For a certain kind of listener, the true-crime podcast is the audio equivalent of crack cocaine. The perfect marriage of content and cliffhanger-friendly form, productions such as Dr. Death, S-Town, and In the Dark have been downloaded and dissected at a frantic pace ever since the first season of Serial streamed into the public imagination in 2014. True-crime podcasts have been the subject of doctoral dissertations, countless clickbait features, and heated online denunciations. (“The Killer Question: Are True-Crime Podcasts Exploitative?” asks the Guardian.) Given the genre’s explosion, is it any wonder that parodists and spoof artists have begun to flock to the scene?

Similar to its lamentably underwatched predecessor American Vandal, Hulu’s new comedy series Only Murders in the Building re-creates the true-crime experience in ways that are both satirical and sincere. The story of a murder investigation conducted by a trio of self-involved amateurs, Hulu’s program is The Hardy Boys meets Seinfeld meets Waiting for Guffman, with all the absurdity and irreverence that that combination suggests. Despite its cheekiness, however, the series never quite loses track of the mystery at its core: whether a young financier’s alleged suicide was, in fact, a slaying. The result of this duality is a show that delights in lampooning genre conventions but isn’t above a little cliffhanger magic of its own.