Law and Order: "Remedies" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 5, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, March 5) I watched Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on NBC and Elsbeth on CBS. The Law and Order episode, called “Remedies,” opens with a successful alternative-health entrepreneur and influencer named Emily Starr (Tess Marshall) leading a seminar and book-signing event at her wellness center. She “made her bones” in the wellness community by claiming she cured herself of cancer through entirely “alternative” methods, including diet, exercise, cleansings, enemas, and the like. Unfortunately for Emily, she’s cornered on the street and shot with a .22 pistol that turns out to have identical ballistics with a gun used in a robbery six years earlier. The police detectives investigating the case, Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his commander, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), trace the gun to the original robber, who served his time for the crime but has just been released after a six-year term. Unfortunately, while he was in prison his girlfriend pawned the gun, and the cops trace it first to a gun-store owner who has the usual Second Amendment twitchiness about being questioned by police but then lets them know it was a couple in New Jersey who bought that particular weapon. The police find surveillance footage of the alleged killer but can’t determine how old they are, what color they are, or even what gender they are. The killer turns out to be Mrs. Massey (Stephanie Szostak), whose attorney concedes in court that she did kill Emily Starr but she did so under the “imminent harm” exception to the laws against murder that says you can kill someone if that someone else is about to commit murder themselves or another crime so heinous it justifies terminating their own life to make sure it doesn’t happen. Mrs. Massey claims that Emily Starr was essentially killing her daughter Lauren (Georgia Waehler), who had cancer, by convincing her to cut off the standard treatments (radiation and chemotherapy), putting her on her regimen, and telling her to cut off all communication with her family and anyone else who might offer “negative thoughts” about her condition.

Only after Emily Starr’s death does Lauren return to standard care, where an MRI shows her cancer has spread. Within a month she’s in partial remission from the standard treatments, and in the trial she follows her mom on the witness stand and credits her mother with saving her life by killing Emily. The two prosecutors on the case, series regulars Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), have strong disagreements about how to handle the case, and at one point Price is ready to offer Mrs. Massey a plea deal to a lesser charge because he’s worried that the jury might have so much sympathy for her she might get acquitted. This episode reminded me of a similar one from the years Christopher Meloni was on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, “Retro” from October 28, 2008, which I remember horrified me at the time because it was a slashing attack on the AIDS dissident movement in general and my friend Christine Maggiore in particular. I later talked to her about it and she said there was an organization called “Hollywood and Health” that was lobbying the producers and staff members of TV shows like Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit to do episodes that would dramatize public health controversies and propagandize for the mainstream views. Ironically, Maggiore herself died in December 2008 while I was waiting to publish the second half of my interview with her in Zenger’s Newsmagazine (her death, like that of her daughter 3 ½ years earlier, was widely blamed on AIDS and led a lot of AIDS dissidents to turn away from the movement), and I made the second half a memorial to her. “Remedies” also took a strong stand against alternative medicine and for conventional treatments, though if I were confronted with an invasive cancer diagnosis I’m not sure myself which route I would take or whether I’d attempt to combine both. (I did have a mild colon cancer diagnosed through a colonoscopy, for which I underwent surgery to remove part of my colon, and a later colonoscopy showed no remaining trace of cancer.)

Aside from presenting the dilemma in a dramatically effective way, “Remedies” ends with Mrs. Massey’s murder conviction and a rather prissy statement from Nolan Price that murder is still wrong even when good people commit it for at least understandable, if not entirely sympathetic, reasons. The show’s script by Jennifer Vanderbes also throws in a few complications, including the five-figure sums Lauren was paying Starr for her treatments (her mom found out about her excursions into alternative health in the first place by seeing the charges on the family’s credit-card statements), and the prosecution’s discovery late in the trial that Emily Starr wasn’t actually a cancer survivor at all; she was either pretending to be one to justify her treatments or genuinely believed she’d beaten cancer when she really hadn’t. Price briefly considers disclosing this to Mrs. Massey’s attorney as potentially exculpatory material under the Brady rule, but Maroun talks him out of it. My long-time involvement with alternative health movements gives me a rather mixed view of this story in which I can identify with both sides, while at the same time I’m concerned about the loonier aspects of alternative health, including particularly its skepticism towards vaccinations that has led, among other things, to a recurrence of measles; this morning, as I accompanied my husband Charles to a doctor’s appointment, I was struck that in addition to the expected posted warning signs about flu and COVID-19, there were ones for measles.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Frequency" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired March 5, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show that followed after the flagship Law and Order on March 5, 2026 was called “Frequency,” and like the “Remedies” episode of Law and Order also used a gimmick that had been used previously on SVU. A child has been kidnapped by a predator and is being held in captivity inside a dog’s cage in a room in an unknown home, and the cops have to find the child and rescue him (in this case it’s definitively a he) before the sicko who took him gets tired of the game and kills him. The police stumble on this when the radio and video frequencies under which the perp is monitoring his captive somehow got jammed and end up being viewed by a middle-aged (straight) couple who use identical equipment to monitor their own pre-pubescent daughter. It’s therefore a race against time to see if the police can find where the child is being held before anything nasty happens to him. They also aren’t sure just who the kid is or how long he’s been held captive, and there’s one chilling scene in which they invade the office of an Asian-American doctor to ask if it could be her child, who’s been missing for over a year. She freaks out when her hopes are initially raised and then dashed again, and the people I felt sorriest for in the scene were her patients, who came there expecting a professionally competent woman doctor and ended up with an at least temporarily traumatized basket case. The newest member of the Manhattan SVU, Detective Jake Griffin (Corey Cott, who among other things is the sexiest cast member of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit since Christopher Meloni left), notices from the video that the captive boy is autistic, which he realizes because he had a younger brother who was autistic and the two worked out a system of non-verbal communication which he wants to try out on the captive. One quirk in Brant Englestein’s script is that the eavesdropping is two-way; the police can speak to the child (though, being autistic, he’s not inclined to answer verbally) and can also be overheard by his captor, who’s in a different location (it turns out) but is using the video feed to monitor his captive.

Ultimately the police identify the child as Avery Li (Camden Everett Kwok), son of Lauren Li (Elizabeth Sun), who reported him missing a year before. The cops also obtain a note written by the captor, which is printed in a childlike script full of misspellings, including “sturt” for “street.” From the note, and from her training in profiling from a male FBI agent she once dated and who fathered one of her own children, Detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish) deduces that the criminal is a loner with poor social skills, a lot of time on his hands because he probably isn’t working, and is a hoarder. The police ultimately trace the signals to an apartment occupied by Costa Lykos (Eric Edelstein), a sort of slovenly, proletarian version of Orson Welles. When Detective Rollins visits him as part of her investigation, he at first tries to divert her attention by giving her the address of a cousin named George who he says is the real crook. We figure Costa is the real abductor when he slams the door behind Rollins as she enters his apartment and we see he’s carrying a gun, but we also worry about Rollins’s safety because she’s trapped behind a locked door with a madman with a gun. Costa also turns out to have an elaborate ham radio setup and huge stacks of old newspapers on shelves (thereby checking off the “hoarder” box and making this show something of a busman’s holiday for me, since my husband Charles and I have an apartment filled with stacks of books, CD’s, DVD’s, and papers). Fortunately Rollins catches on in time when Costa writes the address of the either innocent or totally fictitious “George” on a slip of paper, and misspells “street” as “sturt” just the way the kidnapper did in his old note, which explained that he had taken Avery precisely to preserve his innocence instead of for physical or sexual abuse. Costa attempts to flee the scene through the subway system, but he ends up getting run over by a train (subway ex machina) and killed – alas, before he can reveal to the police exactly where Avery is being held. But because one of the things he told Rollins before he fled and was killed was that he had a mother diagnosed with terminal cancer, the cops trace the mother’s apartment and, behind the bed where she’s laying unable to go anywhere, they find a secret padlocked door which one of the male SVU members breaks down and discovers the dog cage with Avery in it. It was a grim and appropriately suspenseful tale even though as social comment it was hardly in the same league as the Law and Order “Remedies” episode just before it.

Elsbeth: "All's Hair" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired March 5, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the two Law and Order franchise episodes on Thursday, March 5 I turned from NBC to CBS and watched the latest episode of Elsbeth, a policier I’ve described as “Columbo in drag” because the main sleuth character, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), like Peter Falk in Columbo, essentially intuits who the killer is and eventually annoys him or her into confessing. This show was called “All’s Hair” and opens with a bizarre shouting match between a harried U.S. Customs agent (Terrell Wheeler) and the top five wigmakers in New York, each of whom specializes in one particular set of customers. Felix Weaver (Jeff Hiller, who looks oddly queeny and strikingly resembles the young Elton John) specializes in hair appliances for medical patients, including people on chemotherapy who’ve lost all their natural hair as a side effect. Gordon “Persimmon” Tuttle (Antwayn Hopper) is a Black wigmaker who specializes in doing drag queens and looks like he just walked in from the cast of Paris Is Burning. Domenico Cappelli (Al Sapienza) – his last name means “heads” in Italian, an odd “in” joke from writers Erica Shelton Kodish and Wade Dooley – is the wigmaker to the stars, including Diana Ross as well as several white celebrities. The wigmakers desperately plead with the customs agent to get their supplies of natural hair, while the customs agent pleads bureaucratic policy, says he won’t be able to release the hair until the next day, and closes his computer just to make sure they get the message. Then Felix gets a visit from morning TV host Lina Vyanti (Alexandra Wentworth) asking for a wig for her show. She usually goes to Domenico for her wigs, but for some reason she’s dissatisfied with him and wants Felix to do it. Felix in turn is delighted to have a chance to cut into the celebrity market that Domenico has been dominating, and agrees. But in order to make Lina’s wig he needs a sample of untreated naturally blonde hair, and to get it he simply sneaks behind a teenage girl with a long blonde ponytail and snips it off. Unfortunately, Domenico witnesses him do this and tries to blackmail him, demanding 40 percent of all Felix’s future earnings as the price of his silence. The struggle between them happens in Domenico’s living room, where Domenico’s mother (Patricia Mauceri) is simmering a large pot of homemade pasta sauce. Felix tries to take a taste of it but that just gets Domenico even angrier; he declares that Felix is not morally fit to eat his mother’s sauce.

