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.

The Librarians (Radical Gaslighters LLC, Doc Society, Arizona Rising Productions, Cuomo Cole Productions, Good Gravy Films, ITS International, Independent Lens, Independent Television Service, K. A. Snyder Productions, Pretty Matches Productions, The Brandt Jackson Foundation, The Harnisch Foundation, Two Chairs Productions, World of Ha Productions, iDeal Partners Film Foundation, 2025)

by MARK GABRISH CONLAN • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

On Monday, February 9 PBS aired a powerful and unflinching 2025 documentary called The Librarians, about how librarians are being dragged into the culture wars being waged by an ascendant radical Right (it’s really a perversion of language to call these people “conservative” when their political, cultural, social, and moral ambitions are anything but “conservative”). Their ultimate goal is to turn the U.S. into a Christian theocracy, and one of their immediate goals is to eliminate any opinions they disagree with from public discourse, including critiques of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

The Librarians, directed by Kim A. Snyder in collaboration with Janique L. Robillard, Maria Cuomo Cole, and Jana Edelbaum, tells the story of how librarians across the country, especially (though not exclusively) in Southern states, have essentially been drafted into the culture war. They’ve been torn between the ethics of their profession, which among other things call them to oppose censoring the content of their libraries simply because other people don’t like certain books; and the increasingly vociferous demands of organizations like the well-funded, powerful nationwide group “Moms for Liberty” which demanded that school libraries in particular censor books with anti-racist or Queer themes.

Moms for Liberty was founded on New Year’s Day 2021 by three Right-wing activists in Florida. They were originally opposed to mask requirements instituted in 2020 to slow the spread of the virus that causes COVID-19, but their agenda soon broadened to include running candidates for local school boards who were pledged to support their racist, anti-Queer agenda. In 2022 their campaigns were successful in 11 Texas school districts, including one in a town called Granbury that became a major focus of the film.

The campaign was started by a Texas state legislator called Matt Krause, who in October 2021 released a list of 850 books he wanted banned from Texas public school libraries. Krause also said his list was not all-inclusive and he reserved the right to add future titles. Krause explained that the books he wanted removed from state school libraries were ones which “might make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress because of their race or sex.” That seemingly unexceptional statement is actually radical-Right code-speak for anything which “might make white people uncomfortable by pointing out that the U.S. built its prosperity on the backs of enslaved Africans.” (For more information see https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-matt-krause-launches-inquiry-into-850-books.)

Krause included with his blacklist a demand that the Texas Education Agency and school districts throughout the state asking each individual he sent it to whether their schools had any of the books on his list. He also asked for a detailed accounting of where the books were and how much money had been spent on them. Among the books cited by Krause and other would-be Texas censors were Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project, Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist, Peggy J. Parks’s How Prevalent Is Racism in Our Society?, a picture book put out by Amnesty International illustrating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and novels like Tim Federle’s The Great American Whatever, Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy, and “Pink Is a Girl’s Color” … and other silly things people say, a children’s picture book by Stacy and Erik Drageset.

One of the key people involved in the radical-Right takeover was successful school board candidate Courtney Gore. She was a prominent activist in the area with solid Right-wing credentials. After the school district removed 130 books from school libraries on grounds they were “pornographic,” Gore did something unusual for someone with her background. Instead of meekly going along with the pressure from her colleagues and funders to ban whole lists of books as “pornographic,” she actually read them and realized they weren’t pornographic at all. Though Gore maintains that she still considers herself a “conservative,” she posted on Facebook in May 2022 that “I’m over the political agenda, hypocrisy B.S. I took part in it myself. I refuse to participate in it any longer, it’s not serving our party. We have to do better.”

Another quirky story told in the documentary concerns Granbury parent Monica Brown, one of the leaders of the book-banning movement. What made her story unusual is that the oldest of her nine children, son Weston Brown, is Gay. When he came out to her at age 23, she immediately and irrevocably banned him from any Thanksgiving dinners and other family functions. Weston ultimately moved to San Diego, found a partner named Andrew, and agreed not to have anything to do with the birth family that had raised him, homeschooled him, and kept him as insulated as they could from any intimation either that Queer people existed or he might be one.

Then he saw Monica Brown testifying before the Granbury school board on a social-media video that had gone viral. “It was one thing when my parents’ beliefs were causing this rift between us and it was just a family matter,” Brown told NBC News. “But seeing now that she’s applying those same views to public activism, at a time when so many basic rights are being challenged, I couldn’t stay quiet about that.” The Librarians includes a scene in which Weston Brown spoke to the Granbury school board and pleaded with them not to ban Queer-affirming books like the one he says turned him around, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue.

