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Téa Leoni (“Madam Secretary”) joins the cast of “Only Murders in the Building,” which premieres its fifth season Tuesday, Sept. 9, on Disney+ and Hulu. Steve Martin and Martin Short star in “Only Murders in the Building”
Cover Story More than ‘Murders in the Building’: Leoni joins expanding mystery series By Dana Simpson After four complete seasons of Manhattan-based murder and mayhem, one has to wonder if perhaps the residents of the Arconia should just move. Nevertheless, Charles (Steve Martin, “Cheaper by the Dozen,” 2003), Oliver (Martin Short, “SCTV”) and Mabel (Selena Gomez, “Emilia Perez,” 2024) have stuck it out this far, and when their doorman turns up dead, the crime-loving trio knows better than to accept it as an accident. Thus begins Season 5 of Hulu’s “Only Murders in the Building,” premiering Tuesday, Sept. 9, on Disney+ and Hulu. When “Only Murders” first appeared on the streamer in late summer 2021, it immediately garnered a 100% rating on the RottenTomatoes.com Tomatometer, a metric used to quantify critics’ opinions regarding various specific films and TV series. Forty episodes and seven Primetime Emmys later, “Only Murders” still
holds an average Tomatometer reading of 97% across all four seasons. Hoping for another hit season as it crosses the 50-episode threshold, Season 5 of “Only Murders” continues its longstanding tradition of packing big-name talent into the cast. This year’s big addition — teased, as most new cast members are, during the previous season’s finale — is “Madam Secretary” and “Spanglish” (2004) star Téa Leoni. “I think she’s the great tease at the end of the finale and a little bit of an intriguing bump forward,” co-creator John Hoffman (“race and Frankie”) told Deadline of Leoni’s role in the Season 4 finale. “She’s an extension of the little news report in Episode 9 that Mabel makes note of at the hospital,” Hoffman elaborated, adding that Leoni’s character, Sofia Caccimelio, “is the wife of the Dry Cleaning
King of Brooklyn, and maybe a couple of dry cleaning outlets in Manhattan, as well.” And while dry cleaners are not typically considered to be dangerous, the Caccimelios do have ties to organized crime within the Big Apple and are particularly intertwined with the Caputo crime family mentioned at least once throughout the series to date. As for whether the Caputo family has any further connection to previous murders in the series, that remains to be seen, but we wouldn’t rule anything out just yet. As is always the case for “Only Murders in the Building,” however, Hoffman reiterates that much of the risk is simply “involved in helping” to solve the crimes, but he made sure to add that “there are some moves that might come in Season 5 that change the whole equation.” A major component of that equation this season is the death of beloved Arconia
doorman Lester, played over the course of 20 episodes by Teddy Coluca (“The Blacklist”). To add insult to injury (or death, as the case would have it), the fountain where Lester’s body was dumped was the very same one he had decreed as lucky during his own Arconia terrace wedding decades before the building’s growing reputation for murder. As described by Hulu Press, Charles, Oliver and Mabel’s newest case “plunges them into the shadowy corners of New York and beyond — where the trio uncovers a dangerous web of secrets connecting powerful billionaires, old-school mobsters and the mysterious residents of the Arconia.” The more they dig, the more the friends and podcasters discover that New York is evolving into a metropolis with an entirely new identity; “one where the old mob fights to hold on as newer, even more dangerous players emerge.”