The two have a struggle in which they both reach for, not a gun this time, but a curling iron, and Felix eventually strangles Domenico to death with the curling iron’s cord and steals some of his most prized wigs, including Diana Ross’s, to make it look like a burglary gone wrong. There’s also a subplot involving the captain of the squad Elsbeth works for, C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), and a wealthy donor to his charity who insists on involving the New York Police Department in stopping his daughter from being buried in high school. The daughter is a rising star in dressage (that preposterous 0.1 percenters’ sport described on Wikipedia as one “where the rider executes a memorized sequence of predetermined movements, directing the horse through the test using coordinated leg, seat, and rein aids”; it unexpectedly became an issue in the 1996 Presidential campaign when it turned out Ann Romney, wife of Republican nominee Mitt Romney, was a major participant in dressage). Her dad insists she’s being bullied and enlists Wagner to find out who and why, and though Wagner insists that it’s not part of his job description to settle quarrels between schoolchildren, ultimately he takes the case. It’s a good thing he does, too, because the two stories turn out to be linked: the daughter was the kid from whom Felix Weaver stole the ponytail he needed for Lina Vyanti’s wig. There are also a couple of other subplots that don’t link to the main intrigue; Elsbeth gets a sudden charm offensive from Winnie Crawford (Henny Russell), who unbeknownst to her is an operative for the opponent of the mayoral candidate Elsbeth has been dating; and there’s also an estrangement between Elsbeth and her Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) which police officer Reese Chandler (Ethan Slater) is trying to end by figuring out how to bring the two of them back together. Ultimately Elsbeth cracks the case by realizing that a hair from Felix’s wig for Lina ended up in Mama Cappelli’s spaghetti sauce when Felix tried to taste it. She also gets Felix to lift the bangs across his forehead, revealing a black scar where the curling iron burned his face during his struggle with Cappelli prior to killing him. This Elsbeth episode was a bit too campy for my taste, but at least it was fun, and like Columbo it builds suspense not by asking “whodunit” but “whosgonnagetcaughtandhow,” since we already see the murder go down in the first act before we see any of the police or other authority figures investigating it.

Sweet Bird of Youth (Roxbury Productions, MGM, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, March 4) I watched the 1962 film Sweet Bird of Youth on Turner Classic Movies, largely because there wasn’t much better to do. Sweet Bird of Youth was based on a 1959 play by Tennessee Williams, who’s not one of my favorite writers anyway. I’ve long suspected the peak of his popularity, between 1947 and 1959, came largely because of the ascendancy of the Method school of acting, including the tenet that an actor should draw on his or her own memories to play a scene by looking back on instances in their lives that paralleled what was happening to their characters. Williams wrote plays that lent themselves to that type of acting style because all too many of his characters are tortured by memories of events that happened in their backstories. Sweet Bird of Youth was produced at MGM by former RKO studio head Pandro S. Berman (when his credit appeared I joked, “Where are Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers when we need them?”), written and directed by Richard Brooks, and with Paul Newman as the male lead. Newman and Brooks had worked together on a previous film of a Tennessee Williams play, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), with Elizabeth Taylor as the female lead (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/11/cat-on-hot-tin-roof-avon-productionsmgm.html). (Ironically, in 1989 Taylor would appear in a TV-movie remake of Sweet Bird of Youth as the alcoholic, drug-addicted former movie star played here by Geraldine Page, with Mark Harmon from Star Wars in Newman’s role.)

Newman plays Chance Wayne, who grew up in St. Cloud, Mississippi until he left town to seek a career on Broadway. He made it as far as a featured role in a musical with two other men, and all three made it onto the cover of Life magazine. Then fate intervened in the form of the Korean War. Back home in St. Cloud, local political boss Tom “Boss” Finley, Sr. (Ed Begley) saw a chance to get rid of Chance, who was having an affair with Finley’s daughter Heavenly (Shirley Knight) very much against dad’s wishes, since dad would prefer to pimp her out to powerful older men who could advance his political interests. Finley puts Chance in command of a regiment raised in St. Cloud to fight in the war (incongruously setting him off to battle under the Confederate flag), and when Chance is wounded in combat he returns to the U.S. He settles in Hollywood, hoping to make it as a movie star, but the best he can do is become a beach boy. He attracts the attentions of fading movie star Alexandra Del Lago (Geraldine Page), who essentially hires him as a gigolo – it’s hard not to make the connection between this plot line and the story of the 1950 film classic Sunset Boulevard – who’s on the outs after a drunken scene at the premiere of her attempt at a comeback film. (She was upset when her close-ups revealed how old she really was.) Chance returns to St. Cloud in Alexandra’s Cadillac convertible and tries to pass himself off as a success, but the townspeople know better. Chance tries to resume his affair with Heavenly, but Finley uses his political power in town to frustrate them and keep them apart.

Finley is about to stage an Easter Sunday political rally on TV to respond to allegations being made against him by an outside candidate for the governorship, Brutus Haven Smith (James Chandler), a professor who’s discovered Finley’s big secret: he’s keeping a mistress outside of town, Miss Lucy (Madeleine Sherwood), and paying her rent and lavishing gifts on her in exchange for sexual favors. (One wonders why this is considered such a big deal, especially since Finley is a widower; his wife died years before the story we see takes place.) Finley is upset because his son Tom, Jr. (Rip Torn in a performance that steals the film) organized a “Youth for Finley” group that retaliated against Professor Smith by crashing his office and literally burning his books. If you had to do that, Finley tells his son, you should at least have dressed in white hoods instead of clown masks and burned a cross instead of books, so it could have been blamed on the Ku Klux Klan. While that political intrigue is going on (and frankly, it’s a lot more interesting than the romantic story!), Chance is attempting to extract a screen test and a movie contract from Alexandra while at the same time courting Heavenly and trying to get her to return to him, which is a tall order because (though we don’t find this out until the film is almost over) at one point Chance got her pregnant. Finley ordered an illegal abortion from Dr. George Scudder (Philip Abbott), who screwed it up and left Heavenly permanently infertile. Now he’s trying to marry Heavenly off to Dr. Scudder, and both Finley himself and his staffers and allies use various techniques to order Chance and his drunken, drugged-up movie-star companion out of town. There are a number of scenes between Heavenly and Chance that make it seem like she’s still interested in him as well as he in her, but she’s all too aware of how much her dad hates Chance and will do everything he can to make it impossible for them to get together.

Eventually the film’s climax takes place outside Finley’s big political rally, where Professor Smith drives by in a convertible with a bullhorn giving away Finley’s big secrets – not only that he had a mistress but he literally beat her and broke her fingers as revenge for her having written a note in the women’s bathroom of the hotel with red lipstick saying that Finley couldn’t get it up anymore. Tom, Jr. and three of his goons corner Chance outside the rally in the chaos of the situation, beat him within an inch of his life and threaten him with a D.I.Y. castration. (In the play they actually did that, but Richard Brooks had to change that because the Production Code, albeit slightly liberalized over the years, was still in effect.) They think they’ve beaten Chance so badly he’ll no longer be attractive to women and therefore won’t be able to make a living as a gigolo, but after some uncertainty Heavenly finally runs off with him and the two leave town together as lovers. That rewritten ending earned a lot of criticism at the time, including from Tennessee Williams himself, who called it “a contradiction to the meaning of the play.” One reviewer for a publication called FilmInk wrote, “You can have a popular film with a happy ending or a sad ending, that doesn’t matter – what matters is that it’s a just ending. Justice must be served. Chance didn’t deserve a happy ending in Sweet Bird of Youth. (If the filmmakers wanted that ending, they needed to make more changes throughout to justify a happy ending.)” Brooks agreed to lose the castration but worked out an alternate ending in which Alexandra and Miss Lucy would leave town together on a ferry and see Chance’s broken but still living body on a garbage scow, but the “suits” at MGM refused to let him shoot it.

As he had done with Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Brooks had his cinematographer (Milton Krasner here, William Daniels on Cat), shoot the film in pretty picture-postcard color instead of the black-and-white noir look the story’s darkness demanded, and justified it by saying, “It’s a very harsh picture, and I didn’t see why the photography had to be as harsh as the content.” One thing Brooks did right was recruit four actors from the original stage cast – Newman, Page, Begley, and Torn – to be in the film, though he had to fight the studio over Page because they didn’t think she was glamorous enough to be believable as a movie star, even a fading one. He was rewarded by the Academy, which gave a nomination to Page for Best Actress, to Knight for Best Supporting Actress, and to Begley for Best Supporting Actor. Begley actually won even though his character is a typical Tennessee Williams overbearing villain and a pale echo of Burl Ives’s work in the analogous role in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Once again, Boss Finley reminded me of Donald Trump, especially in the similarly mindless adulation he attracts from his supporters, who carry signs at the rally with slogans like, “Save us, Boss.” Given the flashback we see of Finley’s first campaign for office in the late 1920’s, I got the impression that we were supposed to read Huey Long as the real-life basis for his character: a man who emphasizes his humble origins, wins office with all the best intentions to serve the people, is drawn deeper and deeper into a swamp of corruption and self-dealing, but manages to retain his support with a “man of the people” image that no longer fits (if it ever did) what he’s actually doing with his power. Finley also reminded me of Trump in his determination to tar his political enemies as “Reds,” “Bolsheviks,” and “un-American,” and his visceral upset whenever anyone in the media criticizes him. In one scene he’s being shown a newsreel copy of a TV show exposing his regime as the corrupt, fraud-ridden mess it is, and he gets violently upset, demands that the film be stopped, and says that people shouldn’t be allowed to make films like that about him. But then by now, 11 years into the Trump Era of American politics, it’s almost a reflex-conditioned response for me to think of Trump whenever I see a film about a megalomaniac political leader using his power to corrupt absolutely!

