How ‘Poker Face’, ‘Only Murders In The Building’ & ‘The Residence’ Editors Capture The “Difficult Tone” Of Comedic Murder Mysteries

The light-hearted murder-mystery was a big deal in the ’70s, with shows like Columbo, McMillan & Wife and McCloud bringing in big ratings for NBC. Today, the format is coming back, most recently with The Residence, which debuted in March. Poker Face is midway through its second season, while Only Murders in the Building, with its fifth outing on the horizon, still finds new ways to blend humor and tension.

The formula might seem simple enough. However, the key to a series being successful is in striking a delicate balance between keeping things light and fun while still giving weight to mystery itself. How do you make the audience care about the forensics of a gruesome murder but also land the humor? It’s not as easy as it looks…

Poker Face

As opposed to most murder mysteries, the mystery of Poker Face is usually not who the murderer is, but how they are caught. That’s what led editors to refer to the genre not as a whodunit, but as a “howcatchem” instead. Since the tension isn’t in the discovery of who did the crime, the editing process is more about finding the tension in the “rhythm, space and timing” of the edit.

Editor Bob Ducsay was in charge of Episode 2 opener, “The Game is a Foot”, which needed to bring the audience back into the Poker Face world after a hiatus. “The way I always describe it is there’s a Poker Facetone, but it’s a little elastic,” says Ducsay. “It can go from slightly goofy to a little bit darker, but the tone, you know it when you see it.”

That tone is a difficult one to match, as the series doesn’t shy away from violent murders while still keeping comedy as a priority. “That’s the real trick, and it’s a slightly difficult tone to wrangle because if the stakes aren’t real, you’re not as invested,” says Ducsay. “The murder that takes place in the first act, even though there’s often very comedic elements to it, you have to work very hard to make sure that you don’t go too far and that people have something that they can take seriously…” Even when the murderer, victim and three other roles are all played by the same actor, Cynthia Erivo.

Shaheed Qaasim edited Episode 3, “Whack-A-Mole”, which begins a bit differently from other episodes. While usually Charlie (Natasha Lyonne) isn’t shown in the first act of the episode, this one starts with Charlie held at gunpoint by Beatrix Hasp (Rhea Perlman). “It has this little bit of an accordion effect,” he says. The episode actually starts with a conversation between Beatrix and Charlie from the finale of Season 1, told from the other point of view, similar to the beginning of the first season’s finale. The goal in this episode was to have long scenes of drawn out tension, to contrast with the high paced scenes. “So, when we got to the actual shootout of the scene and it’s fast paced, we’re cutting so quickly that even if you look down, you’re probably going to miss a crucial moment of the scene.”

“I believe editors help to shape the emotion of a scene,” he says. “We’re not just cutting the picture, we’re trying to carve out the truth.”

Only Murders in the Building

There have been four seasons of Only Murders in the Building, but the series stands out for being able to constantly stay updated without getting stagnant. Editor Shelly Westerman attributes this mostly to working with “the greatest comedians in the history of the world, Steve Martin and Martin Short. You’re trying to follow what they do while also keeping it sharp, fast-paced, so it’s a constant exploration and playing around to see what works.”

Editor Payton Koch also says the writers are part of what creates the balance between tension and comedy. “When we read these scripts, they do such a great job in a tense scene,” he says. “We are building tension and we’re tracking the murder, then Marty comes out and drops a hysterical joke… and it shouldn’t work, but it does because it’s just his delivery.”

Although each season revolves around a single mystery as a through line, Koch and Westerman say they approach the finale as its own entity, rather than a culmination of the season. “Every episode is approached as a single entity because each episode is sort of a little vignette into a suspect or a different character, and it’s always going somewhere else,” says Koch. “But because it’s a murder mystery show, it’s so interconnected and involved in the other episodes so it is one big thing, but I certainly feel like the approach when we dive into the finale, it is its own thing.”

The pair edit each episode separately, but come together to work on the finale together. “We started on Season 2, we did the finale together, so then it became a thing,” says Westerman. “It’s a lot of back and forth and sharing and collaborating. It’s so much fun.”

Editing as a pair for the finale also gives them a chance to see alternative perspectives from the season. “On the finale, you are tying up loose ends throughout the season,” says Koch. “You are going back to other episodes and seeing this beat here, and you pull that and we are seeing the murder, so we’re even going back to Season 3, and then you’re going to the finale of Season 3 to tie up the murder.”

The Residence

As the editor of a show in its first season, Ali Greer says the most important part of the job was to strike the right tone in the first episode. “You’re establishing that someone’s been murdered and people take it seriously, but there’s also these wacky characters. That was a big push, especially in the first 10 minutes of the pilot. We had to figure out, where is the first laugh and where do we establish that this is a comedy? But we also had to show you that it won’t just be a straightforward murder mystery, in terms of figuring out who did it and why.” 

Luckily the scripts, written by Paul Davies, already had a lot of humor in them. “There’s a lot of intricacies about how the story unfolds that continues to be more and more funny as you get to know the characters,” says Greer. “Even just reading the pilot script, there’s tons of interjections and crazy things, and the way that the script was written was extremely funny.”

Although the humor is a major aspect of the series, Greer still had to make sure to balance it with the seriousness of the plot as well. “Part of that balancing is making sure people are still engaged in the actual plot and fitting in the jokes,” she says. “What is so great about the script of the show is that the jokes are intertwined with the plot. As they’re telling jokes, they’re also expressing exposition, things that you need to know. For this particular show, there wasn’t a lot of choice of, ‘Do I include the exposition or do I include the joke?’”

That question came in a bit later, when the flow of the story had to shift or be interrupted to show events happening on the night of the murder. “A lot of that was trial and error,” says Greer. “There’s a mix of having the script be super engaging in terms of the comedy and the exposition. And then a part of that is just making sure that within all of the exposition moments we’re finding the places for editorial to insert jokes and to keep it lively.”