"It’s been nearly five years since I came out to my family,” Weston Brown told the Granbury school board. “I'm not allowed to join in family celebrations or holidays, or be part of my eight siblings' lives, all because I’m not straight. I’m here to implore you to listen to librarians, educators and students, not those speaking from a religious perspective or at the bidding of a political group. If you choose to marginalize differences and remove representation, you will only cause harm.” Monica Brown immediately followed her disowned son to the podium and spewed the usual radical-Right nonsense. She ignored everything her son had said and didn’t have anything to do with him – until the meeting ended. Then, as Weston was being interviewed by a reporter in the parking lot, she walked up to him and started filming the interview herself with her cell phone.

As I’ve noted in previous posts about the American radical Right and its position on Queer issues, one thing most pro-Queer people don’t understand about the radical Right is that it doesn’t believe in the existence of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, or Transgender people. They believe we are all naturally heterosexual and cisgender, and any people who express themselves as homosexual or Transgender are either deliberately rebelling against God or suffering from “trauma-induced sexual sin.” Weston Brown recalls that when he came out to his parents as Gay, “They thought that I was mentally ill or demonically possessed.” This is the ideology behind so-called “reparative therapy,” the various attempts to “cure” Queer or Trans people from their “trauma-induced sexual sin” and turn them into cisgender heterosexuals.

One thing we’ve learned about the radical Right since its political ascendancy, which predated the Presidencies of Donald Trump but was kicked into high gear by the Trump phenomenon, is the thug-like way they go after their enemies, especially ones like Courtney Gore who were formerly on their side. Gore reported receiving death threats. So did Amanda Jones, a 20-year veteran librarian in Louisiana who in 2021 won the School Librarian of the Year award from School Library Journal. The award was in recognition of an innovative program she devised during the COVID-19 lockdown. She reasoned that as long as students couldn’t go to the outside world, she would use computer technology to bring the world to them by presenting virtual tours of other countries.

Then in 2022 Jones ran afoul of the would-be book banners. In July 2022 she spoke publicly against censorship at a meeting of the Livingston Parish Public Library Board. (In Louisiana, counties are called “parishes.”) As a result, she got viciously attacked by various organizations, including Citizens for a New Louisiana and Bayou State of Mind. Bayou State of Mind accused Jones of "advocating teaching anal sex to 11-year-olds.” Citizens for a New Louisiana put out a leaflet showing a photo of Jones inside a red circle with a white border, and captioned it, “Why is she fighting so hard to keep sexually erotic and pornographic materials in the kids’ section?” She was, of course, doing no such thing, as any member of these organizations who’d actually read the books in question the way Courtney Gore did in Granbury, Texas would have found out.

Since then Jones, who is still a librarian at the same school in Louisiana she attended as a child, has published a memoir called That Librarian detailing her struggle against book-banning and the attempts of the radical Right to turn librarians into censors. She still gets awards, but now they have names like the Association of School Librarians’ Intellectual Freedom Award and the Louisiana Library Association’s Alex Allain Intellectual Freedom Award. When Jones was honored at the National Book Awards in 2023, Oprah Winfrey said, “Amanda Jones started getting death threats, all for standing up for our right to read ... but she's not stopped fighting against book bans, or stopped advocating for access to diverse stories.”

Librarians, especially in schools, have become one of our principal lines of defense against the Radical Right’s depressingly successful campaign to end America’s experiment in self-governance and make the U.S. a neofascist dictatorship. They already control the Presidency, both houses of Congress, and the U.S. Supreme Court. They also have organized at the state and local levels in ways progressives can barely dream about. They want a world in which Blacks are once again in the back of the bus, women are once again stuck in the kitchen, Queers are still in the closet, Fundamentalist Christianity becomes a state religion, and giant corporations are able to extract maximum surplus value from their workers without any nonsense about health, safety, or decent pay.

The Librarians is a chilling account of how a handful of individuals are courageously fighting an often lonely battle to maintain and expand America’s and Americans’ freedoms in the face of a well-organized, well-funded campaign to destroy them. It deserves to be seen by every American who wants this country to remain a democratic, secular republic.

