“Only Murders in the Building” Goes to Hollywood!
New York has had its heart broken by Hollywood before. Absolutely quintessential New York shows like Burns & Allen upped and moved to Los Angeles in the 1950s and, worse, New York-set shows like I Love Lucy pretended to be filmed in New York, when they were in fact filmed in Hollywood—at Lucy’s Desilu Studios in this case.
The Dick Van Dyke Show was also filmed at Desilu, with Van Dyke playing a television comedy writer who worked in Midtown and lived in New Rochelle. New York is a central part of iconic sitcoms like Friends and Seinfeld, but while establishing shots were collected here, most of the action was shot on the West Coast. All those jobs and tax dollars going to California, not New York. Yet another LA betrayal on top of the Dodgers’ exodus from Brooklyn.
Thus those of us living in the Arconia probably shouldn’t have been shocked—but we were—when Hulu announced that Only Murders in the Building (OMITB) would be moving to LA. How could you have Only Murders in the Building without the Building? The titular building is a pre-war Upper West Side building called The Belnord at 225 West 86th Street. John Hoffman, co-creator of OMITB, had called it “its own central compelling character.”