All That Jazz (Columbia, 20th Century-Fox, 1979)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 1) Turner Classic Movies showed a night of Academy Award-winning or -nominated films about music and dancing, of which the one I decided to watch was Bob Fosse’s highly regarded, semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz (1979). This was the fourth of the five films Fosse directed, along with Sweet Charity (1969), an adaptation of a show Fosse had also done on stage but the studio, Universal, forced him to use Shirley MacLaine as the star instead of Gwen Verdon, Mrs. Bob Fosse, who’d played the part on stage; Cabaret (1972), which won Fosse the Best Director Academy Award; Lenny (1975), the biopic of comedian Lenny Bruce (which once again suffered a cast change from play to film; on stage Cliff Gorman had played Bruce, but for the movie they got Dustin Hoffman because he had a bigger movie “name”); All That Jazz (1979); and Star 80 (1983), about the rise to stardom of model and Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten and her murder at the hands of her ferociously jealous manager and husband, Paul Snider. I’d seen All That Jazz before in the early 1980’s at a party thrown by some of the friends Cat Ortiz and I knew at UC San Diego; they hosted a party of movies on videotape when that was still a major novelty. I remember not liking the film, finding it really self-indulgent and almost offensive, and calling it overrated while I thought Star 80 was underrated. But when I saw it on TCM’s schedule last night I decided to give it another try.

All That Jazz was based on an incident in Fosse’s real life: a heart attack he suffered while simultaneously directing the stage version of Chicago and editing the film Lenny in 1975. Fosse came near death as a result, and was inspired to create this film about choreographer and director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a womanizing alcoholic and drug addict who begins every morning with an implacably consistent routine: he takes Alka-Seltzer and Dexedrine while listening to a Vivaldi concerto (on cassette, which really dates this movie) while facing his bathroom mirror, then says to himself, “It’s show time!” He also has an ex-wife named Audrey Paris (Leland Palmer) whom he continues to work with in his shows, and a current main squeeze named Katie Jagger (Ann Reinking), with whom he has an argument when she wants to leave town for a six months’ tour with someone else’s show and he wants her to stay in town. There’s one grimly funny scene in which Audrey lets herself into Joe Gideon’s apartment (she still has his key) while Katie is in bed with him, and we brace ourselves for the seemingly inevitable confrontation … only it never occurs because Katie is able to hide her body behind Joe’s so Audrey doesn’t see her. Gideon is simultaneously working on a lumbering stage musical called NY/LA and editing a movie he’s shot called The Stand-Up, and dealing with both sets of producers. The Broadway ones are concerned mainly about the sheer amount of sexual content he’s working into the big numbers, particularly one called “Class” which supposedly takes place on an airliner and features not only men dancing with women but women dancing with women and men dancing with men. (It’s an interesting index of the grudging level of social acceptance Gay men and Lesbians were just beginning to claw towards in the late 1970’s before the calamity of AIDS associated the Queer community in general with illness and death.) The Hollywood ones are upset with how far he’s gone over budget both in shooting The Stand-Up and in editing it, including obsessively recutting a sequence in which Cliff Gorman’s character performs a routine satirizing Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her famous five stages of grief. (The routine features a nice line about how Kübler-Ross presented herself as a definitive authority on dying when she hadn’t yet died herself.)

Gideon is in the middle of rehearsing NY/LA when he starts getting symptoms of heart disease, which leads to a full-blown heart attack and eventually open-heart surgery. Having had open-heart surgery myself, I couldn’t help but think as the blatant med-porn of Gideon’s body being sliced open flashed on the screen, “Did this really happen to me?” (It did, and I have the chest scars to prove it.) The credits for All That Jazz contain an acknowledgment to Dr. John E. Hutchinson III as a technical advisor. It’s also grimly appropriate that Gideon’s doctor, Ballinger (Michael Tolen), is warning him to cut back on his drinking and smoking while both of them are puffing away like mad on cigarettes and coughing big-time from it. (One of my ongoing fascinations with older movies is seeing the sheer amount of smoking doctors, nurses, and patients all did in environments that today maintain rigid anti-smoking policies.) All That Jazz remains a fascinating movie, but not always for the right reasons. It co-won the Cannes Film Festival’s best-movie award the year it was shown there (1980) and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematographer, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay (for Fosse and Robert Alan Aurthur, who also produced the film and whose last project it was), but it only won for four lesser categories: Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Score. Before Roy Scheider got the part of Joe Gideon, it was offered to Paul Newman and also to Scheider’s former Jaws cast-mate, Richard Dreyfuss, but it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Scheider in the role, he’s so spot-on.

At the same time All That Jazz is a film I respect a lot more than I really enjoy; there’s a certain sick level of self-satisfaction in watching the downward spiral of a man who is clearly destroying himself, but at least for me it only sporadically works. You have to be given some reason why you should care about this man, and you aren’t except for a few ultra-brief flashes. There’s a grim ending sequence in which the producers of the show-within-the-show NY/LA realize that they’re actually better off financially if Joe Gideon dies, since if he croaks they’ll be able to collect enough profit from the insurance company to pay off the incurred costs and have $600,000 left over, while if they wait the four months before his doctors clear him to return to work on it, they’ll have to use their own money to keep the cast together. (I wonder if this was a problem for all the shows on Broadway which had to close when the COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect, at least a few of which did open after all once the lockdowns were lifted.) On my first go-round with All That Jazz I had especially disliked the final number, with Ben Vereen as “O’Connor Flood” enthusiastically singing off Joe Gideon with the Everly Brothers’ song “Bye, Bye, Love,” with the lyrics appropriately tweaked to “Bye, Bye, Life.” This time around that seemed like one of the best parts of the movie, along with the “Class” number: artfully rewritten and tweaked in the lyrics to give Gideon the larger-than-life send-up the character deserves. Two women are wearing body stockings emblazoned with drawings of arteries and veins as they become part of his chorus line, alongside all the doctors, nurses (including one he’s repeatedly made passes at), and others who’ve tried to take care of him. Then this spectacular number comes through a thudding halt and we see Gideon’s real end: he dies and is zipped up into a plastic body bag. Those are the two big spectacular numbers; the others are pretty much a compendium of Fosse’s Greatest Hits, with lots of jerky, almost robotic movements; lots of people waving and strutting around in hats, a sequence that blatantly rips off the “Two Ladies” number in Fosse’s Cabaret, another driven by finger-snapping based on a similar song in Sweet Charity, and so on. There’s a marvelous sequence in which an older woman TV film critic blasts Gideon’s newly released The Stand-Up for being pretentious, self-referential, and dull: precisely the criticisms I would make about All That Jazz!

McCabe and Mrs. Miller (David Foster Productions, Warner Bros., 1971)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 28) my husband Charles and I watched a legendary movie neither of us had seen before (at least I hadn’t seen it; I’m not sure whether Charles did or not): McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a 1971 neo-Western directed by Robert Altman, co-written by him and Brian McKay (with uncredited contributions from Ben Maddow, Joseph Calvelli, and Robert Towne), based on a novel from 1959 by Edmund Naughton simply called McCabe. It’s set in the Pacific Northwest in 1902 and revolves around a mining-driven boom town (though we don’t see what’s being mined or any scenes of the characters actually working) with the improbable name of Presbyterian Church, after the town’s largest building. John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a gambler and typical Old West wanderer, arrives in town with the objective of making a lot of money playing poker with the locals – he’s passing himself off as “Pudgy” McCabe, a legendary gunslinger famous for knocking off a particularly nasty outlaw. He hopes to use the money from his poker winnings to open a whorehouse in town, and to that end he buys three prostitutes from a local dealer. Then he runs into Constance Miller (Julie Christie, Beatty’s real-life off-screen partner at the time), who pushes her way into his enterprise by pointing out all the problems he’s blithely ignoring, including the obvious complications of pregnancy and STD’s. Despite McCabe’s disinterest in any business partners, the two work together with Mrs. Miller taking charge of the prostitution operation and McCabe running the associated saloon and gambling den. Then complications arise in the form of two representatives from the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company in nearby Bearpaw, whose workers are the main client base of McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s enterprises. The two, Sears (Michael Murphy) and Hollander (Antony Holland), offer to buy out McCabe for $5,000, which they later raise to $6,250. When McCabe turns them down, insisting on $12,000 to $14,000, Sears and Hollander bluntly tell him that their employers have no intention of paying that much. Instead they’re going to bring in a hit squad of Breed (Jace Vander Veen), Butler (Hugh Millais), and The Kid (Manfred Schulz) to knock off McCabe and take his property by force. McCabe realizes that they’re going to kill him when he returns to Bearpaw and finds that both Sears and Hollander have left town. McCabe sees a local attorney, Clement Samuels (William Devane), who encourages him to fight the mining company in the courts, but it’s no use; Butler stalks McCabe and shoots him in the back, though as he’s dying McCabe is able to take a small derringer and shoot Butler in the forehead, thus killing him as well.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller was an important film in terms of its visual look; Vilmos Zsigmond was the cinematographer. He had fled Hungary after the failure of the 1956 revolution against the country’s Soviet-backed government, and because the business of cinematography in the U.S. was so hard to break into (the American Society of Cinematographers was a notoriously “closed” union, meaning you weren’t allowed to join unless a previous member invited you), he made his living the next decade working non-union jobs for really terrible cheap producers like Arch Hall, Sr. Hall gave Zsigmond his first full cinematography job on the 1963 film The Sadist, which like all Hall, Sr.’s productions starred his son Arch Hall, Jr. By 1970 Zsigmond had gradually began to work his way into more prestigious jobs, but McCabe and Mrs. Miller was the film that really “made his bones.” Zsigmond developed a technique called “flashing,” which meant briefly exposing the raw film stock to light, creating a slightly fogged look that added to the verisimilitude. Though the film was shot in color, the “flashing” made it look more like the black-and-white photos of the era in which the story took place. Altman also insisted on shooting the film as much as possible in sequence to illustrate the growth of the town as McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s business acumen brings more money into it and the town expands as a result. He had his set construction crew building the town as he was shooting, and some of them actually appeared in the film as the construction workers they really were. Oddly, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie weren’t Altman’s first choices for the leads: he wanted Elliott Gould (who would later star for Altman as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, the absolutely worst film ever made about Raymond Chandler’s detective character) and Patricia Quinn. That was interesting since the film was sold largely on the basis of Beatty’s and Christie’s star power and the publicity surrounding their real-life relationship.