Songs of Black Folk (Orange Grove Films, 100 Percent, Stay in the Music LLC, GBH, WNET, KQED, 2025)

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

Last night (Tuesday, February 10) at 11 p.m. my husband Charles and I watched a half-hour show on P.O.V. Shorts on PBS called Songs of Black Folk, about an intriguing event that took place on June 16, 2021 in either Seattle or Tacoma, Washington (the narration wasn’t clear about just where it took place) to commemorate former President Joe Biden signing a bill making “Juneteenth” – the day in 1865 when slaves in Texas learned a fact that had been carefully concealed from them: that the Civil War was over, the South lost, and they were legally free – a national holiday. The event was promoted by two members of the same family: Black church pastor Leslie Braxton and his nephew, Ramón Bryant Braxton. Ramón was raised by his grandmother because his father had spent most of Ramón’s childhood in prison for one offense or another (the show didn’t say just what he was in for, though it really didn’t matter). Ramón’s grandmother forbade him from playing football but encouraged him to study music, and after exploring other instruments Ramón settled on piano. He became good enough that in 2002 he gave a school recital as a classical pianist, which was rather shakily filmed by someone with a hand-held camera from the audience. When Biden signed the bill making Juneteenth a national holiday both Leslie and Ramón decided to promote a concert commemorating it and making people in the Pacific Northwest aware of the major musical heritage of African-Americans even though, as the narration noted, there are surprisingly few Black musicians of note from there. (The one real legend is Jimi Hendrix, who was part-Black, part-Native, and came from Seattle.) The two assembled an orchestra and choir and performed a rather sedate-sounding concert featuring Ramón’s arrangements of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “We Shall Overcome.” What made the event especially poignant was that while preparations were underway Ramón’s grandmother was in a nursing home with dementia and was clearly on her last legs. Often Ramón had to tear himself away from rehearsals to go see the woman who’d raised him when he still could, and he expressed hope that she would last long enough for him to give the concert while she was still on this plane of existence. She died the day after the concert, on the actual June 17 Juneteenth holiday. Incidentally, it’s worth noting that under the command of our current President, Donald Trump, U.S. national parks no longer offer free admission on Juneteenth or on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday – but they do offer it on Donald Trump’s birthday, yet another example of the personality cult America’s Führer is building around himself.

Super Bowl LX Halftime Show (National Football League, Apple, aired February 8, 2026)

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

Yesterday (Sunday, February 8) my husband Charles and I both stayed in and watched Super Bowl LX (“60” in those oppressive Arabic numerals New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has forced all New Yorkers to use – that’s a real Right-wing meme I’ve seen online). The Bears San Diego were having a Super Bowl watch party but it was in El Cajon; the AWOL Bar in Hillcrest was also doing a Super Bowl watch party but I decided not to go and instead watched the game here at home with Charles. At least I got in three walks during the day, including a short one just before the game’s official start time at 3 p.m. – though the kickoff wasn’t until 3:40 because there were all the extended preliminaries before actual play began. (I wonder if the ancient Romans put the crowds at the Colosseum through this sort of thing.) I was particularly anxious to see the much-ballyhooed and, in Right-wing media circles, much reviled Super Bowl halftime show featuring Puerto Rican singer and rapper Bad Bunny (true name: Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio: “Martínez” is his family name and “Ocasio” his matronymic), which turned out to be marvelous. I wish it had been subtitled so we monolingual English speakers could have understood it, but otherwise it was vividly staged and as strong as I could have hoped for. It began with a crew of campesinos (Latin farmworkers) doing something with a crop that grew in high stalks; at first I thought it was corn but it turned out to be sugar cane, the main cash crop of Bad Bunny’s native Puerto Rico. There were nice traveling shots (courtesy of NBC’s drone camera, which also made periodic appearances during the Super Bowl itself) that came to rest in front of a barrio street set. Midway through Bad Bunny’s number he cut to two other singers, a blonde woman performing in English and a man with a guitar singing in Spanish. Once again I was put off by the lack of chyrons to tell us who they were – the woman was Lady Gaga and the man was Ricky Martin – but the music itself was so powerful and the vibe so strong I enjoyed it all anyway.

This morning I saw a clip from the so-called “All-American Halftime Show” put on by Turning Point USA, the Right-wing political organization formerly chaired by the late Charlie Kirk and headed since his murder by his widow Erika. The clip I saw was from Kid Rock’s performance, and even though it was nominally in English it was just as unintelligible as Bad Bunny’s and considerably meaner, nastier, and more in-your-face. At least part of the problem was that for some reason Kid Rock decided to lip-synch to a pre-recording instead of performing live. I was a bit disappointed in the cast list for the alternative halftime show because Brantley Gilbert, a country singer who attracted my attention for being the only person on Tim McGraw’s Academy of Country Music show Tim McGraw and Friends on May 19, 2013 to use a pedal steel guitar in his band, was on it. (This once-paradigmatic country instrument has been pretty much relegated to the sidelines as most modern country acts play music closer to the 1970’s “Southern rock” sound of Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers than the music of Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, or Johnny Cash – though, come to think of it, Cash never used the pedal steel guitar either.) It’s taken me a while to realize why I like Bad Bunny’s music even though he raps (in Spanish) through most of his songs when I strongly dislike most rap. After the last Grammy Awards show I think I’ve figured it out: Latino rappers like Bad Bunny rap over a much more interesting, more complex set of rhythms derived from Latin vocal and instrumental music instead of the strict militaristic style in which most Black and white rappers perform. (“Hip-hop,” the alternative term for rap used by people who like it, reportedly comes from the strict cadence of military drill, which to an old peacenik like me is one more reason not to like it.)

