Elsbeth: "Foiled Again" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired February 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Law and Order: Special Victims Unit I switched to CBS for another episode of Elsbeth, which I’ve come to like a great deal even though its debt to Columbo – the elaborate schemes used by the murderers to escape being caught, and the tactics of the lead “sleuth” character essentially to annoy the culprits into confessing – is quite obvious. The show was called “Foiled Again” in a bad pun on the fact that fencing plays an important role in the plot. Once again, as on the Columbo show and in most of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies even before that, we in the audience know from the get-go who the killer is and what the motives are. The victim is Ethan Brooks (Rob McClure), director of admissions for the upscale elite Bodle College, and his killer is admissions counselor Lawrence Gray (Matthew Broderick). Years before Lawrence Gray had counseled Ethan Brooks and his parents to get him into an elite Ivy League school even though Ethan’s own ambitions were to go to a non-elite college and prepare for a career in theatre arts. Among the sports Lawrence insisted on teaching Ethan so his college application would be more impressive to the Ivy League schools was fencing. As our story begins, Ethan has just been appointed admissions director for Bodle and he’s so appalled at Lawrence’s tactics that he’s decided to blackball all Lawrence’s application clients no matter how qualified they might have otherwise seemed. I was amused that for the second week in a row I was watching a TV show in which a college admissions counselor was the villain; a week ago the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode had been about a college admissions counselor who sets up a side hustle by sending out texts to his student clients, ostensibly from people they know in high school, to extract nude photos of them that he in turn sells to online pedophiles. Lawrence worked out an elaborate plan to knock off Ethan that involves challenging him to a fencing duel for old times’ sake and triggering his long-term chronic asthma by lining the inside of his protective helmet with cat dander, which Lawrence extracted from his daughter’s pet cat, Veritas. (These are the sorts of people who would give their cats names like “Veritas” and “Quadcat,” the latter being one whose front paws have only four toes instead of the usual five.)

As Ethan goes into anaphylactic shock and expires – courtesy of a red string with which Lawrence has tied the back of Ethan’s helmet so he can’t just slip it off – Lawrence puts his foot on Ethan’s chest and says a line about how his application has been denied. Lawrence’s alibi is that he was administering a preparatory exam for the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) to a client while Ethan died, but Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) buys a copy of the LSAT prep test herself to time it to see if Lawrence could have slipped out and committed the murder while the student he was prepping was so engrossed in the test he didn’t notice the sudden disappearance of his proctor. There’s also a subplot involving Elsbeth’s son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), who’s coming to visit her and whom Elsbeth invokes for preliminary discussions with Lawrence about hiring him to coach her putative grandson, who hasn’t yet been born or even conceived, in getting into a top college because, as Lawrence likes to say, “it’s never too soon.” One of the things that makes this a great gag is that Teddy is pretty obviously Gay – he has a partner, Rudy (Louis McWilliams), whom Elsbeth waylays and interrogates in the police station for an hour and a half, obviously checking him out as potential son-in-law material – and therefore won’t have to worry about getting his kid into a high-end college unless he and Rudy adopt. There’s also a gag about Teddy’s relatively low level of ambition – he went to college, all right, but at the University of Illinois (remember that Elsbeth used to live in Chicago and practice law there until he got involved with a messy high-end divorce case), and after he graduated he went to work for a nonprofit – and another gag about Lawrence’s own daughter Melanie (Madia Hill Scott), who likewise rejected dad’s remorseless ambitions for her and took a “gap year” instead. She left her cat in Lawrence’s charge and when she returns, Lawrence tells her the cat is dead – but he’s actually just got rid of it out of fear that the living cat would blow his alibi. I really like Elsbeth – and I’ll readily admit that the initial promos for it turned me off because it made the show seem too cute – but I think writers Robert and Michelle King have got the right “sweet spot” between thrills and campy humor and the show is really engaging to me.