Elsbeth: "Elsbeth Flips the Bird" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired November 14, 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Elsbeth episode I watched last night (Thursday, November 14) was quite clever and charming, and it helped that it was not a mystery. Instead director Ron Underwood and writers Sarah Beckett and Matthew K. Begbie used the old Alfred Hitchcock trick of letting the audience in on “whodunit” from the get-go and building suspense from how the characters would find out and what would happen to them when they did. The opening scene takes place in the kitchen and dining room of an ultra-high-end restaurant owned and run by Chef Veev, true name Genevieve Hale (Pamela Adlon). Chef Veev is shown as so demanding a person and such a totally evil bitch that at first we assume she’s going to be the murder victim. Instead she’s the killer, and her target is a young kitchen assistant named Jordan Humphries (Aaron Gonner), who’s been going behind her back by selling reservations for her restaurant without her approval or knowledge. One of the parties Jordan got into the restaurant hung out there for so long that Veev had to turn down a hoten bigwig, Mr. Montebello (Drew Moore), from whom she was hoping to get a contract to run the restaurants in a number of his hotels. Veev confronts Jordan in the downstairs kitchen and ultimately bludgeons him to death with a meat tenderizer, then hits herself with it to make it look like they were both victims of an attack by an avocado goon squad. I’m not making this up, you know: the writers explain that the major cartels, having run out of opportunities to make money off drugs, weapons and humans, are moving into produce. We’re told that the avocado cartel is using the same tactics the illegal alcohol distributors did in the 1920’s in gangster movies set then: forcing restaurateurs to buy avocados only from them … or else.

This reminded me of the 1949 movie Thieves’ Highway, which was about gangsters hijacking shipments of apples – when my husband Charles and i watched this one over a decade ago I jokingly retitled it Apples of Doom – but the kingpin of the avocado cartel has an alibi for the night Jordan was killed. He was at a fruit market selling his avocados, seemingly legitimately. Meanwhile the series lead, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston, who’s a lot more grounded and less air-headed than you’d have guessed from the promos for this series), is trying to learn Veev’s recipe for duck cassoulet – hence the episode title, “Elsbeth Flips the Bird,” since the gimmick is that the duck has to be turned in the oven at precisely the right moment to come out right. This is also what ultimately gives Veev away as the murderer: while she was supposedly unconscious after the assault on the kitchen floor, she nonetheless got up at the right time to turn the ducks she was slow-roasting all night. The writers use one of Dick Wolf’s favorite Law and Order tricks of having Veev get arrested at the most embarrassing moment possible: while she’s entertaining Mr. Montebello and seems on the verge of getting the big hotel deal she’s been angling for all episode. Charles said he doesn’t think this show is as good as Law and Order: Organized Crime – and he’s right, but with that one off the air and replaced by something called Found which seems like a preposterous series about a woman who kept a man locked in her basement for 12 years until he escaped and quite understandably vowed revenge against her, I’m having a lot more fun with Elsbeth instead.