Representation will not protect you: Only Murders in the Building and the terms of our own consumption
I find Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building more than just a cozy murder mystery series. The show quietly reinforces carceral logics through pleasure, humor, and representation. Drawing from an autoethnographic reflection of Sunday rituals, I explore how characters like Detective Donna Williams offers a comforting image of state power that masks its violence. The show invites us to root for surveillance, to find joy in suspicion, and to feel resolution through punishment. Through media, we’re taught to distrust our neighbors and ourselves in exchange for the illusion of safety. Utilizing the cultural and media analysis of James Baldwin, Joy James, and bell hooks, I show how the real mystery isn't who did it, but why we keep trusting the very system that creates the conditions for harm in the first place.
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| A wide, welcoming shot of the Arconia. Nothing here says danger until you start paying attention. | Generations gather under soft light. The scene says community, but the frame suggests display. |
I knew my grandmother’s Sunday bodega order by heart: one packet of Marlboros, a large bottle of Pepsi, and two large bags of Lays chips to go with whatever sandwiches she was going to whip up for our special time of watching cozy murder mysteries on television. That was the setup every Sunday: while everyone else was at church or Sunday school. It would just be her, my sister, and I lounging in her house, letting the screen filter in policed versions of what the media perceived Black life in the United States to be. Children at the center of it would either be heroes or criminals, victims or martyrs — bodies on display as the spectacle of desire.
American Black kids know, long before they see the cop shows that splash across their grandparents’ TV screens, what it means to be policed and put on display much like the child actors — except they don’t get paid to display the spectacle, they become the example. They know the cops on television weren’t made for the Black kids who walk home in groups to and from school, kids who grow weary as they are asked to stop, show their school IDs, open their bags, and tell if they live in their area. The neatness of the screen is a far cry from the mundane routine that too many youths in the United States live with daily. Because while watching mysteries was fine. And thinking about how you would solve a crime to save your friend, your life, was fine; the reality we already lived was set. Shifting between the fine lines of what was fiction and fact, with only the soft scents of vanilla, leather, and Marlboros to remind you to stay aware of what happens next to bodies that were already deemed by the state as wayward.
We used to watch it all — or at least all that we could on a Sunday: Law and Order: SVU, Law and Order, NCIS, Murder, She Wrote. Depending on the channel the topic and tone would be set for the afternoon. The practice sustained my grandmother’s understanding of keeping up with what the police thought we were doing and what we could and what we could or should be doing in opposition. After all, the stories told on the screen were always going to be a far cry from the justice, perceived justice, that was preached there as progress. My Grandmother sat with us, reminding us that not only was every day not promised (though she believed in the beauty of it) but that we needed to stop pretending that representation is transformation. Because seeing a Black cop doesn’t mean you’re safe, any more than seeing a white one. That is as clear now as it was then: how violent the state is, how it needs to placate you into thinking your desire for safety can be met in terms of the conditions it has set for our survival.
Honestly, my grandmother would have loved Only Murders in the Building, but in the same way she loved the other shows—she peeled them apart like fresh fruit. “It’s breathable”, she’d say. It’s something you can sit with. Something that lets you play along. She had a deep knowing about life: one shaped by living in a world that constantly asked her to survive its contradictions. That knowing came from existing inside an anti–Black society built on the carceral desires and colonial memories that still shape what we're shown and how we're shown it. These shows were never just entertainment; they were tools. And we observed them.
We know, as James Baldwin said, “whiteness better than it knows itself” (Peck). We’ve had to. We see the reports on Cop Cities cropping up across America. We watch the docuseries of serial killers and cold case murders. We see more Black cops in real life than in the shows, walking the streets of New York with the same authority and power as their white counterparts. And still, we're told to be grateful. Grateful that they look like us. Thankful that they might "understand" our material conditions. But the conditions haven't changed. Only the casting has.
Baldwin called media "the language of dreams" because it speaks to our subconscious, telling us who we are, what we're allowed to desire, and what stories we should believe (Baldwin 33). That language is powerful. Not because it reflects truth but because it creates a dangerous comfort.
We see Black face in high spaces, in recurring roles, leading shows, playing detectives, and it feels like something is shifting. But it isn’t. They still follow the same scripts. They still protect the same systems. And that’s the point. Shows like Only Murders in the Building doesn’t ask us to challenge the lie. Instead the show asks us to relax into it, find comfort through it. To believe that having a Black, queer, or fat cop is a sign of progress instead of a rebranding of the same logic. And it feels good, doesn't it? To see someone on screen who looks like they might care. To dream that maybe this version of the police could work. That perhaps it could be different. But dreams don't change this type of system. They soften it. They sell it back to us in a form we're more likely to consume. My grandmother knew this. She never trusted the badge, no matter who wore it. But she loved a good story — and so do I. That's the contradiction. We know the system won't save us, and still, we watch, and still, we hope. And that's where the danger lives: in that space between pleasure and belief.
Representation is dangerous when it's used not to disrupt the system but to protect it. Only Murders introduces us to Detective Donna Williams (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a character that feels fresh on the surface. She’s Black, queer, fat, and openly partnered with a woman. They have a baby on the way. She’s someone who, by all accounts, is supposed to make us feel seen. To showcase the progress that is missing from early detective and cop shows.
And she does make us feel seen. But that, in part, is the problem. She’s written to put both the characters and the audience at ease. She’s not aggressive, not corrupt, not a threat. She’s smart, soft-spoken, and competent, the ideal dream of a diverse cop. Williams manages to push back against some of the micro-aggressive stereotypes about fat black women ingrained into our media literacy. And because she checks off these boxes, we are encouraged to root for her, to trust her, even as she stands as representing the same system that criminalizes and surveils the communities she supposedly represents.
