2 New Shows Are Beating Only in the Murders in the Building at Its Own Game

How’s this for a twist? Even though Only Murders in the Building is the most popular mystery series that’s built around a show-within-a-show, it’s the worst at making the gimmick actually work. While people fire off tweets and think pieces about the diminishing returns of the fictional podcast that doubles as a meta-commentary on the rest of Hulu’s breakout detective comedy (ahem), two other, less-heralded series are making far more elegant use of the same concept. That makes their approach to self-aware storytelling as instructive as it is cheekily entertaining.

The key similarity between PBS’s Magpie Murders, which just started its six-episode run, and Netflix’s The Midnight Club, which dropped its first season earlier this month, is that neither lets the meta-textual tail wag the dog. Only Murders, however, seems more interested in spoofing true crime podcasts than in crafting the mystery the show’s fictional podcast is supposed to cover. As a result, there are plenty of funny jokes about the characters mastering the art of suspenseful storytelling, but they can’t overcome the series’ own cheap writing crutches, like letting folks “conveniently'' discover a new hidden passageway every time they need to eavesdrop on a neighbor. This makes Only Murders feel clever but hollow, like a reference that has forgotten what it was referring to.

Compare this to Magpie Murders, which is first and foremost about the murder of Alan Conway (Conleth Hill), a mystery author who falls from the top of his mansion just days after finishing the final novel in his long-running detective series. At first, his editor Susan Ryeland (Leslie Manville) is upset that he delivered the book without the last chapter, meaning she’s stuck with a whodunit that never reveals who did it. Soon, though, she realizes Alan was almost certainly pushed and that his book may hold clues about his killer. She starts poring over his manuscript, and while she reads, the show stages scenes from his novel. As we cut between the “real world’ and the “book world,” we see how much they have in common.

This is all very droll, but it’s more than a parlor trick because the book is crucial to solving the actual crime. That gives real stakes to scenes from the novel, because if we want to understand why Alan died, then we have to pay attention. Credit screenwriter Anthony Horowitz (who adapts the script from his own novel) for understanding that the best mysteries make good on the promise that every detail is there for a reason. Unlike Only Murders, which gets distracted by aimless stories about supporting characters, it doesn’t have an ounce of flab.

But that’s not to say the series is all plot and no emotion. On the contrary, one of its shrewdest moves is having the actors from the real world scenes portray characters in the book. Matthew Beard, for instance, plays Alan’s lover James, and he also plays Fraser, the bumbling sidekick of the novel’s star detective, Atticus Pünd (Tim McMullan). That not only lets Beard have fun in his dual role, but also tells us what Alan actually thought of his boyfriend. And since James knows he’s the inspiration for Fraser, his motive for killing increases every time we see Fraser act like a fool.

The Midnight Club takes a similar approach. Based on a novel by Christopher Pike, it’s about a supernatural mystery, not a crime that needs to be solved, but it’s still designed to let its meta moments deepen our understanding of the primary story. Our lead character is Ilonka (Iman Benson), a teenager who goes to a hospice for adolescents after she gets diagnosed with terminal cancer. Once she gets there, she learns that all the other kids gather at midnight to tell each other spooky stories, both as a way to keep each other entertained and to use the power of their imaginations as a kind of shield against their frailty. She also discovers there’s a powerful force lurking in the building that could save her life, and she wants to understand it before it’s too late.

In every episode, her quest is interrupted by a story someone tells in the Midnight Club. But while these stories don’t reveal specific clues about whatever might be haunting the kids, they nevertheless feel vital. That’s largely because they take us deep inside the storyteller’s inner life. When a religious girl tells a noir tale about a murderous love triangle, we learn about the feelings her faith is supposed to hide. When an angry young woman spins a yarn about a ballerina whose soul is split into two bodies, we understand her own sense of isolation. This matters because it heightens the urgency of Ilona’s search for a magical cure. The more we relate to these kids as particular individuals, the more we can care about the possibility they’ll be saved. (It also helps that, similar to Magpie Murders, the young actors play the stars of the stories they tell.)

This isn’t to say that Only Murders in the Building should have Selena Gomez play some other character in a reenactment scene or that the writers should somehow make the act of podcasting the key to solving a murder. There are plenty of ways for a show-within-a-show to become agreeably entangled with its host. But hopefully the creative team will come up with something substantive for the upcoming third season. After all, when two other series are demonstrating the full potential of the self-referential boom, the leader of the pack needs to step up.

Magpie Murders airs Sundays nights at 9:00 PM ET on PBS. New episodes premiere through November 20. The Midnight Club is currently streaming on Netflix.

Mark Blankenship has been writing about arts and culture for twenty years, with bylines in The New York Times, Variety, Vulture, Fortune, and many others. You can hear him on the pop music podcast Mark and Sarah Talk About Songs.