John Hoffman is happy the Television Academy didn’t forget “Only Murders In The Building’s” second season which was released over a year ago. Not only did the show earn a second Outstanding Comedy Series nomination, but he and two of his co-writers (Matteo Borghese and Rob Turbovsky, in particular) were recognized in the Outstanding Writing For A Comedy Series category. But during our conversation earlier this week, it’s clear he really wishes his cast could speak to the press about their experiences in the new, third season. And maybe Meryl Streep could tell why she asked (yes, asked) to be a part of the hit Hulu and Disney+ (outside of the U.S.) series.

READ MORE: “Only Murders In The Building” Review: Season 3 is funny again and rents out space to fantastic guest stars [Review]

Hoffman says that Streep reached out to her friends and “Only Murders” stars (and executive producers) Steve Martin and Martin Short about being on the show as she was looking for “a moment of levity in her life.” It turns out Hoffman, along with executive producers and writers Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal, had been discussing an integral new character for the season, Loretta at the same time. He recalls, “And literally on that couch, two weeks before the call from Meryl to Steve and Marty came, I said to Dan and Jess, ‘The perfect person to play this, to play a down-in-her-luck actress who’s forgotten a big break would be Meryl Streep.’ And we all laughed like, ‘Yeah, that would be really fun, but never going to happen.’”

A month and a half later Hoffman was going over the character with Streep on a Zoom call. But for anyone who has seen the first episode of Season Three, it gets even more interesting.

“There was more importantly a deeper connection to it than I would’ve ever predicted, which was I started to tell her the opening of our first episode for “No Strings,” and this little 10-year-old girl from St. Louis at her first Broadway show gets smitten by the Broadway bug or the theater bug. And I said, ‘It was ‘No Strings’ or a Richard Rogers musical.’ And she cut me off right at the beginning, and she said, ‘I saw that.’ And she said, ‘Diahann Carroll, my mother took me to it when I was about 10.’ I was like, ‘O.K!’ And she literally on the Zoom started to sing the song that our lovely Rosharra Francis is singing in the opening of Season Three.’”

The series co-creator continues, “And I was like, ‘Meryl, you have to stop right now because I’m going to lose it, because I’m going to send you the script after we hang up this Zoom, and you’re going to see on page one that lyric you just sang is on page one.’ And we were both like, ‘What the hell?’ So it had that kind of lovely, unpredictable sort of sweet fate around it.”

Over the course of our interview, Hoffman reflects on “Only Murder’s” second season Emmy nomination haul, if the show drops easter eggs that matter throughout the season, how they got Selena Gomez to sing and dance in Season Three, and much more.

Please note: There are spoilers regarding the first two episodes of “Only Murders In The Building” season three in the context of this interview.

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The Playlist: Congratulations on all the Emmy love. I know that Season Two came out pretty much a year ago, what was your reaction when the nominations came out?

John Hoffman: “Phew, they remembered.” It was nice to see, all of that, and very grateful because it’s a wealth of great television right now. So it’s always sort of a moment of, “Oh, will they…” And this one in particular, “Will they remember?” was a big thing. And it was sweet. It’s the greatest feeling when it hangs in the memory, and there’s great support obviously that way too.

With Season Three now dropping, we have another storyline that is tied to the previous one. How do you plot all this out with your writers, and how far have you plotted it out? Because it’s so intricate and complicated, and it has to be a ton of work.

Thank you for saying that, it really is. The goal of course is to make it look fairly effortless, real, and amidst insanity, and big, bold leaps trying for things that are more challenging than it might appear in a 30-some-odd-minute, half-hour comedy. So the challenge of writing this show, and I really in this time particularly, I can’t say enough about what our writers do, and how fairness should be built into how they’re compensated and dealt with. So, I very much stand in solidarity in this moment with them, and with the actors to which this Season Three is such an homage, particularly to the creative risks. But beyond that, the risks involved in this kind of show are myriad because you are trying to obviously weave and thread well-thought-out, both emotional arcs and mystery arcs, creating comedic premises. Which have to be honed to a tee to match the stylings of our central trio, and fit well into all of those other things that we’re weaving. It does just mean you’re carrying balls in the air that you can’t forget, or do your best to sort of weave. And really build the whole season before you can put pen to paper on Episode 1.

You sort of didn’t answer my question. [Laughs.] So have you planned out beyond the current season? I have not had time to see all the screeners for Season 3 yet but is there a plan where the thought is, “O.K. this is where we want to go for Season 4, for Season 5, let’s leave breadcrumbs, let’s introduce this.” Are you guys that planned out, or is each season itself such a monster it’s too hard to do that?

