Elsbeth: "Ick, a Bod" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired October 30, 2025)

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

Alas, after the Law and Order/Law and Order: Special Victims Unit crossover event on Thursday, January 8, NBC chose to show a new episode of The Hunting Party, a program they used to replace Law and Order: Organized Crime on Thursdays in February 2025. Instead I switched to CBS and watched a rerun of Elsbeth’s Hallowe’en-themed episode from October 30, 2025: “Ick, a Bod,” a stupid title for what turned out to be a quite good show. The story centers around the conflict in the Sleepy Hollow neighborhood of upstate New York (a locale already famous from the stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne and others) between Sharon Norman (Annaleigh Ashford), self-appointed social director of the neighborhood and mistress of “Towering Maple,” a house named after a large tree on the property; and newly arrived Beryl Nix (Kate Jennings Grant), an independently wealthy artist who complains that the towering maple is in the way of the daylight she wants to use in her studio. The wittily written duel of wits between the two Stepford wives is so charming and eloquently composed by scenarist Erica Larson that for a while we’re not sure which one is going to be the murderer and which the victim. In the end Sharon decides to slice Beryl’s head off with a chain saw during a party on Hallowe’en in the middle of an elaborate maze Beryl has had set up, since the Sleepy Hollow townspeople are bored with Sharon’s relatively mild entertainments and are turned on by Beryl’s offer to coordinate something more exciting. Even more than usual this episode draws on the famous template from Columbo, with a) us knowing who the murderer is in advance instead of playing the whodunit game, and b) with Elsbeth basically taking Columbo’s old role of annoying the killer into confessing. Sharon’s alibi is that she was on the porch of her home all Hallowe’en night dressed as a scarecrow coming out of a giant jack-in-the-box scaring would-be trick-or-treaters on cue, but it doesn’t take us long to deduce that she put up a replica of herself on her front porch so she could sneak away and kill Beryl. Part of Sharon’s plan was to frame the workers who put up Beryl’s elaborate maze by using a chain saw as her weapon and secreting it amongst their equipment, but the foreman of the crew proves that was impossible because all their prop chain saws have the actual chains removed for safety.

One campy touch was that Elsbeth conducts her whole investigation while dressed as both pre- and post-transformation incarnations of Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady, sometimes affecting a posh upper-class English accent and sometimes slipping into the Cockney of Eliza’s pre-transition character. She even looks remarkably like Audrey Hepburn from the My Fair Lady film. There’s also a subplot of Elsbeth’s immediate supervisor on the police force, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), being unable to accept that his daughter Julia (Brittany Inge), of whom he has a picture from her teen years in a frame on his desk, is now a 27-year-old woman entitled to go out on dates with men without his approval. The gimmick is that Julia is serving as a volunteer information technology specialist to upgrade the precinct’s offices and bring it into the 21st century computer-wise. In the end Elsbeth blows Sharon’s alibi by finding a fingerprint belonging to one of the local kids, who actually dared touch the hand of Sharon’s seemingly fearsome mannequin and noticed that it didn’t react, and the whole neighborhood – including Sharon’s long-suffering husband Lucas (Theis Weckesser) and their daughter Avery (Olivia Daponde), who’d been going on perfectly legitimate dinner dates with her father just to get away from the stultifying control of her mom and had also been dating a young man, Xander Drake (Jeremy Parrott), and spending (non-sexual) time with him at Beryl’s because Sharon didn’t think Xander was “good enough” for her daughter – is visibly relieved that their nemesis is going off to prison for murder. Though I was a bit disappointed that writer Larson didn’t manage to work in Elsbeth’s Gay son into their show – after all, Hallowe’en has the reputation of being the all-time Queer holiday – other than that, “Ick, a Bod” was a charming episode despite the silly title. And in case you’re wondering how New York City police got jurisdiction over a murder that occurred upstate, it’s because Beryl’s remains weren’t discovered until the firm that put up the maze packed up all their equipment and took it to Manhattan, where they unpacked it and discovered Beryl’s remains.