I’d like to report that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a masterpiece, but no can do; the film was obviously trying too hard to be “different.” With the Motion Picture Production Code finally having broken down a few years before and been replaced by the movie ratings system we’re familiar with today, Altman and his writers are obviously taking a certain joy in being able to show things and talk about them on screen that wouldn’t have been possible in the 1930’s or 1940’s. They could present a whorehouse as just that instead of having to call it a “dance hall” (the usual Code-era euphemism) and even show the breasts of some of the actresses playing hookers. There’s a certain air of in-your-face cheekiness about this movie which, paradoxically, makes it a lot less fun than it could have been. But the film’s major problem is Altman’s ponderously slow pace. Charles found a lot of it boring and both of us sometimes had difficulty staying awake. McCabe and Mrs. Miller had a lot of Altman’s directorial trademarks, including overlapping and frequently repetitive dialogue (he wanted his actors to talk the way real people do, interrupting each other and saying the same things over again, and he did) and frequent cross-cuts that undermine any sense of pace. Just as we’re getting interested in and even engrossed by one story thread, Altman wrenches us away from it and whipsaws us into another. Altman’s best films, M*A*S*H and Nashville, make that device work and help him bring his stories and characters to vivid life. McCabe and Mrs. Miller just plods along from one not very interesting plot strand to another. It ends in what has got to be one of the all-time dullest and least exciting final shootouts in the history of the Western genre. There are some marvelously subtle bits in the film, including McCabe’s bitter opposition to drug use (especially among the Chinese mine workers in the area) versus Mrs. Miller’s carefully concealed opium addiction; and McCabe first paying Mrs. Miller to have sex with him (revealed quite cleverly by Altman keeping Zsigmond’s camera on the box where he’s put her fee rather than showing us them having sex) and then the two of them having sex without him paying her just before he gets tracked down and shot. Overall, though, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an overrated movie, despite some good qualities, and one of my particular aggravations was the exaggerated Cockney accent with which Julie Christie spoke. She sounds like she’s auditioning for Eliza Doolittle rather than running a relatively high-end brothel in 1902 Washington. It seems unbelievable to me that in the 2008 American Film Institute poll it was rated eighth among the “100 Best Westerns of All Time” – I can think of a lot of better Westerns than this!

Death in Paradise: Season 14, Episode 8 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired April 9, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 27) I watched an episode of the engaging if not altogether satisfying BBC/PBS policier Death in Paradise, set on a fictitious Caribbean island called “Saint-Marie” or “Honoré” but actually filmed on the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe (whose tourism board is actually listed on the production credits; obviously they’re hoping this show will encourage people to vacation in Guadeloupe). An ambiguous listing on imdb.com suggested this would be a story about an actor who drops dead in the middle of a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (it’s odd to suggest that particular play for this plot device, but I’ve always been partial to stories about theatre productions in which a character really dies during the course of a play). Instead it turned out to be a whodunit about an organization that ostensibly rescues sea turtles and protects them from going extinct, run by husband-and-wife team Callum (Rupert Young) and Sadie (Lyndsey Marshal) Jones. The victim is a short-haired butch woman who calls herself Rosa Martinez (Lily Nichol) who’s killed and left behind in “The Shack,” a beachfront residence occupied by detective inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet). Wilson’s long-delayed departure to London has become a recurring gimmick in this show, and he locks “The Shack” behind him as he departs for his this-is-it flight to London – only he’s contacted at the airport and summoned back even though, given that the victim was found in his home, not only is he not allowed to investigate officially but he’s at least briefly a suspect. The local cops, including the annoying comic-relief character of probation officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah) – who in this episode admits he only took the job because his mom was desperate for him to find some way to make a living instead of sleeping on her couch all day, and being a police officer looked like the coolest job opportunity on the island – discover that there are no official records to show that “Rosa Martinez” existed or traveled to the island.

“Rosa” turns out to be Leah, a British investigative journalist working for a paper in Manchester (as Wilson realizes when he sees the interior of “The Shack” and sees it’s exactly as he left it on his way to the airport for yet another London-bound flight he’d miss except that a postcard from someone in Manchester has been turned around so the return address is visible) to expose the sea-turtle organization. Instead of actually preserving the sea-turtle eggs so they can hatch and keep the species going, the Joneses are actually selling them on the black market to a group of smugglers, who in turn place them with their eventual users, gourmands who like the idea of eating an endangered species. The Joneses had an “open relationship” in which they each could date (and have sex with) other people, and accordingly both Callum and Sadie drifted into affairs with their volunteers ¬– only the affair between Callum and Rosa/Leah turned out to be a lot more serious, at least on his end. In the end it turns out that both Callum and Sadie were involved in Rosa’s death: Sadie confronted her on the turtle group’s boat and clubbed her with a boathook. Fleeing for her life, Rosa hid out in “The Shack” before Wilson got there and called Callum, thinking she could trust him. Instead they got into a big argument over Callum’s discovery that Rosa was never in love or particularly interested in him. She was only having the affair with him to get information for her article exposing the fraudulent sea-turtle charity. In the end the Joneses are both arrested and life goes on for both Wilson and his immediate supervisor, Police Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), who was called away to a meeting on Jamaica on which the future of his job supposedly depended, though it’s still uncertain at the end of this episode (the final one of the 14th season) whether Wilson is going to stay on Guadeloupe or not. Death in Paradise is actually a charming little show, and if the intent of the Guadeloupian tourist board in co-producing and helping bankroll this show was to encourage tourist visits to their island, it’s probably succeeding. As a crime drama, it’s not exactly thrill-a-minute, but it’s a nice bit of fun.

Law and Order: 'New Normal" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 26, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, February 26) my usual crime shows returned to the airwaves on Thursday night and I watched new episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order, “New Normal,” was a chilling tale that began with two young Black men walking down a ghetto street in Washington Heights when all of a sudden they’re accosted by a masked man with a gun who shoots and kills one of them. The victim was a young man who had nothing to do with gang life, but he had made what turned out to the fatal mistake of volunteering to tutor other young Black men in a neighborhood dominated by a gang called the Pleasant Valley Mafia. It was the other man he was with, a gangbanger who wanted to leave “the life,” who was the intended victim. His killer was Eric Robinson (Jason Lyke), and he’s arrested on information given to the police by a waitress who saw him and, though he was masked, she recognized his bright red sneakers and his green eyes, unusual for an African-American. But when Eric goes on trial the waitress recants her testimony out of fear for her life and that of her unborn son, symbolized by a character identified in the cast list only as “Intimidating Man” (Hank Strong) who sits in the courtroom and glares at her as she’s on the witness stand. The one person who can link Eric to the crime is a young Black man named “Book” (Nacqui Macabroad) who was wearing a multi-colored jacket in one of the crime-scene videos. It turns out “Book” is really Raymond Booker, a young police officer who’s been working undercover for two years to infiltrate the Pleasant Valley Mafia and bust them once and for all. Booker is initially reluctant to testify for fear that if he comes forward now, he’ll blow his cover and the two years’ work he’s put into infiltrating the gang will be rendered useless.

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and the prosecutors on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), pull out all the stops to order Booker to testify, including going to his boss and his boss’s boss. It helps that the Black police detective working the case, Theo Walker (David Ajala), had himself worked undercover details before transferring to homicide. “New Normal” was a good Law and Order episode that could have been even better if the writer, Ajani Jackson, had done more to delineate the internal conflicts that beset a cop who for years has had to pose as a criminal and deal with the unending series of loyalty tests the gang’s leaders impose on its members. She could have done more to depict the inevitable conflicts of loyalties in a police officer working a long-term undercover detail and torn between his commitment to the law and his growing attachments to the gang members, to the point where it’s conceivable (though this is not an issue Jackson raises in her script) that at one point he stops thinking of himself as a cop and starts thinking of himself as a gang member. Still, “New Normal” was an effective episode and one which definitely highlighted the extent to which the well-intentioned housing projects of yesteryear degenerated into crime and drug dens. It’s become a staple argument of the radical Right that big housing projects never work – though New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was fortuitously in the White House office of President Trump February 26 to talk about building more such projects in the city. It was fortuitous because Mamdani got word during the meeting that at least one New Yorker, an American citizen, had been detained by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posing as New York city police officers, and he was able to get Trump to order their release. It also begs the question of what Mamdani would do if Trump’s condition for authorizing the more than 12,000 homes Mamdani is asking for is that the projects all be named after Trump.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Corrosive" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC=TV, aired February 26, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Law and Order episode on February 26, NBC aired a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show, “Corrosive,” written by Roxanne Paredes and directed by Martha Mitchell, that was even more chilling and full of the ironies Law and Order’s writers love so much. Assistant district attorney Dominick “Sonny” Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scannavino) is hosting a commemoration in honor of Judge Warren Fels (David Zayas) when the Special Victims Unit gets a video tip from a woman, Elsa Clark (Hannah Masi), who claims that Judge Fels cornered her in his robing room, pulled down her underwear with his teeth, and raped her. The SVU detectives launch an investigation and find that Elsa is a student at New York University who’s also listed on a sex-for-pay Web site. They make a phony “date” for her services and learn that she’s working out of a college dorm room that has been turned into a mini-cult by Robbie Miller (Ross Partridge in a quite nice smarmy-villain performance). Miller had just been released from a four-year prison term for fraud when he moved into the dorm room of his son Matt (Dan Thompson) and eventually took over. Judge Fels is shot in the parking garage as he’s leaving the event Carisi hosted and the shooter turns out to be Matt’s roommate Jeremy Coleman (Carter James McNeil). The SVU squad also finds out that Elsa Clark was out of town in New Jersey on the night of her alleged “rape” by Judge Fels. Though he’s only a small-time operator, Robbie Miller has all the classic strategies for domination endemic to would-be cult leaders, including torturing his victims (his favorite technique is to stick tweezers into their ears, touching the ear canal); keeping elaborate logbooks of how much money they supposedly “owe” him for trivial things; recruiting Elsa into becoming a prostitute and paying him her earnings to pay back her supposed “debts”; and doing coercive interrogations of the students on video.

