Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are the latest artists to achieve EGOT status, winning the Emmy for best original music and lyrics for their Only Murders in the Building composition, alongside Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?.”
The duo, who took home the trophy Sunday, during the second night of the 2024 Creative Arts Emmys, beat out fellow nominees Sara Bareilles for Girls5eva‘s “The Medium Time”; the Saturday Night Live team of Eli Brueggemann, Maya Rudolph, Auguste White, Mike DiCenzo and Jake Nordwind for “Mother” from the variety series’ Mother’s Day episode; The Tattooist of Auschwitz‘s Hans Zimmer, Kara Talve, Walter Afanasieff and Charlie Midnight for “Love Will Survive” and True Detective: Night Country‘s John Hawkes for “No Use.”
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The duo previously won the best original song Oscar for “City of Stars” from La La Land and the best musical theater album Grammy for Dear Evan Hansen, which also won them a Tony for best original score. They later won a best compilation soundtrack Grammy for The Greatest Showman and best musical Tony for their work as producers on A Strange Loop.
Pasek and Paul were previously nominated for a best original music and lyrics Emmy in 2018 for the Christmas Story Live! song “In the Market for a Miracle,” where they lost to Brueggemann and his SNL colleagues for “Come Back Barack.”
The “Pickwick Triplets” patter song is featured in the Broadway-set third season of Only Murders and is performed by star Steve Martin, whose character, Charles-Haden Savage, struggles to master the fast-paced tune. He finally gets it during the episode “Sitzprobe.”
The Only Murders writing team contacted Pasek and Paul to help make the series’ “Death Rattle Dazzle” musical feel as real as possible, with the pair also bringing other well-known Broadway songwriters, including Shaiman, Wittman and Bareilles, into the fold.
Paul spoke to The Hollywood Reporter last year about the process of writing songs for the show, including “Pickwick Triplets.”
“Finding those couplets was like a very fun, juicy experiment,” he told THR. “We came up with a huge long list of possibilities of what to pull from, here’s our palette that we want to work with lyrically and then going about telling the story that we had really broken down pretty thoroughly with [showrunner] John Hoffman. And then it was just the fun of executing it, finding our favorite lines, how can we keep besting each other, besting that line. It was a joy and certainly something that I know we would never have come up with on our own.”
Pasek added, “What was so fun was that John Hoffman and the writers really engineered this moment to have several moments in the show where you as an audience member are waiting for the payoff to see whether or not [Martin] can do it. And often when songs are used in TV shows, in our experience, you’re chopping a song off, and even some of the songs from this musical are more in the background, while action is taking place elsewhere. And what was so exciting, particularly about the ‘Pickwick Triplet’ moment, and also ‘Look for the Light,’ is that those songs are so integral to the plot of what’s happening in the musical. So really, as an audience member, you’re waiting to see whether or not Steve Martin can get through a very, very difficult patter song full of alliteration and full of dexterity. And so it let us really get to be in a sandbox, where we got to really play and collaborate and try to reverse engineer the hardest thing to actually sing and then present that to Steve, who was unbelievable and was so up for the challenge and attacked it with such rigor and determination. Steve’s dedication to learning the song was really not dissimilar to [his character] Charles-Haden Savage, in that he had a real tongue twister to have to get through and he really approached it with such care and diligence.”
Pasek also recalled how Shaiman and Wittman gave the duo their “very first TV job” on the second season of Smash.
“Not only are we just fans of their work, but they’ve also just been wonderful, supportive writers in our lives,” he told THR.
With their win, Pasek and Paul join an elite club of EGOT recipients that includes Richard Rodgers, Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg, Frozen and The Book of Mormon‘s Robert Lopez, John Legend, Viola Davis and Elton John, who achieved EGOT status at the 2023 Emmys, which were handed out just eight months ago.
The duo also join Lopez as some of the youngest people to ever EGOT, with Lopez, Pasek, Paul and Legend all achieving the feat at the age of 39.
The pair are the second to EGOT as a team, after Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
