Note: This story contains spoilers for the Season 5 finale of ‘Only Murders in the Building‘
The “Only Murders in the Building” Season 5 finale saw Mayor Beau Tillman (Keegan Michael-Key), Camila White (Renée Zellweger), Jay Pflug (Logan Lerman) and Bash Steed (Christoph Waltz) all headed to prison.
After stopping Tillman and White from demolishing the Arconia to build a casino, Charles, Mabel and Oliver revealed that Tillman killed Lester in order to cover up the casino plans and his affair with Nicky Caccimelio’s (Bobby Cannavale) wife Sofia (Tea Leoni). Before killing Lester, Tillman was confronted by Nicky, who chopped his finger off with a cleaver.
In the chaos, Nicky ended up accidentally dying after landing on Lester, who was holding said cleaver and threatened to expose the plans. White, Pflug and Steed covered up the death by hiding him in the latter’s cryogenic chamber before Pflug moved the body to the dry cleaner’s. Meanwhile, Tillman chased Lester out to the Arconia’s fountain, where he was pushed in and hit his head, killing him. Right before his death, he blew his bird whistle, activating a camera he set up that captured the entire altercation.
As always, when one mystery is solved, another murder immediately follows.
The final minutes see the trio listening to Cinda Canning’s (Tina Fey) latest podcast, where they learned she was on holiday in London. Her latest case revolves around a red-haired woman who she believed was wrongfully accused of killing a royal descendant and has faced threats against their life. That red haired woman ends up collapsing at the Arconia’s front gates and turns out to be Canning herself, setting up the trio’s next case — and a trip across the pond in its officially announced Season 6.
Showrunner and executive producer John Hoffman told TheWrap that the writers’ room has already opened on latest season and that the team is “pretty far along” on developing the latest mystery.
“I feel really, really excited. It’s been a great jolt of energy to angle in Cinda’s direction, to angle our trio in this direction that puts them in completely different surroundings and the potential for a recharged notion about our show, while still keeping the central heart and beat and pulse of what it is,” he explained. “It felt really right and exciting to go to the place where the cozy murder mystery was invented and bring them there and watch a bit of a culture clash, or a deepening of an understanding of the kinds of storytelling that has been a part of the fabric of that world matched up with our novice true crime podcasters telling stories in a completely more modern way. All that felt like great fodder and you feel the energy in the writer’s room that way, without doubt. So we’re a good way in and can’t wait to get going and much, much excitement on the other side of 2026.”
Hoffman added that shifting Season 6 to London felt like a “perfect marriage” given its similarities to New York City, as well as an opportunity to celebrate the city’s history, traditions and relationship to murder mysteries with Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as well as its local actors.
“I will tell you it will not be structured like Season 4. We’re headed to the motherland to explore what the mother of podcasting for our trio was up to and what might be happening there,” he said. “It felt like a good opportunity to really do a big shift for the trio and make a real move that feels fresh and different for the show and a good time, particularly off of Season 5, which was so focused on the Arconia and so much about home and the building and the whole theme of everything was all about that. So having really gotten deeper on all of that, it felt like a moment to say let’s see what happens when they’re over here and take them to a certain origin story with the person who provided the origin point for all of them getting together.”
Read on for TheWrap’s full interview below where Hoffman unpacks Season 5’s killer, Tina Fey’s reaction to becoming Season 6’s victim, whether any other characters from the Arconia may make their way across the pond, celebrating Teddy Coluca and how much longer he sees the Hulu comedy series going. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
TheWrap: How did you decide that Mayor Beau Tillman would be the killer this season? Was there ever any discussion about alternative killers or endings?
Hoffman: We always talk about alternatives at the very beginning. We pick up a couple of different versions and wonder what’s the best way to go, what’s the one that seems interesting, what feels right for the story we want to tell. We landed on the mayor pretty quickly in this case. But it’s always a dance of you have to ask yourself, who’s going to figure that out as early as this or that and it’s been such a lesson doing this show now for five seasons and I’ve heard everything. I’ve heard everyone from like, I had no idea who did it. So that’s thrilling. But then I hear other people say, I think it’s the mayor. But in this case, we did come pretty early to it.
It’s so complicated in the case of a crime of passion, which this ended up being doubly so. It’s a moment that brings a culmination point. Anyone involved and who is in that gaming parlor and all of the ways in which that tethers out to understanding the truth of what happened has to be really understood more than anything, especially if it’s more than just two people in a room together and one is killing the other person. This is a lot of people involved and they all have secrets and they all have agendas that have to be carried forth from there. So all of that had to be worked out from that night and we spent a lot of time doing that before we start page one of Episode 1.
There was never any back and forth with him not being the killer. There may be dimensions and angles and specifics to things that can certainly develop as we’re breaking the season and breaking episodes if we feel like ‘I’m a little not crazy about this beat we’ve worked out in for the ending, what if we made this little pivot around or did this little shift?’ So it’s stuff like that that happens, but the general big beats are typically fairly early on. In Season 1, that wasn’t the case. We didn’t have a lot of it.