It also turns out that he particularly targeted Judge Fels because, though Judge Fels didn’t have anything to do with his case as a criminal defendant, Robbie tried to get Judge Fels to intervene for leniency with the judge who was handling it. When Judge Fels refused, Robbie declared him “the Devil” and made him Public Enemy Number One to his cult. Ultimately ADA Carisi brings Robbie Miller to trial, but when Matt is testifying against his father, Robbie insists on handling the cross-examination himself. Under the influence of his dad, Matt literally goes to pieces on the witness stand and ends up apologizing to his father for having dared to testify against him. The only alternative the prosecutors have is to recruit Jeremy Coleman as a witness against Robbie Miller. They and his attorney offer him a plea deal that would get him a lighter sentence, but Jeremy refuses. It turns out he actually wanted to be an attorney himself, though his involvement with Robbie Miller and his willingness to kill a judge for him has ended that dream, and Jeremy tells the prosecutors that he’ll testify against Robbie but won’t take a plea deal for his cooperation because he reasons Robbie and his attorney, Joel Mitchell (Shaun Woodland), could use that against him as a way to discredit his testimony. Ultimately, thanks to Jeremy’s testimony, Robbie is convicted on all counts of a far-reaching indictment including sex trafficking as well as coercion. The episode title comes from a word Robbie often uses to brainwash his victims. I remember a previous Law and Order franchise episode that also featured an adult moving into a student dorm and using his influence to take over the students’ lives, but this was a quite good example of cult control and how leaders who claim special authority can get their followers to do just about anything, including murder.

Elsbeth: "Ol' Man Liver" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired February 26, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Law and Order: Special Victims Unit I turned to CBS on February 26 for Elsbeth, a TV show I’ve come to like especially even though I’ve often referred to it as Columbo in drag. Like Peter Falk’s character in Columbo, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) wins her cases by essentially irritating the killer into confessing. This one was called “Ol’ Man Liver” and the central villain is Archer Bryant (Hamish Linklater), a 32-year-old who is convinced that by following the exact same routine every day, eating nothing but health foods and dietary supplements, and keeping an in-house doctor named Kim (Jason Wayne Wong) on call 24/7, he can literally live forever. In the opening scene Archer accosts a hot-looking young man named Tyler Hollis (Case Walker) and we originally believe it’s a Gay cruise. Instead Archer is offering Tyler a job as his in-house trainer, though the price of that gig is permanent enslavement to Archer’s insane health regimen and signing a contract literally giving Archer full and complete ownership of his body whenever Tyler croaks. Tyler’s croaking occurs well ahead of schedule when Dr. Kim advises Archer that his liver function is subnormal due, Archer believes, to all the partying and high living he did before he adopted his health regimen. So he kills Tyler by injecting him with air (I didn’t know that was lethal until 1978, when I saw the movie Coming Home and one of the veterans in it used an air injection to commit suicide; it’s why medical professionals giving injections squirt liquid out of the needle first to make sure it contains no air bubbles that might be fatal) and passes it off as a stroke. He’s able to do this because the company that runs the health rings both Archer and Tyler wear all the time was doing a system upgrade that would turn their monitoring off just long enough for Archer to kill Tyler for his liver and switch rings so when the system came back online it would send an alert to 911 and emergency medical technicians would come out and pronounce Tyler dead.

His organs are distributed to various transplant recipients, who regularly get together and have parties celebrating their continued existence and Tyler’s role in keeping them alive. They refer to each other by the organs they got transplanted, and the man who got Tyler’s heart (Danny Jolles) becomes convinced based on dreams he’s having that Tyler was murdered. He reports this to the New York Police Department, and while Elsbeth’s boss, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), doesn’t believe it for a moment, at Elsbeth’s insistence he assigns Detective Daniel Rivers (Braeden de la Garza), who’s just broken up a relationship with Wagner’s daughter Julia (Brittany Inge) at her insistence, to work with Elsbeth on investigating the case. Elsbeth hangs out with Archer, ostensibly as a student learning his regimen, and meets his new trainer/assistant, Sven (Rainer Dawn), whom Archer fires on the spot when he catches Sven eating something with processed sugar. (Given what happened to the last man who had that job for Archer, we’re thinking, “Lucky you, Sven.”) Elsbeth also meets Tyler’s former girlfriend, who was planning an extended getaway with him just before Archer killed him, and the girlfriend gives Elsbeth the fitness monitoring ring Tyler had worn. Ultimately Elsbeth cracks the case with the rings as her key piece of evidence – the records from the company that made them revealed that Archer’s and Tyler’s rings were switched just before Tyler’s murder and switched back afterwards (they can tell because one of the things the rings monitor is the wearer’s age). There are a few unnecessary subplots involving Rivers’s and Julia’s relationship (there are hints they’re getting back together at the end) and also Elsbeth’s Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), but fortunately they don’t detract much from the central intrigue. It also has a neat ending in which Archer, about to be taken into custody, accepts Elsbeth’s offer of a frozen yogurt and enjoys it immensely now that prison will at least liberate him from the self-imposed tyranny of his diet regimen. The best compliment I can pay to the writers of this episode, Eric Randall and Matthew K. Begbie, is that while I was watching it I wasn’t conscious of the sheer preposterousness of the plot, even though my awareness came crashing back at me when I was trying to summarize it for this review!

Double Double Trouble (PF Cherry Productions, Studio TF1 America, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, February 22) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Double Double Trouble which had had its “premiere” on the network the night before but I’d bypassed it to watch the Winter Olympics. Double Double Trouble was on from 4 to 6 p.m. and, as I guessed, it was largely a rehash of the 1948 film A Stolen Life, directed by Curtis Bernhardt and starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. Double Double Trouble was one of Lifetime’s “race movies,” essentially their usual formulae with an all- (or mostly-) Black cast. Directed by Gabriel Correa and written by Sa’Rah Jones (that odd spelling of her name is correct; her only credits, at least as referenced on moviemagg.blogspot.com, are the 2023 film Girl in the Closet, a regrettably bad reworking of a true-life case of extreme child abuse, and the three films in their Single Black Female series, which she co-wrote with Tessa Evelyn Scott), it starred Tami Roman as twin sisters Ali and Drea. Ali was the “good sister” and was born 21 seconds ahead of Drea (Charles questioned that and said most real-life twins are born a few minutes apart because the mother’s womb needs that much of a rest between births), and the film starts with Drea in the hospital after her latest attempt to give birth through artificial insemination from her husband Kevin (imdb.com’s page on this show is inadequate and lists only four actors by character name) results in a miscarriage. Drea is anxious to try again even though she’s already failed three times, but Kevin couldn’t be less interested in her; he’s found another Black woman whom he’s impregnated and is waiting for her to give birth. Later someone corners Kevin and shoots him dead, but we can’t tell whether it’s Brea, Ali, or someone else.

Ali is introduced along with Brea as co-hosts of a local cooking show called Double the Recipe which is based around the novelty of being hosted by twin sisters. The two get a meeting with an entrepreneur who wants to take the show nationwide, but only with Ali, not Brea, as the sole host. Brea is a regular at a local coffeehouse where she spots hot, sexy hunk Ryan Jackson (Colin Lawrence) and immediately decides he’s the right man for her. Unfortunately, Ryan, who in addition to being handsome is also a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur with a company called Reverb Tech, meets Ali at a business conference and falls head over heels for her. Ryan and Ali get to have a lot of sex, and one of their trysts leads to Ali becoming pregnant – which sends Brea into a jealous hissy-fit because conception is an especially sore point for her. Brea responds by spiking Ali’s drinking water with a combination of listeriosis and E. coli, and Ali gets sick; she recovers, but her unborn baby dies. Alas for Brea, the show’s director, Lamar (who it’s hinted is Gay, which inevitably made me look longer and harder at the actor playing him), accidentally caught Brea’s poisoning of Ali on camera and threatens to report her to the police. Brea responds by knocking Lamar out in the parking lot and pushing him into the path of an oncoming car, thereby dispatching him but making it look like the proverbial “accident.” Brea steals the house key Ryan has given Ali and seduces him – he can’t tell the two apart and neither can we except that Ali wears a brighter and redder shade of lipstick, which Brea uses to disguise herself – and then tells Ali that Ryan raped her. This causes Ali to break off their relationship, though later they reconcile after Ali realizes that Ryan is blameless.

It ends in a confrontation at Ryan’s home in the mountains by a lake, in which Brea goes after Ali with a knife, Ali goes after Brea with a gun (left there in a case, which Ali extracts and then is too nervous to load properly, so there’s only one bullet in it), and during their confrontation [spoiler alert!] Ali admits to Brea that she killed Brea’s late husband Kevin (ya remember Kevin?) to help Brea get over him. (That confounded my expectations because I’d thought the story would end with Brea conveniently dead, Ryan and Ali getting together, and Ali getting that great new nationwide cooking show which she could host solo.) The movie ends with Ali dead and Brea taking her place in Ryan’s arms (and bed), though there’s a diabolus ex machina in the person of Ryan’s ne’er-do-well brother Randy (Charles thought Ryan and Randy were supposed to be twins, but I didn’t get that impression), who was serving time in prison as Ryan built his fortune, who shows up at the end. I guess we’re supposed to assume he’s going to kill Brea for whatever reasons obtain in that family. Double Double Trouble has a lot of problems, starting with the silly title (it’s hard not to think of those old Doublemint gum commercials – “Double the pleasure, double the fun!”), but the big one is that Tami Roman is simply too old for her role(s). Makeup department head Kathleen Fowlstone and her associates plastered the stuff on her with a trowel to make her look younger, much as Dick Wolf’s people have been doing with Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit lately. Tami Roman’s imdb.com page lists her birthday as April 17; it doesn’t say April 17 of what year, but her credits list goes all the way back to 1993. She’s certainly well preserved, and I give her credit for helping develop the project (she’s also an executive producer on it, though that’s a nebulous credit that can mean just about anything), but it’s hard to take this project seriously when the leading actress is just too annuated.