I’ve seen a report that at the viewing party Donald Trump hosted for the Super Bowl at Mar-a-Lago (he didn’t attend in person, reportedly because he was afraid of being booed) he kept his TV on the regular halftime show instead of the “All-American” one, though of course he let rip with a nasty tweet on his so-called “Truth Social” site afterwards. Bad Bunny had already been causing Right-wing snits when he used his acceptance speech at the Grammy Awards to denounce the tactics of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) squads in Minneapolis and elsewhere in the country, though he ended his speech with the ennobling words, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love.” He used those words in his Super Bowl performance, too, projecting them on giant screens over the Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California where the San Francisco 49’ers regularly play their “home” games (even though Santa Clara is 45 miles southeast of San Francisco). Bad Bunny even included a real-life (straight) wedding in his show; both Charles and I assumed it was play-acting but later we learned from online sources that it was a real bride, a real groom, and a real officiant marrying them to each other. And one thing I loved about this year’s Super Bowl is that Bad Bunny was not the only performer they hosted who was guaranteed to draw hackles among the Trumpsters: in the pre-game concert the 1990’s punk band Green Day performed four songs, including their signature tune, the anti-George W. Bush song “American Idiot.” And before Charlie Puth sang the national anthem (surprisingly well; he managed the song’s notorious high notes adequately if not spectacularly), “out” Lesbian singer Brandi Carlile, one of my favorite modern-day country music performers, did an intense acoustic version of “America, the Beautiful.”

As for the game itself, the Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots 29-13, though the relatively high score was deceptive because it was mostly a defensive battle. Seattle made four penetrations deep into New England territory in the first half but had to settle for field goals each time. Indeed, Seattle’s field-goal kicker, Jason Myers, set a new record for most field goals kicked (five) in a Super Bowl. I made a joke about the ad for TD medication, which (specially produced for a football telecast) made a pun on the fact that “TD” stands for both “touchdown” and “tardive dyskinesia.” Alas, the ad ran at a point in the game when neither team had scored a touchdown! Much of the play reminded me of the 1936 film Pigskin Parade, a largely forgettable movie except that it was Judy Garland’s first feature and it had a great voice-of-reason performance by Patsy Kelly in which she hears out newly appointed coach Stuart Erwin’s lament that his players know how to play basketball but not football. “Then teach them to play basketball-football!” she tells him. It was advice both coaches in last night’s game seemed to have taken to heart, since there were plenty of passes that were broken up and rendered incomplete by a defender leaping up and batting the ball away from the intended receiver in mid-air. Seattle running back Kenneth Walker III was named most valuable player of the game even though his most spectacular play, a 49-yard touchdown run, was nullified by a holding penalty. Still, he gained 135 yards on 27 carries. It’s been a long time since I followed football – it’s a game that has left behind too many brains permanently damaged by concussions for my comfort – though put me in front of a TV broadcasting a game and it all comes back to me from my childhood when my mother, stepfather, brother and I all kept track of the NFL. I’ve been to both baseball and football games “live” and I long ago came to the conclusion that baseball is more fun live than on TV while for football it’s the reverse. The reason, I suspect, is that the action in baseball is spread out over the entire expanse of the stadium, whereas in football it’s centered around wherever the ball happens to be at that moment.

Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking (Quoiat Films, Sky, Kino Lorber, 2021)

