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

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

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

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