In the third season of Hulu’s acclaimed murder-mystery comedy Only Murders in the Building, songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul found a singular opportunity.
One of the duo’s favorite shows on television, Only Murders centered the plot of its third chapter on an original Broadway musical that they help to bring to life. Involving the writing of not one but four new songs, the process saw them overseeing an unconventional writers’ room for songwriters, featuring some of their musical heroes, as well as highly lauded contemporaries.
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Showrunner and exec producer John Hoffman recalls that when he first met with Pasek and Paul, a pair known for their work on projects like La La Land, he approached them with “this idea of this murder mystery play that had to become a murder mystery musical” — a tale told “through the eyes and mind of Oliver Putnam, played by Martin Short.”
Along with Charles-Haden Savage (Steve Martin) and Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), Putnam is part of an eccentric trio of residents of the Arconia apartment building on New York City’s Upper West Side, who share an obsession with true crime and get caught up in solving a series of murders.
Connected to the murder being looked at in Season 3 is Putnam’s “Death Rattle Dazzle,” an absurd musical centered on a murder investigation in which a set of infant triplets emerge as suspects. Featuring vocal performances from Martin, Short, Meryl Streep, Paul Rudd and Ashley Park, the musical’s opener, penned by Pasek and Paul, is the Short-performed “Creatures of the Night.” The songwriters teamed with Sara Bareilles to pen the lullaby “Look for the Light,” performed by Streep, collaborating with A Strange Loop‘s Michael R. Jackson on the number “For the Sake of a Child.”
But the great triumph of Pasek and Paul’s work would have to be “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?”, a rapid-fire tongue-twister number known in musical theater terms as a patter song, which Martin’s character would be seen struggling to master over the course of the season, in his role in the musical as a detective. In the case of this number, which has brought them their latest Emmy nomination, the duo sought out the collaboration of Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the pair of Tony winners who gave them their first job in television, as part of the songwriting team for NBC’s Smash.
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In the words of Hoffman, who spoke with Pasek and Paul recently for The Process, “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” was a “highwire” song — “a feast of insane brain work and vivid brilliance” that Martin would struggle to conquer, just as much as the character he was playing.
In the case of this tune, and all others crafted for Only Murders, Pasek and Paul sought to thread “something fresh and something classic,” per Paul — as the show itself does, with an absurd and playful tone not quite like anything else on TV.
After being asked to explore some hybrid of “theatrical storytelling” and pop songwriting on many a project, says Pasek, it was exciting to take a stab at crafting something more “traditional” in feel, with perfect rhymes — “something that feels like it is simultaneously really committed to a high level of craft, even if it is about a zany idea.”
Hoffman recalls that he came up with the title for “Pickwick” in the shower, then meeting with Pasek, Paul, Shaiman and Wittman over Zoom to give his take on the story the song should tell.
“[We] would be like, ‘Okay, John, set the scene. What exactly do we need accomplish? How does this need to weave throughout multiple episodes? How is this going to work? What’s the payoff?’ All of that,” says Pasek. “Then, [John] went away, and we were left to our own devices of having to actually try to make the song half as good as what we had promised on that Zoom call.”
The next step for the songwriters, who were gathered in Shaiman and Wittman’s NYC studio, was to open a Google Doc and begin exploring different kinds of rhymes. What they were looking to zero in on, Paul says, was a “Venn diagram” of couplets where themes of murder and infancy collided.
“We just listed those out, and you’ve got four people who love this basically going nuts in a document for two days…” he shares. “It was like building some kind of amazing LEGO or Tetris-y kind of thing. Everybody just building on each other, besting each other, making each other laugh. That was sort of the fun game of it.”
“What was so cool about working on a Google Doc,” says Pasek, “is that we got to literally be deleting, improving, changing the collective one line at a time, the entire time.”
Pasek found that the fun the songwriters had in delivering “Pickwick” was in keeping with the lovely “theater camp” energy conjured on set. “So often,” he tells Hoffman, “I think there’s two ways to motivate people in general. There is fear, and there is play and love, and you have just created such a motivation for people to do their best work, because they feel like they’re getting to play.”
Pasek and Paul’s Emmy nomination for “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” comes on the heels of one for songwriting in 2018, recognizing their work on Fox’s A Christmas Story Live!. Returning for its fourth season on August 27, Only Murders garnered a total of 21 Emmy nominations in its third outing, including Outstanding Comedy Series.
Produced by 20th Television, a part of Disney Television Studios, the show hails from co-creators and writers Martin and Hoffman, who exec produce alongside Short, Gomez, Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal.
Check out our full conversation between Pasek, Paul and Hoffman above.