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

Later that night (Sunday, February 8) Turner Classic Movies ran Within Our Gates, a truly great 1920 silent film written, produced, and directed by pioneering African-American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux which I’d seen at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/02/within-our-gates-micheaux-book-and-film.html, and then followed it with Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking, a 2021 documentary produced in Italy by Quoiat Films in association with Sky (Rupert Murdoch’s satellite video channel) and Kino Lorber, which has several of Micheaux’s films available on DVD and Blu-Ray. Oscar Micheaux (the family name was originally “Michaux,” without the “e”) was born on January 2, 1884 in Metropolis, Illinois, the fifth of 13 children born to parents Calvin and Belle Michaux, both of whom had been slaves. His parents were farmers and managed to scrape together enough money to move to a city, where Oscar began his education. But they soon fell on harder times and had to move back to the country, which turned Oscar into a rebel of sorts. Dad sent him off to the city to work in marketing, where Oscar had the chance to meet different sorts of people and broaden his horizons. At age 17, Oscar moved to Chicago to live with his older brother and worked in the stockyards and steel mills. Then he got a job as a Pullman porter, which oddly was one of the most prestigious employment opportunities then available to African-American men. Though the pay was pretty good for a menial job open to Blacks, it was reduced by management which insisted they had to pay for their own uniforms and meals. Still, it gave employees quite a lot of travel and allowed them to see new parts of America. According to the documentary, Micheaux supplemented his salary by skimming from the customers’ payments for meals aboard the train – as did a lot of the porters – though after he was fired in Illinois he got a similar job assignment in the South with no one the wiser in those pre-Internet days. When he’d saved enough money to do so Micheaux moved to Gregory County, South Dakota, bought land and set himself up as a homesteader on a farm he called “The Rosebud.” He prospered for a few years and also developed a second career as a writer, getting pieces published in the African-American newspaper The Chicago Defender.

When his farm finally went bust in 1911, Micheaux wrote a novel about his experiences as a farmer called The Conquest: The Story of a Negro Pioneer. The first edition was self-published in 1913 without an author’s credit, but in 1917 he reissued the book as The Homesteader and put his name on it. It attracted the attention of the Lincoln Motion Picture Company, run by brothers Noble and George Johnson, both actors (Noble Johnson would eventually have a film career and be best known as the native chief in the 1933 King Kong). The Johnsons were the first African-Americans to form a movie company, but negotiations between them and Micheaux broke down. So Micheaux decided to film The Homesteader himself, doing what would now be called crowd-sourcing to raise the production money. The film, which like all too many of Micheaux’s films is lost (of his 42 films only 20 survive in whole or part), was enough of a commercial success that Micheaux followed it up with Within Our Gates, a stunning movie that was widely interpreted – as it is here – as a pro-Black response to D. W. Griffith’s racist masterpiece The Birth of a Nation (1915). Though Micheaux denied having intended Within Our Gates as a response to The Birth of a Nation, he had certainly learned from Griffith. Within Our Gates and his later film Body and Soul (1925), which cast Paul Robeson in his screen debut as two brothers, a scapegrace phony minister and an inventor (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2024/02/body-and-soul-micheaux-book-and-film.html) are both major works of cinematic art. One can watch Micheaux’s films – at least the surviving silents – and appreciate them not only for their historical importance but as great movies in their own right. Micheaux would not only fund the production of these films but also market them directly, taking his prints on trains and traveling from city to city, showing up at movie theatres in Black communities and offering to show them. (Charles pointed out that this meant he was taking highly flammable materials on passenger trains and risking a fire or explosion.) The documentary mentions in passing that Micheaux had watched the German Expressionist masterpieces of the 1920’s when they were released in the U.S. and learned from them, which accounts for the film noir-like sequences in many of his films.

As I’ve written before about Micheaux, the twin blows of sound films in 1927 and the Great Depression two years later blew his business model. In the silent era it was relatively easy to create a professional-looking film on a low budget and end up with a product comparable to that of the major studios – especially if you had a ready talent pool, which Micheaux did from all the underemployed Black actors in the U.S. In the sound era that became much harder, as state-of-the-art recording equipment was so expensive you practically had to have a major studio behind you to afford it. Micheaux settled in New York City and bought a house in Harlem with the money he made from his books and films, which put him in the middle of the “Harlem Renaissance” of the 1920’s, but once sound came in he lost the ability to self-finance and had to go hat in hand to white financiers for his production money. One Micheaux talkie that is shown being restored in this film is Midnight in Harlem (1935), based on the notorious Leo Frank lynching case. Leo Frank was a white Jewish man who was lynched in Marietta, Georgia on August 16, 1915 for having allegedly raped 13-year-old Mary Phagan. His story was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1937 as They Won’t Forget, but Micheaux beat the major studio to the punch by two years and, of course, changed the victim from a Jewish white man to an African-American. Alas, Micheaux didn’t have enough money to gain the production experience needed to transcend the limitations of early sound film. His 1930’s productions have many of the same crudities of major-studio talkies from the late 1920’s, including stiff, wooden line deliveries and those obnoxious pauses between the actors hearing their cue lines and speaking their own. A lot of his sound films feature musical numbers, but it doesn’t appear he was as capable of recruiting top-tier musical talents for his films as he’d been fine actors like Robeson and Evelyn Preer in his silents.

