The White Room

The White Room is an enjoyable detour as it examines Charles neurosis and stage fright.

Having to perform a patter song during rehearsals. Charles is anxious and ends up frazzled. The others tell him he has entered the white room, a place where actors on stage go when they freeze.

Mable enters her own white room when she looks for a new apartment in New York. The clinical antiseptic kind and it is not her style.

Charles problems might stem from something more than doing a rap style song. Joy has moved in with him and Charles is uncomfortable with a new housemate.

Mable is uncomfortable when podcaster Cindy Canning shows up with a new lucrative proposal. The kind that would be useful when looking for a new apartment in New York.

The murder mystery was secondary. The trio have an early suspect with Kimber who sells anti ageing products on Tik Tok as a sideline but she looks like a red herring.

Enjoyable enough, funny in places and that is more to do with Steve Martin.

I loved the first season, the second season kind of twisted itself in the end. But both seasons stuck to the main premise of the murders in the building being investigated.

Here it looks like "Only theatrics in the building". This is the fourth episode and all we have till now, is how Martin Short is trying to revive his play into a musical and how Steve Martin is struggling to perform.

The murder investigation and podcast has become a side story which barely gets 5 mins in all this white room nonsense. Yes its good acting but I didn't sign up for the experience of what happens in Broadway and what theatre actors experience. It was how three people crack murders in the building and we are not seeing any progress on that front at all in this season.

Oh man! Steve Martin absolutely KILLS in this episode (not literally, mind you, just flexing his comedic abilities all over the place). We were crying from laughing so hard at the "Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It" white room sequences. And it absolutely did move the story along, so the naysayers should just sit back and enjoy the ride. I'm glad they're incorporating more musical aspects to fit in with Martin Short's character arc. With the Bob Fosse number at the start, to Meryl Streep's beautiful song a few episodes ago, this season is all about creativity while still focusing on the murders that occurred at the Arconia.

Their writers are fabulous!

Steve Martin's character is at the center of this episode, although the others are also quite wonderful. The White Room is a fictional place stage actors go to when they freeze on stage. Martin has a silly little song to sing in the play, and he is so panicked when he does it, he slips into the White Room. When he awakens, he has done some ludicrous thing and finds that he has embarrassed himself. Tina Faye gets back into the act with Mabel as they try to sort out the killer of the obnoxious actor. The one they suspected is not the one. She is selling products, using the theater where the guy died. The murder case seems secondary at the moment. But watch this to see what a comic genius Steve Martin.

This is one of my all-time favorite shows. There are just a lot of things I miss this season. I would love to see Ursula, Lester, Nina, Theo, and more people from the building. I'd also like to see the building itself more. I loved the building tenants' meeting from season 1 and the historical opening of the building of the Arconia in the 1900s from season 2. Over the years we got to see the apartments of Tim Kono, Jan, Howard, Bunny, Teddy, Nina...now we have so many fewer little cozy apartments. That microcosm feeling isn't really there for me as much.

Maybe I'm just not a fan of musical theater. It feels like they're rehearsing for something and I miss my show.

PS Andrea Martin still reminds me of Aunt Voula from My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Classic.