Murder in Music City (Cal’s Kitchen, Dastoli Digital, Reel One Entertainment, Storyteller Studios, Studio TF1 America, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the next Lifetime movie my husband Charles and I watched Sunday, February 22, a “premiere” from 8 to 10 p.m., was considerably better than Double Double Trouble. It was called Murder in Music City and takes place in Nashville, Tennessee, mostly at the grandiose estate of country-music superstar Abilene Tucker (Deena Dill). It starts in her guest house, where a hunky young man named Jimmy Stone (Ty Trumbo) is practicing a new country song called “Stephanie.” We get a lot of shots of his hunky, muscular back as he sings, only someone wallops him from behind with a red electric guitar, killing him. Abilene Tucker calls her daughter Caroline (Madison Crawford) in a panic because she’s understandably worried that she’ll be accused of killing Jimmy, who was on Abilene’s property as both her latest boy-toy and her collaborator on a set of new songs she’s hoping will revitalize her career. The police officers assigned to the case, Detectives Moreno (Clark Moore) and Fisher (Olivia Crosby) – a white man and a Black woman – immediately arrest Abilene and assume she killed Jimmy after a lovers’ quarrel. Murder in Music City was written by our old friends Ken Sanders (story) and J. Bryan Dick (script), and directed by Dave Thomas. Sanders and Dick give us an engagingly large suspect pool, including the murdered man’s brother, Kyle Schneider (Brigdon York), who shows up to collect Jimmy’s belongings, including the blue-covered journals in which he wrote all his songs. Others include Abilene Tucker herself; Barbara (Elizabeth Houston), Abilene’s personal assistant; Marcia (Sharonne Lanier), Abilene’s (Black) agent; Hank James (John Castle), Abilene’s second husband and former duet partner; and Devin Brown (David Turner), a former stalker of Abilene’s who once turned up in Caroline’s bed and was busted in California, sentenced to a mental institution, but escaped and turned up in Nashville and tried to assault Caroline again until Kyle rescued her.

There’s a grim scene in which Caroline delivers Hank’s alimony check (since she was making so much money than he when they broke up, he gets alimony), and then Caroline and Kyle, who’ve become lovers, sneak into his home looking for Jimmy’s journals. At one point Abilene admits to Caroline that she wasn’t that good a mother to her because she was too focused on her career – she was devastated when her first husband (Caroline’s father) died suddenly and she married Hank on the rebound. She offers to take a few months off and take Caroline on a trip to Europe, but just then Abilene is formally exonerated of Jimmy’s murder and she decides to strike while the iron is hot and do an elaborate concert at the old Ryman Auditorium where the Grand Ole Opry show launched way back when (the location isn’t specified in the script, but it’s easily recognizable in the aerial shot on screen) followed by a Vegas-style residency there. She reconnects with Hank James to be her duet partner, and the two do a song called “Hey Baby” that’s credited to Hank as composer, but somehow (since she’s never heard it or seen the sheet music) Caroline recognizes it as “Stephanie,” the song Jimmy was working on when he was killed. Stephanie (Isabelle Almoyan) turns up herself, and she’s a woman Jimmy and Kyle fought over way back when during their early days in Seattle before Jimmy moved to Nashville in search of country-music stardom. Stephanie had originally been Kyle’s fiancée until Jimmy seduced her away from him.

For a while I was expecting Kyle to turn out to be the murderer, if only on the general Lifetime principle that the sexiest man in the cast is usually the killer, but in the end it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Ken Sanders and J. Bryan Dick ripped off the central gimmick of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and made four people legally responsible for Jimmy’s death. Abilene was the one who actually killed him after a fight, not over his affections, but over songwriting royalties: Abilene insisted on owning the copyrights of all the songs she and Jimmy wrote together, or the ones he wrote solo for their project. Jimmy was making the rounds of the record companies to land a solo deal for himself once his collaboration with Abilene Tucker made his reputation, and in a fit of anger Abilene clubbed him with her guitar. Hank, Barbara, and Marcia came together to cover it up, and when Caroline puts all this together they threaten to blacken her reputation and call her a drug-addicted psycho if she tells the cops or anyone else. They also burn Jimmy’s journal so there’ll be no evidence that he wrote the songs on which Abilene and Hank are staking their comeback hopes. Caroline greets the Unfantastic Four in Abilene’s dressing room on the night of her concert and extracts confessions from all of them, which she records not only on her own phone (which Barbara discovers and erases) but a separate one which none of the baddies notice. Caroline gives the evidence to Detectives Moreno and Fisher, who grimly note that they had the right suspect all along but the wrong motive, and Abilene, Hank, Barbara, and Marcia are all arrested.

The final shot is of Abilene Tucker, country star to the last, writing a new song on a yellow legal pad while in the jail holding cell, while Caroline and Kyle pair up even though one doesn’t hold out much hope for the longevity of their relationship – not when the biggest thing they have in common is her mother killed his brother. Murder in Music City is actually an engaging thriller, and I especially liked the two songs Deena Dill sang as Abilene Tucker in the final concert sequence just before she got arrested. I’m not sure if Deena Dill sang the songs or had a voice double – her Wikipedia page says she grew up in Nashville and appeared in a number of country-music videos with such stars as Billy Ray Cyrus, Aaron Tippin, George Ducas, and Trace Adkins, but not whether she has a voice herself – but I’m inclined to believe it's her own voice, if only because I can’t imagine a Lifetime movie having a big enough budget to hire a “ghost” singer. And while the ending is far-fetched, it’s at least conclusive and doesn’t have the maddening loose ends of the finish of Double Double Trouble!

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "There Is No 'i' in Slaughter" (BBC-TV, UKTV, Britbox, PBS, aired September 23, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, February 21) I watched two British mystery shows on KPBS: a Sister Boniface Mysteries episode called “There Is No ‘I’ in Slaughter” (after Great Slaughter, the fictitious town in central England where the show takes place) and a Father Brown show called “The Lord of the Dance.” It annoys me that KPBS’s announcer pronounces Sister Boniface’s last name as “BONEY-fass” when I’ve always assumed it’s “BONNI))-fuss.” “There Is No ‘I’ in Slaughter” was actually a pretty dreary episode – writer Asher Pirie seemed to assume that the way to enliven a show set in the mid-1960’s would be to camp it up in the manner of the 1960’s Batman and other shows of the time. It’s about a so-called “team-building exercise” two central English police forces, one from Great Slaughter and one from a neighboring town, are put through by a particularly obnoxious official named Lowsley (Robert Daws), which gets interrupted when a police official named Horace Winthorpe (Mark McDonnell) is found dead in a locked room. The gimmick Is that next to Winthorpe’s body is found a spinning top (though of course it had long since ceased to spin when Sister Boniface, played as usual by Lorna Watson, shows up on the scene and it’s lying in a pool of Winthorpe’s blood), and the trademark of the gangster who supposedly committed the fictional crime the real cops are investigating as part of their team-building exercise was to leave a similar wooden top next to the bodies of the victims he killed. Even more than usual for amateur detective stories, there’s an air of “step aside, you incompetent professional cops, and let the brainy outsider show you how it’s done.” When Lorna Watson enters as Sister Boniface, there’s a sense of fresh air blowing in from outside the silly rivalries between the two competing “teams.”

I spent a lot of this 45-minute episode nodding off and woke only in time for Sister Boniface to deduce not only the killer’s identity but how he pulled off the trick of making the murder appear to have taken place in the locked room. The killer was Constable Rupert Beagle (Tyler-Jo Richardson), an African-British officer whose quarrel with Winthorpe was that Winthorpe had killed Beagle’s father years before. Ostensibly it was an accident – Winthorpe had fired a gun at Beagle père thinking it wasn’t loaded, but it was, and the shot killed him – and Beagle’s killing Winthorpe was also an accident. They were quarreling and Beagle grabbed Winthorpe and slammed him against the metal foot of the room’s bed, causing Winthorpe’s death. Then, rather than report what he’d done to all the police on the scene, Beagle put the key to the room on a string attached to the top, pulled it through the outside window (which he was able to open from inside even though when the police and Sister Boniface discovered Winthorpe’s body, they checked the windows and they were inoperably locked from both sides), hung the key from the string, and thus dropped the key back in the room along with the top. Unfortunately for Beagle, in pulling the string he cut a wound in his hand, which gave him away to Sister Boniface. When he realizes he’s been discovered, Beagle threatens to commit suicide by jumping off a watchtower on the site of the exercise, but Sister Boniface talks him out of it and he turns himself in instead. Needless to say, the self-important goon who was running the silly contest insists on declaring it a tie because the other police who were participating stopped competing to solve the real-life killing. Despite Lorna Watson’s reliably sprightly appearance in the title role, this Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was pretty lame, and the contrast between the phony investigation and the real one just didn’t come off that well.

Father Brown: "The Lord of the Dance" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, aired February 27, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Fortunately, the Father Brown episode KPBS showed immediately after the Sister Boniface Mysteries program, “The Lord of the Dance,” on Saturday, February 21, was considerably better. Directed by Caroline Slater from a script by Rebecca Ramsden, “The Lord of the Dance” had to do with a self-important and spoiled rich-kid dancer named Frederick Thorncastle (John McCrea) who’s a contestant on a 1950’s TV show called Go Dancing! With his previous partner unavailable, he picks local girl Brenda Palmer (Ruby-May Martinwood) as her replacement even though Brenda is not only untrained as a dancer, she’s also African-British. Thorncastle is nearly killed when one of the TV lights unexpectedly falls down on the “X” that marked the spot where he was supposed to stand. Fortunately, he’d moved away from the lethal location just a few seconds before, so it’s just a case of attempted murder. Father Brown investigates and finds out a number of dark secrets, including Thorncastle’s ways of getting ahead in the Go Dancing! contest through underhanded means. Not only is he the grandson of the legendary “Dancing Duchess,” he’s also discovered that the show’s producer, August Bestwick (David Westhead), is Gay. He found this out when he followed Bestwick to the local Gay bar, which since this is the 1950’s and Gay sex is still illegal in Britain (as it was throughout the U.S. until 1961, when Illinois did a major revision of its criminal code and inadvertently left out the anti-sodomy law in the process), gives him the chance to blackmail the poor man. Father Brown deduces this from the matchbooks given out at the bar, which unlike most matchbooks has the establishment’s logo printed inside the matchbook rather than outside. Of course, being the hero of a 2020’s TV show, Father Brown is far more understanding and sympathetic to Bestwick’s sexuality than a real priest would have been in the 1950’s, or even now.