It also didn’t help that Micheaux had his own racial agenda; he was big on stories contrasting hard-working “good” Blacks who got ahead and succeeded with lazy ones who stayed poor and blamed racism for their failures. Micheaux also frequently told stories about Black men who fall in love with white-looking women but are frustrated until the last reel, when a sudden last-minute revelation shows that the “white” woman the hero has been taking an interest in is actually Black, albeit super-light skinned. This reportedly came from an incident Micheaux went through in his homesteading days, in which he fell in love with a genuinely white woman of Scottish descent (though his biographers have so far been unable to come up with her name), only the relationship went nowhere because in the 1910’s interracial marriages were illegal throughout the U.S. (In 1946, Lena Horne and the white conductor/composer Lennie Hayton had to get married in Paris because no U.S. state then allowed white and Black people to marry. The California Supreme Court threw out the legal ban on interracial marriage in this state in 1949, 18 years before the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated it nationwide.) Micheaux’s later career was, in the words of Black author and film historian Thomas Cripps’s book title, a “slow fade to black.” After The Notorious Elinor Lee (1940) Micheaux made just one more movie, The Betrayal (1948), and died at age 67 in Charlotte, North Carolina. (A number of interviewees for this documentary wondered how someone who’d led an urban life in Chicago and New York ended up dying in so remote a locale as Charlotte.) Oscar Micheaux: The Superhero of Black Filmmaking features interviews with African-American filmmaker John Singleton, film historian Richard Peña, actor Morgan Freeman, musician Stace England, biographer Patrick McGilligan (who’s also written books about Frank Capra and Fritz Lang), and Turner Classic Movies “Silent Sunday Nights” host Jacqueline Stewart (who’s shown at least three Micheaux films ¬– Within Our Gates, The Symbol of the Unconquered, and Body and Soul – on her program). The film was written and directed by Francesco Zippel, who got his title from a strange quirk in the history of Micheaux’s birthplace, Metropolis. The city government has commissioned a giant statue of Superman and given it pride of place in the town square because in the Superman mythos his home town is “Metropolis.” Zippel argues that instead of embracing a fictional white hero who isn’t even from this planet, the town should have hailed Oscar Micheaux, the Black film pioneer who made it both artistically and commercially despite the long odds against him.

Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch (Above Average Productions, Broadway Video, Rutle Corps, Warner Bros. TV, NBC-TV, 2003)

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

Last night (Saturday, February 7) at about 9:45 p.m. my husband Charles and I had finished dinner and were ready to watch a movie. Since he’s expressed interest in lighter fare, I picked out Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch, the 2003 sequel to the marvelous 1978 TV-movie The Rutles: All You Need is Cash. The original Rutles film is the first “mockumentary” at once depicting a fictional rock band and lampooning it – This Is Spinal Tap (1984) usually gets the credit for that, but Eric Idle and Gary Weis beat Rob Reiner by six years. It was also a beautiful coming together of the original casts of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Saturday Night Live for a spoof making fun of The Beatles but also paying loving tribute to them, especially in Neil Innes’s songs, which cleverly tweaked the Beatles’ oeuvre and managed to sound “right” and original at the same time. Charles and I got Rutles 2: Can’t Buy Me Lunch as a bonus item when I ordered the original The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash on DVD, and for some reason the version they got was significantly abbreviated: the running time listed on imdb.com for Rutles 2 is 84 minutes but the version we got was just over an hour. It showed Eric Idle, who directed (solo this time) as well as starring as a mock newscaster hosting yet another documentary about The Rutles, the infamous “Pre-Fab Four” (actually The Monkees, the fictional rock band organized by Columbia Pictures for a TV series that lasted two seasons, were also nicknamed the “Pre-Fab Four”) from Rutland, England who conquered the world’s culture and changed the face of music as we knew it. It wasn’t quite as funny as it was the first time round (sequels usually aren’t, though I can think of at least three movie sequels that surpassed their originals: The Bride of Frankenstein, Ivan the Terrible: Part Two, and The Godfather: Part Two), and all too much of it just repeated gags that were done better and funnier in the first film. One new gag was that Eric Idle as Melvin, the narrator, was continually being attacked by another, much younger newscaster who’s also doing a documentary about The Rutles and going to the same places he is. This character is played by the young Jimmy Fallon and gets into a series of knock-down drag-out fights with Idle until at the end it’s revealed [spoiler alert!] that he’s really Idle’s long-lost son, and the two hug. This part reminded me of the Monty Python sketch “Wicker Island,” in which the joke was that the entire population consisted of newscasters continually trying to interview each other.

