Elsbeth: "Elsbeth's Eleven" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired November 7, 2024)

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

The Elsbeth episode that followed, “Elsbeth’s Eleven,” was a parody of the classic crime story Ocean’s Eleven, made first by Frank Sinatra in 1960 and remade with George Clooney in 2001. It centers around an ultra-exclusive New York jewelry store named Vivienne’s and its long-term clientele and staff. Vivienne’s has an exclusive members-only club for especially well-heeled customers who get to shop at parts of the store barred to ordinary people, even ordinary people with the money needed to afford their ultra-high-end merchandise. Among the people in the club are Roslyn Joshi Bridwell (Vanessa Williams), who’s trying to sponsor her friend Celeste (Jenn Lyon) for membership. Celeste is – or until recently was – the owner of a chain of frozen-yogurt shops that suddenly went bankrupt and left her broke. Roslyn is also down in the dumps financially, and when she and Celeste breeze into Vivienne’s for one of their usual high-class shopping sprees, they’re met by a newly hired manager named Valentina (Katie Lee Hill). Valentina has already forced Judith (Becky Ann Baker) to retire after 30 years of service to the company, and now she pisses off Roslyn by demanding “proof of finance” to continue to be allowed the rare privilege of shopping at Vivienne’s. Roslyn, Celeste and Judith immediately plot to rob the store at the annual gala held that week elsewhere in the same building as Vivienne’s, albeit a couple of floors down, when people in the store’s customer base will be allowed to borrow jewelry to wear for the one night.

The plot involves hiring Hugo (Adrien Martinez), a fence who can also make worthless copies of the real jewels for the heisters to substitute for the real ones when they turn in the jewels at the end of the evening; and also recruiting Claude Tobia (Patrick Breen), Vivienne’s security person and jewelry expert, to pass the fake jewels off and say they’re real. Unfortunately, Claude (who’s played as a screaming queen, by the way) has no interest in participating because Valentina has just given him a long-awaited promotion. So Roslyn spikes his teacup with a jeweler’s cleaning compound containing cyanide, and watches calmly as he dies. Word of this reaches the New York Police Department, though the head of the unit at the center of this show, a heavy-set African-American named C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), warns Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) and her friend and partner Detective Donnelly (Molly Price) to back off lest the police offend Vivienne’s high-end and ultra-exclusive clubs. Ultimately they go to the party dressed in the highest-end fashions they can scarf up for the occasion, having already turned Judith state’s evidence (or so they think!) so they can foil the robbery in progress. Elsbeth and her fellow police get the expected snobbery from the fellow guests who are legitimately part of the 1 percent (or the 0.1 percent, more likely), but ultimately they arrest Roslyn, Celeste and Hugo the fence. In a nice surprise twist, Roslyn goes back to her apartment to retrieve the jewels she bought from Vivienne’s over the years and goes to her safe to get them – but the safe is empty. Later we see Judith, who got off scot-free by turning state’s evidence, laughing and enjoying herself in a café in Lausanne at her own audacity, stealing all Roslyn’s and Celeste’s ill-gotten gains to finance her own escape from justice!