Hulu’s Only murders in the building has taken a big leap in Season 3, focusing on crime-solving podcasting trio Charles (Steve Martin), Oliver (Martin Short), and Mabel (Selena Gomez), and the season’s crime revolves around a massive theater production led by newcomer Loretta, played by Meryl Streep.

The risk paid off. The series, created by Martin and John Hoffman, received a whopping 21 Emmy nominations in several major categories, including Best Comedy Series, Best Actor nominations for Martin and Short, Best Actress for Gomez and Best Supporting Actor for Streep.

Outside of the acting categories, the Television Academy honored composer Siddhartha Khosla, songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, and choreographer John Carrafa. All four joined Deadline as part of Contenders Television: The Nominees to talk about collaborating to create a stirring musical dramedy as the centerpiece of season three.

“Justin and I described it as going to the theater, to an overnight summer camp, and it was just the best summer of our lives,” said Pasek, who was nominated along with Paul and collaborators Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman for best original score and best lyrics for the song “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?”

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Khosla, who has served as the show’s composer since the show’s inception, revealed what it was like introducing several new original songs created for the stage production, greatly increasing the overall scope of the show compared to Seasons 1 and 2.

“I started early. I heard demos of the songs Justin and Benj were writing; John shared them with me,” he said. “I remember we got a little demo of the song they wrote for Meryl with Sara Bareilles singing it, and I remember being just blown away by what I heard.”

Paul adds: “Do you remember thinking, ‘This feels like it was inspired by my film score?’ Because it was.”

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To complete the vision of the musical numbers, Caraffa contributed his skills as a Broadway choreographer. He is nominated for best choreography for a screenplay for “Oliver’s Dream Sequence / Creatures of the Night.”

“For me, the fun of this project was that I got involved pretty early on in what a choreographer does, which is help create the music, which is really rare on most of the TV shows I do,” Caraffa said. “A good example is … ‘Oliver’s Dream.’ John Hoffman came to me (and said), we’re trying to license a song for this dream sequence or write something. We don’t really know what to do. And I said, it’s a Fosse sequence, you don’t have to write anything. We’re taking Sid’s themes from the show and building something out of them. I told John to write some lyrics and we would use some percussion instruments and use Sid’s piano theme and build a Fosse, oh, you know, kind of a classic Fosse breakdown.

“I think that’s what I’m most proud of of everything I’ve done for television because I got to be involved in the musical creation process.”

Check back on Monday to watch the panel video.