The CrimeCon Clue Awards have cracked the case. The case, it turns out, was: how do you give a prize for crime-solving to a show where the crime was made up and the solution was written in the writer’s room on a Tuesday afternoon? The answer, it appears, is the same way you solve any crime — confidently, and without asking too many follow-up questions.
This year’s ceremony awarded “outstanding scripted series” to Only Murders in the Building, a show whose detectives are, by the program’s own premise, three people who have no business detecting anything. That is the joke. That is the whole joke. CrimeCon has now given that joke a trophy, which means the trophy is also the joke, which means CrimeCon has committed the only crime in this story: awarding a prize for solving something that was pre-solved by the person who invented it. Congratulations to Hulu. The butler did it, the network collected the hardware, and the crime never happened.
The outstanding docuseries award went to Girl on the Run, which documents a real case — meaning, to be fair, that someone actually did solve something. That award makes straightforward sense, which is precisely why it sits next to the other one like a notarized document filed next to a napkin sketch. The Clue Awards have now established that “crime-solving” is a category large enough to contain both genuine investigative work and Steve Martin in a podcast-themed bathrobe.
There is a word for a competition that gives equal standing to people who solved a real mystery and people who solved a mystery they also wrote. The word is “awards ceremony.” In fairness, all awards ceremonies do this. CrimeCon has simply done the courtesy of putting it in the name.