more eyes on it and know, it’s okay.” Barbato credits Monroe: “Julie really started us off with a great template in the first episode. That was a huge help for me, and we always were checking in with each other’s cuts and seeing how things were progressing. I think we just found the sensibility of the show pretty quickly.”

The pandemic also meant that the team had to get used to remote work. “We all had concerns about how it would work with the technology,” says Barbato. And all the editors credited their outstanding assistant editors for that: Barbato’s AE Jack Cunningham, Yarrow’s AE Olivia Latz and Monroe’s AEs Marie Lee and Warren Hickman. Barbato gushes, “My assistant is simply the best assistant there is,” and Yarrow praises her assistant for being another creative voice in the process:

“It was a great collaboration. You need someone strong to help tell the story with you.

That rapport was critical because the show wasn’t an easy one to pull off, and not just because of the pandemic. The production was split between New York and Los Angeles. Monroe says, “Our schedule is obviously off from New York’s. And because the schedule with the directors was so tight, everything had tocome together pretty quickly.”

One of the key components that aided the work was the music. “Fortunately,” Monroe explains, “with the sound and the music, we had a composer, Siddhartha Khosla, and our sound supervisor, Matt Waters, on board very early. They helped us get that finished feel very early on.” Monroe FaceTimed with Khosla in the months leading up to her work on the pilot and was able to listen to the title sequence. “It’s very thematic,” Monroe says. “There’s definitely a thread through it all.”

Yarrow praises Khosla’s availability and flexibility: “He would FaceTime us while he’s on his keyboard, trying things, adding instruments. It was really collaborative. And it really helped. He was watching the show multiple times as well, getting engrossed in the story, understanding the little things that we were picking up on.” Monroe adds that they had so many great cues to choose from that they were able to share them among the editors for their different episodes.

Of course, another element that set the show up for success was the cast of legendary actors and comedians. The editors were all big fans of Steve Martin and Martin Short coming into the show. [And] seeing the rapport they had on screen, and then the avuncular dynamic they struck with Selena Gomez, helped with the way the edit came together. Barbato says, “When you’re balancing comedy and drama, character is the trick.”

Monroe credits the writers and showrunner Hoffman with striking the tricky tonal balance: “Even when the actors were talking to giant animated characters, it had depth and pathos.”

“I’m an instinctual editor,” Barbato explains. “I work from performance first. And if there’s a shift in tone, I rely on the actor to give that to me. I try and let the actor do that. And I always like to push outside the box in terms of adding surprising reactions or performances, and trying to stay away from what was expected So I’m always looking for those things, as long as it still feels honest, and real within the world that we’ve built.”

And finding that with this cast wasn’t hard. Monroe says, “We were working with amazing actors who knew what they wanted going into the scene. And everyone was collaborative. It was so nice to be a part of, hear that banter between them and see how it developed and see how these two comedy masters bring Selena Gomez into the fold, which, I think the three of us saw that progress in a really nice way.”

“The only disappointment about working on this show,” adds Barbato, “was that I wasn’t going to get to go to a table read! We did it on Zoom. But they’re hanging out, waiting for someone, so Steve goes and grabs his banjo and plays for everybody.

It’s a special treat. And it’s such a cliche at this point, their relationship and history and rapport. It’s what you see on screen is what it’s like off screen. And it’s a joy to watch a friendship of two hugely funny people.”

With its cast, it’s little surprise that Only Murders in the Building is hilarious. But the actors seldom improvised and kept close to the script. Because the show had to maintain a mystery and character pieces moving, improvisation was kept to a minimum. The one notable exception was Steve Martin’s slapstick in the final episode, where he – spoiler! – ingests poison and can’t control his body. Monroe had her work cut out for her in picking and choosing from a lot of great material. “He crawled all over like nobody’s business. It’s such a joy to see. I just had to decide, let’s get all the best bits of it, make sure we don’t overstay our welcome.”

Throughout the season, episodes wove in interesting elements, from the slow-motion ‘bounces’ choreographed to “Clair de Lune” in the pilot to “The Boy from 6B” which is told from the perspective of Theo Dimas, a deaf resident, and contains just one line of dialogue. Monroe recounts, “The plan was to have zero dialogue until the very last moment. But [Cherien] Dabis had a great idea of how she wanted to play that and not allow it to be too pantomiming or too slapsticky. It was probably the darkest episode. Acoustically, she always wanted to do something where you could hear some semblance of audio, and she created this thing with Matt Waters, that it was the actual dialogue as spoken, just warped beyond recognition, for example, at the beginning, with the headphones.”

If there was one through-line in talking with the editors, it was, how much they connected. Each one says the level of trust, openness, collaboration and fun was unique. Yarrow explains just how important that was during the pandemic: “To be able to laugh and be able to interact with the other editors the way we all did. It was such a release in the middle of all the madness.