TV tip

Only Murders in the Building, season 2

Martin Short (Oliver), Selena Gomez (Mabel) and Steve Martin (Charles) are back as an unlikely trio of true crime podcasters who, in Season 1, managed to irritate just about everyone who lives in their titular Manhattan apartment building – even though they solved a cryptic homicide in their midst. Despite its proudly overt “We’re New Yorkers and you’re not” construct (reminiscent of prime Woody Allen), “Only Murders” effortlessly appeals across demographics with its literate wit AND goofball touches. We see the main characters grow and develop rather than simply rehash shtick from the first campaign, and the plot – wherein the loathed building manager Bunny is found stabbed to death in a fashion – is clever, tricky, and outlandishly fun.

– Rick Koster

Online tip

Conservative Commentators You Never Knew Started in Hollywood slideshow

The Onion Newsletter, www.theonion.com

It’s sort of humbling how consistently funny and clever these daily slideshows from humor factory The Onion continue to be. The selected photos are always perfect to illustrate whatever idiocy that day’s motif might be, and the captions are sharp as a bone scalpel and as brutally on-target as the special forces sniper. For this particular slideshow, it’s not just Fox News hosts who come in for barbecuing – and it’s sort of distressing to see how many targets the writers found to make fun of. It’s not giving away too much to provide an example, as with an image of Laura Ingraham accompanied by the cutline, “In 1992, Ingraham showed up wearing an actual Nazi armband for her ‘Schindler’s List’ audition before she even knew the movie was about the Holocaust.”

– Rick Koster