That’s a great question. I think the key here is that you have to be open to flexibility. So yeah, we are constantly positioning endings of seasons as we’re building the seasons because it’s about the springboard into a potential, a hopeful next season. Now, in Season One and Season Two, they were very much sister seasons. The big reveal was how Poppy was revealed as the central subject of a podcast that drew this trio together at the very beginning of Episode 1. So that whole string was understood and intentionally built to deflect, deceive, and twist to get there. So, that was a big ass structure. And then Season Three necessarily and delightedly I think wanted to switch it up a little bit, and I can’t talk about the end of Season Three.

As you move forward are you dropping little narrative ideas that you could or could not use if you wanted to down the road?

Yes, in Season Two we did that many times, and I love doing that. There’s just this great comfort of knowing where you’re going, and knowing the story you’re telling in order to do that. And so making the decision about what’s going to happen in Episodes 9 and 10 very strongly when you’re shooting Episodes 2 and 3, and being able to say, “Hey, here’s a moment where we can drop in this thing.” Just visual things. I remember talking with Cherien Dabis who brilliantly directed for us in [all three seasons]. But in Season Two there’s this one shot in Episode 6 of Poppy sitting under that podcast poster, and it says literally the catchphrase of that podcast poster is, “Where is Becky Butler?” So there’s this little easter egg of Poppy sitting under that right at the top of Episode 6 when we’ve got a big reveal yet to come in Episodes 9 and 10.

You get to the final episode of Season Two which has multiple twists in it. And the audience could have taken it like, “Oh, this is too much. Just tell us who the murderer is.” And they don’t, it played well. And also that’s the episode that your peers in the writing branch nominated, if I’m correct.

You are, it’s amazing.

Can you talk about the complexities of that episode? Because you were just talking about leaving Easter eggs, and I’m thinking about the end of that episode. You do the time jump, Paul Rudd collapses on stage and he has what looks like fake blood on his mouth. As if anyone has seen the first episode of Season Three, you clearly had to have planned out what was going to happen down the road, assuming Paul would come back and do all this. Honestly, that would stress me out.

Can I call you when I’m stressing out? Because don’t believe that I don’t stress out. [Laughs.] Yes, going back to that episode, the “I Know Who Did It” episode, the finales of our show are always great group efforts, and this one is no exception. And Dan Fogelman was huge in this one. We do a lot of homages in our show, so this concept of a drawing room reveal with our full cast in one spot where the murder occurred basically, and where the murderer once lived felt so right for the culmination of the mystery we’re telling in Season Two. But then the whole podcast nature and unspooling that felt necessary to where we would end up going and the theatrical side of Oliver, Charles, and Mabel. But the key to this one in its very intricate twists and reveals, and they come unspooling very quickly, was making that line feel like a roller coaster you understood. And the track underneath was solid, and you were pointing at things and hitting things that should be a little bit dizzying in a way. And then it’s all really set up with a scene that I just was thrilled with the way it came out, especially, and I loved writing it. It was this first initial scene of the quartet, of Poppy with our trio at the Pickle Diner at the very beginning, where they’re trying to get information on Cinda Canning [Tina Fey], and they find out from Poppy that Cinda Canning is… How do we throw her off her game? And ridiculous notions of she’s terrified of slow motion and the inside of a tomato. So that’s the show, it balances the ridiculous with the very intricate plotting. But then you get this tremendous delight in watching Steve Martin and Martin Short go expansive in that comedic genius way, to go in slow-mo and scare Cinda Canning with a tomato. Those are the delights, but it’s the setup that’s very particular. And then when you come back to that scene, through Mabel’s eyes particularly, that’s the key scene where they realize, “Holy sh*t, we’re sitting with the murderer.” And that’s where we understand that everything we’ve seen in Episode 10 in the middle of it has been a ruse to really pin it on the person they figured out at the diner at the beginning of that episode. So, it was a delightful experiment in the dance of a riff on Agatha Christie there for us that entire episode, but a challenge certainly to get right and thread that needle so it was clear all the way through.

When you have season guest stars like Cara Delevingne or you have Meryl, or you have Paul, are you able to tell them their arc before they jump in? Or are you usually still in the process of writing it?