Detective Donna Williams doesn’t change the game. She just makes it look better.
This is what Joy James means when she warns us about “the terms of our own consumption” (James 269). We are so eager to see Williams as social progress, so glad to see a black body exist outside of ordinary conditions that we make a spectacle out of her. But Williams wasn’t written to disrupt power but to stabilize it. Her character arrives just as the system, in reality, was losing its grip on public trust in the aftermath of the BLM protests of 2020. Her presence doesn't shift power; it masks it. We are made to feel like her identity makes her a trustworthy agent of the law. And because she represents multiple marginalized identities, we’re more likely to see her role as care and repair rather than state control. But that's the tradeoff: she becomes the fantasy that this version of the state is different, even though the functions remain the same.
There are no real risks associated with Wiliams. The show never asks, throughout season two, what it means to have someone like her enforce the same systems of power that regularly harm people who look like her — people who can't hide their black, queer, and fat realities from the gaze of representational power. Instead, I found her role to be that of an emotional buffer. She shows up when things are tense, i.e., when an arrest is being made, such as at the end of season one, or when the main trio consisting of Mabel Mora (Selena Gomez), Charles Hayden-Savage (Steve Martin), and Oliver Putnam (Martin Short) need a reset. Williams becomes the audience's reassurance that things are under control and that order will be restored. But "control" here still means surveillance. And surveillance still means punishment. Even when Williams expresses doubts or frustrations, like when she says it's hard being a Black cop to her wife, she is not acting outside of the system; she only confirms it. And when the trio are looking for her while she takes maternity leave, her role becomes even more symbolic. She's not there to investigate; she's just there to remind us that the cops are still watching and that we’re supposed to feel grateful that it’s her helping them.
That is how representation works when it’s captured. It’s not about visibility. It’s about utility. Characters like Williams are used to make the system appear and feel softer, safer, and more diverse. But softness doesn’t equal safety. And diversity doesn’t mean freedom. As bell hooks reminds us, representation can seduce us into believing we’ve arrived somewhere we haven’t (hooks 5). That’s how it keeps us watching, even when nothing’s changed. My grandmother had a way about her that could see through that. She would’ve asked us: what happens when the one who looks like you is the one who shows up to arrest you? What is to really trust about that?
But the problem isn’t just who represents the system. It’s how we are taught to enjoy it. That’s where the audience comes in. It's easy to enjoy a show like Only Murders in the Building. The show is funny, charming, and never too heavy, even though it's about murder. That's part of the seduction. We get to play detective, to feel smart, even righteous, without ever having to question what it means to turn murder into a game. The show softens the brutality by keeping everything just neat enough to be cozy. The characters aren't detectives, but they act like them. The building's residents all have secrets. Suspicion of your neighbors becomes entertainment. And in the middle of it all, the audience learns to find joy in surveillance, comfort in paranoia, and satisfaction in the moment of neat arrests.
That is what is so jarring and what makes the spectacle so powerful. Death isn't treated with grief but with glee and as a puzzle to solve. The pain of loss, the consequences of violence, it all gets pushed aside so that the mystery can unfold cleanly. And such things are rarely clean. This is the true nature of the genre more broadly. With the crop of crime podcasts, docuseries, and even social media rituals like "In Case I Go Missing" binders, they all feed the same hunger. We're trained to want resolution, to believe that justice comes through accusation and punishment. That a confession makes everything right again. And it’s no mistake that even in a show that centers on "community,” the final solution still relies on the state. The moment someone is arrested, we're supposed to feel closure unless it's a false end. Because closure, in these stories, always means that someone ends up in handcuffs. But the reality is never that neat or simple.
Even as the show tries to control the narrative towards intimacy and care, the repeated line throughout season two where the characters claim they’re “becoming a community" falls short. Because what are we trained to want here? Why do we feel good when closure comes via the state? The residents say they care about the lives of their neighbors. Instead, what they really care about is what the deaths are doing to the reputation of the building. Everyone’s a suspect, even the main characters we are taught to find loveable. Thus, the “community care” we've sought isn’t built on solidarity but surveillance. That's how these narratives work. They train us to look sideways at our neighbors, to turn inward with suspicion, and to hand the final decision back to the police, even when we claim to distrust them. And that pleasure we feel, the neat ending, rests on a carceral foundation that we are meant to enjoy without question.
This isn’t just entertainment. These shows teach us to look sideways at our neighbors.
Even when we say ACAB, we’re still taught to hand the story over to them. My grandmother knew that. She would talk to us about being careful, about watching for the shift in the narrative—how quickly the story could turn on those accused and how easily the system decided what counted as justice. And now, as I sit with her memory, I wonder what she was really asking: What do we lose when we keep mistaking recognition for liberation?
Sometimes, I think about how she and her neighbors relied on each other. Checking in to make sure everything was alright. Asking if anyone needed anything that someone was offering. Teenagers doing grocery runs for older people. Retirees watched the block’s children while parents were still at work. Parents walking to the station to collect the kids from the F train. Block parties to raise money for class trips and scholarships. That was care. That was protection. Abolition demands that we imagine otherwise. Not better scripts or softer cops. Not more representation, but less punishment. Less fear. Less need for the neat ending that comes with a pair of cuffs.
The real mystery isn't who did it; it's why we're still so willing to believe that punishment will make us safe—and who benefits when we keep believing it.