There’s a red-herring suspect named Ron White (Dan Hammill), who was an ex-con who reformed when he discovered ballroom dancing and decided to go straight, but the true culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Melody Byers (Laura Pigott), who along with her husband Colin (Christopher Jeffers) is a Go Dancing! contestant. Her motive is that for some reason she blames Thorncastle for the death of her brother, who was also her former dance partner (shades of Fred and Adele Astaire!), who fell during a dance, became paralyzed, and she dropped out of the dancing circuit to be his caregiver until he died two years later from kidney failure. Thorncastle insists it was her fault for insisting on doing a lift they hadn’t adequately practiced, but it turns out Thorncastle was responsible because he hadn’t sanded down Melody’s brother’s shoes, apparently a common practice in ballroom dancing to give you more traction on the floor. There’s a clever ending in which Father Brown realizes from Melody’s confession that she’s set another booby trap for Thorncastle, even though in order to save Thorncastle’s life he has to walk onto the Go Dancing! set in the middle of a live telecast and shove him out of the way. In the end Melody is promised leniency and Thorncastle gets his at the hands of the Dancing Duchess herself (Angela Rippon), who makes a deus ex machina entrance at the end and announces that she’s so appalled at his tactics to win the contest that she’s disowning him and forcing him to go work for a living like everyone else. This Father Brown episode had real charm and made logical sense, and it was nice to see a member of the hereditary aristocracy “get his” in the end, as just happened to the real-life ex-Prince Andrew in Britain and isn’t happening in the U.S., where Donald Trump has effectively given himself Presidential immunity.

To Catch a Cheater (Sunshine Films Florida, Studio TF1 America, Reel One Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 15) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime, both of them rather grim thrillers with surprise twist endings. The first one was To Catch a Cheater, a story about three women who each gave birth to their daughters on the same day and thereafter formed a bond that lasted until … well, until the story began nearly 18 years later. The three older women are Monica Jackson (Kate Watson), Bridget Lewis (Sheila Leason), and Kim (Jessie Pettit), whose last name, if it were ever mentioned, I didn’t catch. Their daughters are Hannah Wilson (Jordan Kennedy), Charli Lewis (Valentina Rivas), and Megan (Lily Bowen). The movie begins with Charli proposing a so-called “cheaters’ pact” with Hannah and Megan to see if their boyfriends are pursuing opportunities for extra-relational activity. The way this pact works is sort of like Mozart’s (and Lorenzo da Ponte’s) opera Cosi fan Tutte with the genders reversed: each of the women will go online and assume a phony identity to see if they can attract each others’ boyfriends’ attention for transitory hook-ups. Accordingly Megan stands up her boyfriend and sends Hannah to try to seduce him instead. Only the evening ends in tragedy: Hannah slips and falls down outdoor stairs and ends up dead on the rocks on the beach below. Needless to say, Monica is less than thrilled at the sudden death of her daughter just as she’s about to turn 18 and graduate from high school to college and a better life. Monica’s estranged husband David (Philip Boyd) – they appear to have separated but not divorced, though David is living and working in another city and before she croaked Hannah mentioned an upcoming weekend she had to spend ßwith dad – returns to the scene and he and Monica reunite to determine what happened to their daughter.

The police rule Hannah’s death an accident, but both Monica and David are convinced it was murder. But who? As the grim story takes its course we learn that Kim’s husband Doug (Roy Lynam) was having an affair with Bridget. We also learn that Kim and Bridget had launched a company that, though all it appears to make is little scent or chemical bottles they display on their living-room table, is about either to get sold to a major company or do an initial public offering (IPO) which will make both of them millions. Only Bridget is hyper-concerned that nothing happen to them that would jeopardize their deal and cause a scandal that could derail it. (Maybe she should have thought of that before she got sexually involved with her partner’s husband.) Monica gets a series of threatening letters from anonymous sources warning her to stop investigating her daughter’s death, and in the end we learn that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Kim, who offed Hannah because Hannah had caught Kim’s husband Doug and Bridget making out in their SUV. Kim demanded that Hannah remain silent about this and, when Hannah refused, Kim pushed her down the flight of stairs and thereby killed her. Written by Rachel Morton and directed by old Lifetime hand Damián Romay, To Catch a Cheater is a good example of a Lifetime movie that could have been a great deal better if the Lifetime writer had known when to ease up on the passion pedal. (The metaphor comes from Roald Dahl’s short story “The Great Automatic Grammatisator,” in which a couple of computer scientists invent a machine than can write – essentially artificial intelligence decades early – including a set of organ-like pedals that control the amount of passion in the final text.) The idea of an estranged couple suddenly having to deal with the death of a daughter on the cusp of adulthood could have been a very interesting and moving drama, but writer Morton pushed too hard on the melodramatics and the result was another piece of Lifetime sludge – stylishly directed sludge (Damián Romay definitely knows his way around a camera), but sludge all the same.

Girl Who Vanished (Maverick Film, MarVista Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second Lifetime movie I watched last night (Sunday, February 15) – and my husband Charles joined me for most of it – was called Girl Who Vanished, and like previous Lifetime telecasts Lost Boy in 2015 (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2015/07/lost-boy-legrand-productions-lifetime.html) and The Boy Who Vanished a.k.a. The Forgotten Son (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/06/the-boy-who-vanished-aka-forgotten-son.html), it’s about a long-lost child who was supposedly kidnapped eight years earlier who seemingly returns to the fold. In this case the mother is Kate Tanner (Chelsea Gilson), the father – who divorced Kate over the trauma of losing their daughter and who, like his opposite number in To Catch a Cheater, returns to the family to help acclimate their daughter on her homecoming – is Matt (Jon Eric Hoffman). The returnee is Emily (Isabella Carlsen) and the younger sister who wasn’t kidnapped and has had to live the past eight years traumatized by her mother’s overprotectiveness is Lily (Rylee Reagan, top-billed). The film opens with Lily sneaking into the Tanners’ home after a night out with her age-peer girlfriends and Kate catching her and grounding her. Then Emily shows up, insisting that she’s really the Tanners’ long-lost daughter and supplying a wealth of background information to make the identity convincing. Emily even takes a DNA test which says she’s the Tanners’ biological offspring. Kate is overjoyed at the return of her daughter, but Lily is sure something is “off” about her and the new girl, whoever she is, is not Emily.

The police assign a psychiatrist, Dr. Salazar (Lisha Hackney, one of the heavy-set African-Americans Lifetime likes to cast as authority figures), to treat Emily and help her over the traumas of adjusting to her new environment – Emily says she spent the intervening eight years living with a single man who just wanted a child of his own to raise. Only Dr. Salazar is nonplussed that Emily doesn’t show the usual signs of trauma one would expect from a child who was actually kidnapped and forced to live with strangers for that long a time. Lily asks for an appointment to discuss Emily’s case with Dr. Salazar, but the day she’s supposed to meet her Dr. Salazar is found dead in her office, which is apparently a live/work space. Next Emily does an interview with podcaster Naomi Ackerman (Jessica DeBonville), who specializes in stories about traumatized kids, only Naomi holds back on airing the interview because she’s suspicious of Emily’s lack of affect during it. Lily calls Ackerman and makes an appointment to see her, but when she goes to the scheduled meeting place Ackerman, too, is dead, murdered in what was apparently a robbery gone bad. Next Lily is accosted by John Norris (Phil Talamonti), a former police detective who worked Emily’s disappearance when it happened, only he became convinced that Emily had been murdered by one or both of his parents. (Was writer Daniel West thinking of JonBenet Ramsey here? One of the most mysterious aspects of that case was that the only people who could have had access to her were her parents, and yet they had no discernible motive because they were making tons of money exploiting JonBenet in children’s beauty pageants and her death would end that gravy train.)

Norris’s efforts to implicate the Tanners in Emily’s disappearance ended up costing him his job; he drifted into alcoholism but he hung around the scenes, still convinced that one or both of the adult Tanners did in Emily. Norris contacts Lily and asks her to notice any parts of the Tanners’ home that had been changed since the days before Emily’s disappearance. Kate had kept the house exactly the same as it was before Emily left, including the décor of her room which was adorned with posters for boy bands like the “Boulevard Boys” whom Emily especially liked. Unfortunately, the same mystery killer who knocked off Dr. Salazar and Ackerman strikes against Norris, sneaking into his car, strangling him from the back seat, and planting liquor bottles in the car so it will look like he killed himself accidentally while driving drunk. But the information Norris gave Lily allows her to find out the one spot in or around the house that had been changed – a new mini-garden Kate planted after Emily’s disappearance – and Lily starts digging it out and finds [spoiler alert!] the remains of her real sister. It turns out [double spoiler alert!] that Kate actually killed the real Emily during an argument (though director David Benullo inserted a brief closeup that hinted that the killer might have been Emily’s dad Matt), then covered it up by burying her in that newly planted mini-garden. The false “Emily” turns out to be Rachel Sullivan, who concocted the scheme along with a scapegrace boyfriend who only appears in one scene and then is dispatched by the dauntless Kate, who burns him to death by spilling gasoline outside the van in which he lives and then igniting it with a flare.

The two of them researched the real Emily from the press interviews the Tanners gave after her “disappearance” and coached Rachel to pass as Emily. The DNA test was faked from Lily’s own, which Rachel obtained from Lily’s retainer. Lily caught her out with one of the classic strategies used in impersonation stories: inventing a false memory (in this case, a treehouse where the two sisters supposedly played) and catching “Emily” out on it. The film ends with a brutal confrontation between Kate and Lily at the real Emily’s gravesite, though luckily the police arrive and arrest both Kate and Rachel (my husband Charles wondered why Rachel was arrested), though Lily ultimately visits Rachel in prison. Girl Who Vanished was a decent enough Lifetime thriller, though as with To Catch a Cheater one gets the impression that it could have been a lot better if writer West had cooled it on the melodramatics and not taken the easy way out by making mom the killer, thereby creating the problem Fritz Lang identified with the trick ending he was forced to use in his last American film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In that film the supposedly innocent man, a reporter who frames himself for murder to prove how easy it is to convict the innocent on circumstantial evidence, turns out actually to be guilty of murder, and as Lang complained to his producer, you can’t create a central character, make the audience identify with and feel for them, and then in the last two minutes drop the switcheroo on the audience and reveal that they’re really evil.