Well, both. O.K., yes, I do everything I can to let them know as much as I can. So, I’m able to walk them through their arcs. But I’m the kind of person that feels terribly insecure at that moment when a Meryl Streep comes up to you and says, “What am I thinking?” I don’t want to say, “I don’t know.” But on the other hand, I’m happy and I’ll jump in to say I don’t know in certain cases too, because I just don’t want to fake it. And I think you get partners of extraordinary nature from Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Selena Gomez, all the way through Cara, and Season Three’s group is insane. But you have partners who understand the creative process, and I’m also delighted when I see in their eyes, “Oh.” They get a little tingly, they get nervous maybe, and maybe they’re hiding it. But it’s also I’m letting them in on this process to sort of say, “We’re all going to find out, but here’s a couple of options. Here’s this one way we could go or this way. And what I’m thinking is this, does that connect?” And I’m looking for a way to sort of understand it from the actor’s perspective too, because those actors, particularly the trio, know those characters now so well that they will tell you, “This one feels like maybe not me.” And I’m like, “Great, let’s listen up and let’s change, or let’s find the way that feels more you.”

I have a couple of questions about this particular season without spoiling things for people. First off, how hard was it to get Selena Gomez to do the little cabaret number in Episode 2? Because she hasn’t really sung in the show I don’t think before then. Was she up for it?

She was so up for it. And beyond that, it was more just a discussion, and rightly so, of her being truthful to that character, and the way in which we do it. And she said it feels perfect to her because it’s Oliver’s fantasy. And what’s sweet about it and what the key part to me was, and we talked a lot Selena and I about this, was that it remained true to Mable. So, that right from the get-go when she’s standing in that very Ann Reinking hat and the first words out of her mouth are, “Relax, Putnam. I’m not into this musical sh*t.” And that’s just pure Mable. Once we had that, we could take it off and go, and she was free to give it a little bit of a rye wink in the way Mable would do that number. But it breaks my heart on other levels that we can’t have Selena Gomez singing and dancing in the way that she’s so fantastic at, sort of like in other areas, but it’s Mable.

I did think at the end of that, when she does the wink, the wink is really “I know I’m Selena Gomez and I’m doing this, and I’m telling you” which I thought was very cute.

You got it, exactly.

The second question is, and I know you’ve already been asked this many times is how on earth did you get Meryl Streep to do this? Who asked? And did she have any concerns? Did she want to be the killer? Did she make requests?

No requests that way, but she wanted to know if she was. And I’m not telling a thing. And we joked about it later. She joked with me, “What you do is you call up the show you like to be on with the actors you want to be on with, and you say, can I be on your show? And then turns out that works well.” I’m like, “Not for everyone Meryl.” But it was, for her. [Laughs.]

But she called you guys. She asked to be on the show.

Yeah, she reached out to Steve and Marty, her friends, and she was very much looking for a moment of levity in her life. And it had such a fateful edge around all of it when this started happening because it was two weeks before that moment that Dan Fogelman and Jess Rosenthal and I were talking about a character for this third season, such as Loretta, in very big detail. And literally on that couch, two weeks before the call from Meryl to Steve and Marty came, I said to Dan and Jess, “The perfect person to play this, to play a down-in-her-luck” actress who’s forgotten a big break would be Meryl Streep.” And we all laughed like, “Yeah, that would be really fun, but never going to happen.” So two weeks later she’s calling and they said, “Well, that’s so crazy because we have this show, and we’re doing the show with this part that they’re developing.” And then it was only about a month and a half later that I was on a Zoom with her walking her through the entire arc for the character. And there was more importantly a deeper connection to it than I would’ve ever predicted, which was I started to tell her the opening of our first episode for “No Strings,” and this little 10-year-old girl from St. Louis at her first Broadway show gets smitten by the Broadway bug or the theater bug. And I said, “It was No Strings or a Richard Rogers musical.” And she cut me off right at the beginning, and she said, “I saw that.” And she said, “Diahann Carroll, my mother took me to it when I was about 10.” I was like, “O.K!” And she literally on the Zoom started to sing the song that our lovely Rosharra Francis is singing in the opening of Season Three. And I was like, “Meryl, you have to stop right now because I’m going to lose it, because I’m going to send you the script after we hang up this Zoom, and you’re going to see on page one that lyric you just sang is on page one.” And we were both like, “What the hell?” So it had that kind of lovely, unpredictable sort of sweet fate around it.

My last question for you is, if you could tease anything for Season 3, what would you tease?

Well, I won’t say too much. One of the huge leaps in accomplishments I hope for Season 3 going forward, is that we didn’t just say, “Meryl, come along and we’ll have funny scenes and do all this insanity.” We upped it for even ambition and insanity for ourselves to “Can we pull this off?” I believe and feel very proud of the fact that within the fabric of the show, you can have Meryl Streep, you can have some songs, you can have this and that, but it all feels organically of a piece as the fabric of our show. As opposed to sort of, “Oh, we’re over here now, and this feels like we’ve gone in this direction.” It was very important to me to keep the spirit of the show and tie both those things together. So, we make it sing hopefully for everybody.

All three seasons of “Only Murders in the Building” are available on Hulu