Only Murders Boss Breaks Down Charles' Trip To The White Room And [Spoiler]'s Return In Episode 4
Charles' Death Rattle showcase triggers a break from reality during Tuesday's Only Murders in the Building, as TV's Brazzos is transported to another dimension in the deepest corners of his mind.
Faced with rehearsing his patter song in front of the entire cast, Charles blanks and enters the white room. "It's a stage thing," Jonathan explains. "In TV, if you screw up, you get another take. In theater, there's no net. You blank out, that's it. You're a polar bear in a global warming documentary, hanging onto a tiny piece of ice in the middle of the sea, waiting to die."
When it happens a second time, Charles realizes that the Pickwick Triplets aren't solely to blame. He's also stressed out about his new living arrangement with Joy. But just when he's about to tell his girlfriend how he feels, he returns to the white room for a third time and exits mid-marriage proposal.
Episode 4 also marks the return of a radically transformed (and blonde!) Cinda Canning. She's itching to get back in the podcast game, and she offers to make "Bloody Mabel" a true-crime star.
Below, series co-creator/showrunner John Hoffman unpacks Charles' strange trip and Cinda's somewhat-surprising comeback.
TVLINE | Talk to me a bit about the concept of the white room and its application in Episode 4. For starters, who came up with the idea?
The episode was written so brilliantly by J.J. Philbin, but the concept came from my co-writer on Episode 1, Sas Goldberg, who is also an actress in New York City. We talked a lot about this moment. I used to be a [stage] actor and I had a moment like this where nothing made sense. I just blanked. I was carrying on, I was saying all of my lines, and my body was doing what it was supposed to be doing. No one would have known what was happening differently on stage, but I was like, "Wait, did I just do the scene? I don't know what just happened."
People have had these experiences. You do long runs of eight shows a week, you're singing the same song you sang a few hours ago in a matinee, and it's easy to go off [and let your mind wander], so we extrapolated on that. Certainly with Charles' arc this year — his challenges with Joy and the panic that stems from having her move in, and the panic of being given a patter song when he's never sung anything outside of "Angel in Flip Flops" — it made sense, and it's fodder for Steve Martin to work his brilliance.
TVLINE | How difficult was it to take the white room from page to screen?
That was a very specific wish [fulfilled] by our production design team and by our director Adam Shankman. [Costume designer] Dana Covarrubias had the brilliant idea of putting Steve in clothes that Charles would normally be wearing, only in head-to-toe white. Our visual effects team worked on the [Statue of Liberty] outside the window, which shifts our understanding [of the moment] and how it might have to do with Joy.
TVLINE | Did you consider a take where we see the havoc Charles wreaks on stage while he's mentally in this other place?
We didn't. We knew that we wanted to leave it up to [audience] interpretation and the reactions of our brilliant character actors. I'd rather just live in that space of Mabel having trouble keeping eye contact with Charles.
TVLINE | If you can get Tina Fey, you use Tina Fey! But I'll admit, I was a bit surprised to see Cinda Canning again. After being duped by Poppy—err, Becky Butler, it's hard to believe she could win back the trust of her audience. Is her goop-flavored transformation going to be enough?
One of the smaller themes of the season is "What is legitimacy?" and [Cinda's return] fit well into that theme. She has her own challenges after what happened last season and has to rebrand. Obviously, it's working for her on some level to be quote-unquote honest about what she has gone through — to stop and pause and do the therapy, and then help people understand where she is and continue to help them [through true crime]. It's "selfless" now. But of course, we know Cinda. [Laughs]
TVLINE | She offers Mabel a lot of money to ditch Charles and Oliver, partner on the Ben Glenroy case and produce a podcast without them. Is this something Mabel might actually want?
For Mabel, there's a temptation. The guys are very distracted at the moment, and she feels more compelled than any one of the trio to solve this case. She's the one feeling the most pressure to activate and do something, and Cinda is the one [making her an offer].
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