Where did the idea come from to give Cinda Canning red hair? I will say I did not initially expect it to be her when the body was turned over.
That makes me so happy I can’t even tell you. I was so insanely focused on [hiding Tina’s identity]. The writing of that voiceover and who we were looking at, how we we were looking at her, all of that felt very, very important to me that you didn’t for a second wonder or think that could be her. So that’s a relief. If anyone did feel it, sorry i screwed that up. Otherwise, a lot of people thought it was Natasha Lyonne.
[The red hair] is a thing you’re going to find out. The one thing I will say is with Cinda Canning, it’s been pretty clear she has a history of employing people who look like her or making them look like her in the past. So it seemed to match up a little bit that there may be confusion as to what she looked like if she was getting deeply involved in a case somewhere.
What was Tina Fey’s reaction to finding out she was Season 6’s victim?
I called Tina. I was on a bus, and I was saying, ‘Hey, can I talk to you for a second about the potential of you being a part of the end of the season?’ I’ve gotten to know Tina a little bit. I love her and her and her daughters are huge fans of the show. Tina will send me things like, ‘went to the escape, place for Only Murders.’ They’re always going to the events which that’s so cool. I love that she’s doing this, and she’s into it. So I know she was inclined to want to remain essential, as she’s always been to the show, but this is a different kind of call.
She kind of gasped and gulped when I told her and she then whispered, ‘I’m so excited, I don’t know how I’m not going to be able to tell my daughters.’ I was like ‘Oh you’re right. No, don’t tell your daughters.’ I saw her a little bit while was with her daughter over the summer, and I was like, ‘Oh, I can’t talk about this.’ So I’m grabbing moments with her to talk about it privately and about some plans and things like that. So I’m just thrilled and I’m so happy she’s game because it’s a tough conversation, but it’s also a really good, fun conversation to have.
Given that London will be a larger focus in Season 6, can we expect to see some of the other major characters like Meryl Streep’s Loretta or Season 5 characters like Sofia Caccimelio or Jay Pflug again?
Everyone’s in relationship to the trio, everyone has now formed friendships, love relationships, marriages. We’ve got history now, but we’ve also got opportunity for really new worlds to explore. It’s like anyone. When you make a big pivot in your life, what can you learn? What new thing can you learn about characters that you’ve known now for five seasons? What are they learning about themselves? What world has been opened up by a new world. All of that feels like great opportunity for us.
I think there will be people that will be connected in certain ways. I can’t say right now who all will be. But when you’re in the house, you’re in the house. Whether you’re a killer or whether you’re a victim, you could easily come back around in our show.
This is obviously the swan song for Teddy Coluca. What was his last day of filming Season 5 like?
There was a moment we had on the last day of shooting there. I think there’s a video out there of it and I can’t believe someone was filming it. But on the last day of shooting, we have a wrap party and and we show the crew and the cast and as much of the people that we can gather up on that night to watch an early cut of the first episode, sometimes one or two. And I give a wrap speech and I talk about everybody involved in the show and what they mean to it.
[Teddy is] just one of my favorite actors and a sweetheart of a man and a gentleman supreme and we all feel that way about Teddy. But I got completely choked up when I brought him up, I couldn’t talk. He was in the front row with his wife, and I asked him to come up and we had a hug. And it was a very meaningful thing.
It’s a beautiful opportunity that we’ve been able to employ some of the great actors in New York City and who’ve had great careers, but to highlight an actor like Teddy and get the opportunity to work with him and expand upon everything he built from season one. I said the same to Jane Lynch and goodness Paul Rudd’s the best example of sometimes no one ever dies.
Have you figured out how that long-running joke with Paul Rudd will continue in Season 6?
I have a thought that Paul might play maybe a crepe that someone is making on the corner in London (Laughs). He’s gonna be in a waiter at the best Indian restaurant in London. No, I have no idea. You will learn, maybe, hopefully just right after I do.He’s the greatest. And I like the opportunity, but we’ve got our work to cut out for us to make that joke continue. But that’s a blast too.
Do you see the show going beyond Season 6 and feel like you have more ideas to keep elevating it?
I will confess that I haven’t hit the point where I’ve looked at something up ahead and said, ‘Oh, boy, I don’t really have anything there.’ More importantly, as long as they’ll have us, I feel like these characters are really now in our bones and I’m really fascinated by all of them. I watch them grow, I watch them get better and better and better each time they get going and and I watch the writers find inventive new ways to push them forward.
There’s something about this premise that on first blush makes it go, ‘How can that go on that long?’ And then, on the other hand, it’s because it’s about bigger themes, because we are talking about stories that are both humanist and a little bit reflective, we’re allowed to be a little meta and talk about the world we’re in and through a comedic lens in certain ways. But, I don’t know, it’s just a more expansive world than I could have predicted at the beginning. I hope so.
“Only Murders in the Building” Seasons 1-5 are streaming now on Hulu.