The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story (P. F. Birch Productions, Röhm Feifer Entertainment, Studio TF 1 America, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, February 14) Lifetime showed a TV-movie that was, to say the least, an odd choice for Valentine’s Day: The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story. It was actually based, at least loosely, on a true story: Monica White (Lela Rochon), a divorcée whose 18-year-old son Isaiah (Trezzo Mahoro) has been her only companion since her divorce from her scapegrace husband Daniel (whom we never meet as an on-screen character, nor do we learn much about him or why they broke up), is encouraged by her best friend Layla to log onto a dating app called Connections. Monica lives in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where she teaches pre-school and has to deal with a particularly obnoxious boy named Rayleigh who keeps bullying a Black girl named Tracy. (The reason I’m not supplying more names for the actors involved is so far imdb.com’s credit list has only four names on it.) Meanwhile, Anthony Eugene “Tony” Robinson (the darkly handsome Jarod Joseph) is trolling Connections looking for women he can pick up, not for sex but to kill them. His modus operandi is to meet them in bars after having set up a date via Connections, take them to a nearby motel, kill them by strangling them in the middle of the sex act, then load their bodies into shopping carts and abandon them in the middle of parking lots. Tony lives in Washington, D.C. and works as a garbageman (which gives him a convenient way of disposing of his victims’ bodies) until he gets fired midway through the movie by a typically obnoxious boss for being chronically late to work. Writers Miriam Van Ernst and David Weaver don’t give us much of an explanation as to what Anthony’s motives are. Midway through the movie, when he and Monica finally meet face-to-face, he tells her that he had a girlfriend named Skye Allen who suddenly and without warning dropped dead of a heart attack, but we suspect that’s a B.S. story he just made up. (The reporting on the case in The Washington Post stated there was a real Skye Allen who died in a hospital, and her death was ruled accidental but there’s the possibility that Anthony killed her.)

The film was expertly directed by Elisabeth Röhm, who as an assistant district attorney on Law and Order for five years (2001 to 2005) certainly learned something from working in Dick Wolf’s atelier on how to do suspense. Also, since February is Black History Month, this is one of Lifetime’s “race movies” in which the central characters are Black; the only significant white role is that of the no-nonsense woman police chief in Fairfax County, Virginia who leads the investigation when the body of one of Anthony’s victims is found in her jurisdiction. I didn’t catch her name but I did the racially ambiguous male detective who’s working under her, Det. Lareto. The cops pull the case when a white store clerk working the parking lot picking up shopping carts discovers the body of Tonita Smith (Princess Davis) in one as he’s on duty. The local media immediately dub the unknown murderer “The Shopping Cart Killer” and writers Van Ernst and Weaver can’t resist planting a few clues. When Isaiah learns from his mom that she’s met a man online, he says, “He could be a serial killer,” having no idea that he’s right. Also cinematographer Tony Gorman carefully lights Anthony in shadow as he sits in a spartan room with a bank of computers, while Monica gets full light as she goes about her daily routine, hangs out with Layla and hears out her complaints about Layla’s boyfriend Jaden, and summons Rayleigh’s mother Beverly to school for a parent-teacher conference about Rayleigh’s behavior. Beverly is instantly hostile and pulls the how-dare-you-summon-me-when-I-need-to-be-at-work routine, but Monica and we both notice a bruise on her chest that signals that Beverly is being abused at home by Rayleigh’s dad and that’s the reason for Rayleigh’s bad behavior. There are a few close calls, including a woman in a red dress who meets Anthony at a bar but is so weirded out by his odd behavior she bails on him in mid-date and we’re of course thinking, “Lucky her.”

When Anthony and Monica finally meet in person he immediately wants to move in with her, and she’s appalled but allows him to sleep on her couch. When they finally do have sex together, for what’s her first time since her divorce, he literally can’t get it up and the implication is that only by killing his partner can he have a release. There’s an intriguing story on the real Anthony Robinson on the Arts & Entertainment Web site (https://www.aetv.com/articles/monica-white-shopping-cart-killer) which suggests that he was into S/M (the only hint of that we get in this movie is a scene towards the end in which Monica references his previously expressed desire to tie her up, surprises him and ties him up instead) and he was also Bisexual and once expressed his anger at Monica by literally peeing in her bed. In the movie there’s no hint of that, but Monica gets a complaint from her 19-year-old niece Jasmine that Anthony hit on her at Monica’s 50th birthday party. She immediately orders Anthony out of her house, and he responds by waiting outside until he’s able to find an unlocked door, let himself back in, and threaten her. Just then the police arrive; that quite imposing woman police chief in Fairfax has figured out his identity by discovering a surveillance photo of him taken with Tonita way back when as he was escorting her from the bar to the motel room where he killed her. Anthony tries to escape by taking a Silver Streak bus back to D.C., but the woman police chief and Det. Lareto are onto him. They have the bus re-routed off the highway and order the driver and all the other passengers off so they can arrest Anthony. Anthony Robinson is due to be sentenced in May 2026, and the real Monica White told The Washington Post that she’s been too scared by the whole experience to date again. The Dating App Killer: The Monica White Story is actually pretty good Lifetime fare, redeemed by Elisabeth Röhm’s direction and an appropriately chilling performance by Jarod Joseph as Anthony. It’s true that this is yet another Lifetime movie in which the hottest, sexiest guy in the cast is the villain, but Joseph brings the role a kind of smoky intensity that makes his performance special even though of course we can’t stand him. Just as I got a used videotape of the 1996 film The Phantom because I’d been so impressed by Billy Zane’s performance as the bad guy in James Cameron’s Titanic I wanted to see a movie in which he’d been the good guy, so I’d love to see a film in which Jarod Joseph played a character I could root for and lust over!

The Kate: Karl Denson's Tiny Universe (Connecticut Public Television, American Public Television, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, February 13) I switched channels after the Winter Olympics telecast went on a half-hour hiatus to accommodate the all-important 11 p.m. news shows and put on KPBS for The Kate, the latest episode of the intriguing music show from the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the late movie legend’s home town. I’ve compared this series to the local San Diego show Live at the Belly Up, which features similar club-sized attractions at the Belly Up Tavern in Solana Beach, but this one hails from the other end of the country. This time the featured attraction on The Kate was a band called Karl Denson’s Tiny Universe. Denson’s Web page lists the personnel as Karl Denson, alto sax, flute, and vocals; Ricio Fruge, trumpet, flugelhorn, and vocals; Ricky Giordano, guitar and vocals; Rashon Murph, keyboards (a Hammond B-3 organ, Rhodes electric piano, and assorted electronica); Parker McAllister, bass; and Alfred Jordan, drums. There were definitely two guitar players on the program and I don’t know who the other one was, but they did some quite good and interesting duels. One irony was that Karl Denson, an African-American alto saxophonist and flutist with a shaved head and white goatee beard (which will give you an idea of how old he is), talked a much better set than he played. He mentioned that his first exposure to music came from his parents, first Motown and then James Brown, and later he got into artists like Marvin Gaye (who was on Motown but pushed the limits of their formula until in 1970 he created his masterpiece, What’s Goin’ On?). Still later he acquired an interest in jazz via John Coltrane and especially Rahsaan Roland Kirk – and if you’ve never heard of Rahsaan Roland Kirk, get on YouTube and look him up right now. (A good sample of Kirk on the Ed Sullivan Show is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRO1W5twBes&list=RDjRO1W5twBes&start_radio=1.) Kirk was a blind reedman who was famous for playing up to five saxophones at once – one of his most stunning records was a cover of Duke Ellington’s “Creole Love Call” in which he reproduced Ellington’s entire sax section on his own and in real time. He mounted his horns, including such oddball sax variants as the manzello and the stritch, on a rack so he could move his mouth between them. Kirk also doubled on flute, as did Coltrane on his very last album (Expression, recorded in February and March 1967, just four months before Coltrane died), so Denson took up flute. He also said he realized that all the great jazz musicians had their roots in the blues, so he started listening to blues greats like Son House. Denson said he picked up on the fact that all the white British bands in the 1960’s had learned from the great African-American blues players.

He was in Lenny Kravitz’s original band until he left in 1993, and in 2014 he got a call from a blocked phone number that turned out to be Kravitz’s reaching out to him to ask if he’d be interested in doing a tour with a major British band. The major British band turned out to be The Rolling Stones. He’s also played with or opened for Stevie Winwood, The Allman Brothers, the late Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead, and George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic combo. Denson recalled being asked how it felt to play before an audience of 65,000 at a Rolling Stones concert, and he said he was really playing for just four people: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and the late Charlie Watts. Denson said he was actually more comfortable playing in a club before an audience of 500 to 600 because then he’s playing his own music. Oddly, Denson talked a much better set than he played; in the hour-long time slot of The Kate, he did nine songs and all but one of them featured Denson’s singing, which isn’t bad but it’s a typical funk-soul rasp that got wearing after a while. Basically Karl Denson and Tiny Universe play the sort of funk-soul that was popular in the mid-1970’s and evolved (or devolved) into disco. They opened with a song called “Shake It Out” and then played an instrumental that defeated The Kate’s chyron writers but was the best thing in the show. Denson began it quietly and lyrically on the flute before he put it aside, picked up his alto sax, and turned up the tempo and volume. The instrumental featured solos by Denson, Fruge on flugelhorn, one of the two guitarists, Murph on the Hammond B-3 (the organ that Jimmy Smith popularized and made the go-to sound for jazz, pop, and rock organists), and McAllister on electric bass. Then Denson played a batch of good but pretty indistinguishable songs, all featuring his foghorn vocals, with generic titles like “I’m Your Biggest Fan,” “Change My Way,” “Time to Pray,” “Satisfied,” “Gossip,” and “Hang Me Out to Dry.” In between “Change My Way” and “Time to Pray” the band was heard playing a brief snatch of something called “Gnomes and Badgers” which Denson explained was a reference to the current American political situation and particularly the polarization between the Republican and Democratic political parties. That could have made for a more interesting song than any of the ones Denson actually sang on the show, but alas we were only allowed to hear it under the interview. (Playing musical selections under interviews, so it’s hard to hear or enjoy either, is one of my pet peeves about music documentaries, and blessedly the producers of Live at the Belly Up avoid it.) I enjoyed the music but with reservations, and I think my husband Charles put his finger on the problem when he said, “It’s too raucous for me in my current condition.” I could see his point; I could have used Denson playing a song or two that was slower, gentler, more jazzy, and one that used a different singer (his Web site lists Danielle Barker as a second vocalist but there weren’t hide nor hair of her on the show) or was an instrumental.