Part of the poignancy of this film is in the many people featured in the cast who have passed on since, including Robin Williams (brilliantly cast as a German scholar who keeps veering off the Rutles’ history to talk about other things), Carrie Fisher, David Bowie (who thinks Idle is there to interview him about his own music and abruptly ends the interview when he realizes all Idle wants to ask him about is The Rutles), Mike Nichols, and Neil Innes, who wrote the marvelous pastiche songs sung by The Rutles. Innes actually had a connection with the real Beatles; he was in the Bonzo Dog Band, which played a number in the film Magical Mystery Tour alternately called “Baby, Don’t Do it” and “Death Cab for Cutie.” (The later title was ultimately used as a name for an entirely different band, founded in 1997 in Bellingham, Washington.) This film also went into more detail about the private life of the Rutles’ manager, Leggy Mountbatten (patterned after the real Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein), and in particular his sexual orientation. One interviewee said Leggy knew what sort of men girls would be attracted to because he was attracted to them himself – though the real Brian Epstein went quite the other way in his attractions, towards “rough trade” men who often beat him up after having sex with him. (One of the most interesting stories about Epstein is that when he went on vacation in Spain with John Lennon, when the two were eating in restaurants together Lennon kept asking him how he decided which men were sexually attractive. Obviously Lennon was treating it as a sort of anthropological expedition, investigating what turned a Gay man on and comparing it to what Lennon, a straight man, found attractive about particular women.) There were also some interesting interviews with Billy Connolly, playing himself as a Scottish actor, singer (he had a 1960’s hit in Britain covering, of all songs, Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E”), entertainer, and game-show host who was put in to be the contrarian voice denouncing everything the Rutles ever did, said, sang, performed, or acted. Aside from that it was an O.K. documentary spoof which fulfilled my hope for giving Charles and I a nice light evening’s entertainment to take his mind off his current health issues, even though it was hardly at the level of the savagely brilliant original!

2026 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony (International Olympic Committee, Banijay Live's Balich Wonder Studio, Olympic Broadcasting Services, NBC-TV, aired February 6, 2026)

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

Last night (Friday, February 6) my husband Charles and I watched the opening ceremony of the 2026 Winter Olympics from Milan and Cortina, Italy. The Olympics themselves are being held in both those cities, which are 200 miles apart from each other, and the opening ceremonies spanned over four Italian towns: Milan, Cortina, Livigno, and Predazzo. The whole event lasted three hours and 39 minutes, though typically for American TV we only got three hours of it, less commercials. The coverage on NBC featured one of the most annoying parts of how the Olympics are presented in the U.S.: the insufferable jingoism. An international event that is supposed to use sports as a way of bringing the various people of the world together gets turned into a bizarre display of chauvinist patriotism. It didn’t help that rapper Snoop Dogg, one of the most repulsive media presences on earth, was on hand to hang out with the U.S. team and cheer them on while the rest of the world’s athletes awaited their turns in the procession of teams that marked the opening ceremony. I was also amused by some of the spellings of the names of the countries, which were in Italian, and the teams themselves marched alphabetically in order of the Italian versions of their names. Thus Saudi Arabia appeared under the “A’s” because their name in Italian is Arabia Saudica.

One thing that I noticed was that the Czech Republic, which split off from Slovakia in the so-called “Velvet Revolution” of the early 1990’s, is now just called “Czechia,” and I couldn’t help but wonder if that’s a sign of the times that “republics” are “out” now and dictatorships are “in.” I was a bit startled that the parade jumped from Austria to “Cechia,” as it’s spelled in Italian, without any “B” countries. It seems that Belarus, a major ally of Russia in its war against Ukraine, was covered by the same ban the International Olympic Committee (IOC) imposed on Russia: its athletes are allowed to compete as individuals but not as representatives of a country. There was also a bit of “let them eat cake” in the sheer extravagance and outrageousness of the ceremony, which was directed by Marco Balich and produced by his company, Banijay Live’s Balich Wonder Studio. Balich, Lida Castelli, and Paolo Fantin designed the cauldrons – plural; there were two, one in Milan and one in Cortina. From the moment the Olympic torch bearers arrived I said to myself, “Thank you, Leni Riefenstahl,” since it was she who, tasked with making the documentary Olympia about the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, cooked up this whole notion of having a relay run from Greece (the site of the original Olympic Games in antiquity as well as their revival for 1896 in Athens) to wherever they’re being held now, with a torch being carried en route and used to light a cauldron at the final destination, so she’d have a spectacular opening sequence for her film. (I remember one year before the 2016 Summer Olympics that NBC ran a promo for their coverage announcing that they’d mounted a camera on a catapult to follow the sprinters as they raced. They made it seem like their own idea, but sorry, guys, that was another Riefenstahl innovation from 80 years earlier.)

