I’m a big fan of Only Murders in the Building, but every time I see the credits roll, I think, “the coexistence of Steve Martin and Martin Short on the show presupposes a missing third talent named Short Steve.”
Short Steve, like Martin and Short (or Martin and Steve) would be past retirement age but still performing and doing a good job of it. Like them, he would have started up in stand-up before moving to sketch comedy TV and from there to movies and scriptwriting, playing a wide variety of characters, mostly flamboyant and absurd but occasionally low-key. He’d have written a memoir.
And maybe he’d look like this:
(And he would’ve starred in Father of the Bride and Prince of Egypt.)
All things considered, it’s probably for the best that Selena Gomez replaced him. The main cast would’ve felt a bit too samey otherwise.
(I hoped that the Fans stories I mentioned earlier would be restored by today, but sometimes, in this life, hopes are disappointed. I’m still figuring out the technical issues of reviving old Flash files, and Monday’s a bad day to ask for freelance help in Manassas. But I should have these cracked soon!)
This is a tangent, but wordplay lovers should not miss the show’s latest musical number: