Elsbeth: "Poetic Justice" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired November 6, 2025)

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

Fortunately, last night’s (Thursday, November 6) NBC-TV special Wicked: One Wonderful Night ended after two hours instead of three (which I feared), so I was able to switch to CBS and watch another episode of the comedy-mystery series Elsbeth. This was called “Poetic Justice” and was the rather sad tale of Gary Pidgeon (William Jackson Harper), a tall, strikingly handsome African-American who’s publishing a monthly poetry magazine called The Pidgeon Print and hoping that an elderly woman, Delores Feinn (Lois Smith), will bail his publication out of its ongoing financial difficulties, either through a contribution while she’s still alive or a major bequest in her will. He’s facing rivalry from another publisher with a poetry magazine called Tumbleweed. Delores writes excruciatingly bad poetry (one of her poems begins with a line containing “cerulean azure,” which as most of the people who read it point out are just two words for the color blue) which reminded me of the great spoof of Gertrude Stein in the W. C. Fields movie The Man on the Flying Trapeze (1935): “Up is down, and down is out/I was down and out.”

In the opening scene, Pidgeon works out a way of murdering Delores and making it look like an accident: he unhooks her oxygen tank, leaves her alone for hours, then calls her to encourage her to write something. Knowing that one of Delores’s many quirks is that she always has to smoke while she writes, he knows that just before she starts, Delores will light a cigarette – and that will cause an explosion from the oxygen and kill her on the spot. He feels he needs to do this in a hurry so Delores can’t change her will and leave her presumed fortune to Tumbleweed’s publisher instead. So, as in the old Columbo series, we know who the killer is from the get-go and the suspense is in finding out how he (or she) will be brought to book. In fact, through most of this episode, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) and her official police officer partner, Detective Rivers (Braeden De La Garza, who is hot!), make such nuisances of themselves to try to extract a confession from Pidgeon that Elsbeth looks even more like Columbo in drag than she has before. Ultimately they trick Pidgeon into confessing by saying that the oxygen that came out of the hose he pulled out of Delores’s tank would have discolored his jacket, and they confront him at his dry cleaners’ and goad him into confessing while Rivers records it all on his phone. Also it turns out that Delores Feinn didn’t really have any money at all, nor did she really need oxygen; she just pretended she did so she could get invitations to dine at fancy restaurants at other people’s expense, and she used the oxygen setup as an excuse to get the best tables. This Elsbeth was a quite charming episode and a welcome send-up of the pretensions of the literary world and how they will essentially prostitute themselves for money even while claiming they are above all considerations of filthy lucre.