Most of the performance took place inside the San Siro soccer stadium in Milan. It began with a troupe of surprisingly androgynous dancers supposedly re-enacting the story of Cupid and Psyche, though I doubt I could have told you that if the sportscasters hadn’t said that. Then there were three bobble-headed dancers supposedly representing three of Italy’s greatest composers, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini, to the strains of a disco-ized version of Rossini’s William Tell overture. (Charles once told me a joke he’d heard that the definition of an “intellectual” was someone who could hear the ending of the William Tell overture and not think of The Lone Ranger.) Three giant paint tubes, each emitting a long ribbon of cloth in its designated color (red, blue, yellow – I joked to Charles,” Shouldn’t I say ‘magenta, cyan, yellow’?” Charles joked back, “It’s not a printer”), descended from the rafters and hung in an uncertain position over the action. After that they had two rings descend from the stadium’s rafters, each carrying an acrobatic artist, one male, one female. As the two came down they joined hands in the middle and lowered themselves on a cable to the stadium floor to illustrate the event’s theme, “Armonia” (“Harmony”). Then three more rings emerged and formed the famous Olympic symbol. After that there was an appearance by Mariah Carey, whom I generally like but was miked so badly it was hard to tell just what she was singing, or in what language. First she sang “Volare,” an international hit for Italian singer Domenico Modugno in 1962, though she prefaced it with a verse I’d never heard before because Modugno hadn’t performed it. Then she sang one of her English-language hits, “Nothing Is Impossible.” There were more interminable dance numbers, including one that paid tribute to Chamonix, France, where the first Winter Olympics were held in 1924. The gimmick here was that the dancers would first perform in 1920’s style, then in 1970’s style, then in the style of today – though both the choreography and the music were too tacky to illustrate that.

There was also a strange number featuring an unseen violinist named Giovanni Andrea Zanon playing the 1716 “Berthier” Stradivarius violin while more dancers cavorted and an Italian actor read a poem by The Leopard author Giacomo Leopardi. Then came the procession of the athletes from various countries, following which a surprisingly strong tenor voice sang the aria “Nessun dorma” from Puccini’s last opera, Turandot. For a moment I thought I was hearing Luciano Pavarotti reincarnated, but it turned out to be Andrea Bocelli delivering one of the strongest performances I’ve ever heard from him. My husband Charles took strong exception to the choice of music: he pointed out that “Nessun dorma” is an aria sung by a prince who’s about to force himself sexually on a princess who’s had all her previous potential mates killed because, centuries before, one of her ancestors was abducted and raped by one of his. Charles said he would have preferred “Ritorna vincitor!” from Verdi’s Aïda, though that too would have been problematical: it's sung by the soprano lead, Ethiopian princess Aïda, who realizes she’s been so caught up in the crowd’s enthusiasm she’s openly rooting for the Egyptian general (who’s also her boyfriend) to conquer, occupy, and lay waste to her country. Then there was a performance by South African-born actress Charlize Theron and Ghali, an Italian spoken-word artist who was described as a rapper even though his act has little or nothing in common with the “rap” I’ve come to know and despise in the U.S. The idea was to illustrate the commonality of the world’s peoples and offer a prayer for world peace. There was also a weird sketch by Italian actress Brenda Lodigliani, who pretended her microphone was not working and illustrated Italian hand gestures. The ceremony ended with the hoisting of the Olympic flag in both Milan and Cortina and mezzo-soprano Cecelia Bartoli singing the Olympic hymn backed by Chinese pianist Lang Lang (who, though he wasn’t nearly as flamboyantly dressed, reminded me a lot of Liberace in his willingness to turn up in various locations and play quasi-classical schlock) and the children’s choir of Milan’s famous opera house, La Scala.

The show came to a sudden ending at 11 p.m. our time when NBC’s local affiliate abruptly cut to their regular news show. This was billed as the longest Olympic ceremony in history, though I remember an even longer one at the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010, which climaxed with a stunning performance of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by k. d. lang, who I think sang it better than anyone besides Cohen himself (sorry, Jeff Buckley fans). The most spectacular Winter Olympics opening ceremony I can remember was the one at Lillehammer, Norway in 1994, featuring a dance by supposedly evil spirts from Norwegian mythology called vettas. Their closing ceremony featured “good vettas” to counteract the malign influence of the evil vettas from the opening. I enjoyed the sheer over-the-topness of the whole kitschy spectacle, even though compared to k. d. lang, Mariah Carey was a definite step down in the pop-vocal department.