Elsbeth: "Deadutante" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 2, 2026)

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

After two rather dark episodes of Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on Thursday, April 2, the Elsbeth show I watched afterwards (on a different network, CBS), “Deadutante,” was a slice of campy relief. The episode centered around the annual New York Empire City Debutantes’ Ball, hosted by an imperious middle-aged woman named Isadora “Izzy” Langford (J. Smith Cameron), who makes Miranda Priestly, Meryl Streep’s character in the two The Devil Wears Prada movies, seem all sweetness and light by comparison. Izzy is insistent that Plum Barlowe (Danielle Kotch), daughter of the thrice-married tycoon Sterling Barlowe (John Bedford Lloyd) – though it’s not clear which of Barlowe’s wives is Plum’s mother; his current wife is Gwen (Katie Ross Clarke); his embittered first wife is Paulina (Anna Holbrook), whom we see rejoicing at his death; and we don’t get to see or hear from the woman he was married to between them – will not be allowed to make her début at Izzy’s ball. Only a $2 million check donated to Izzy’s favorite charities changes her mind, or seems to. Plum accordingly is named one of the honorees at the next year’s ball, only Izzy has a plot up her bejeweled silver sleeve. She’s worked out a scheme to murder Sterling with a sword – swords used to be a routine part of the ball’s accoutrements, as were fires in fireplaces, but they were eliminated out of safety concerns until Izzy decided to bring them back – and to frame Brando Wild (Jordyn Owens), son of a famous movie star and the sort of man who seems to think with his dick rather than his brains, for the crime. (I wonder if writer Erica Larson deliberately purloined his name from actor Brandon DeWilde, who was a child star in the 1950’s and went on to a brief young-adult career in the 1960’s; he was the obnoxious kid who kept calling, “Come back, Shane!” in the 1953 film Shane.)

Under the cover of photographing Plum and Gwen with Plum’s phone, Izzy sends a text to Brando offering to meet him for some sexual shenanigans in a private room at the hotel. The text tells Brando to strip completely and wait for her in the nude, only Plum never shows up and instead Izzy uses the opportunity to steal Brando’s sword and kill Sebastian with it, then returns it to Brando’s outfit so Brando will have the sword with Sebastian’s blood on it. Though we see Izzy kill Sebastian on screen (as I’ve noted before, Elsbeth follows the formula of the 1970’s/1980’s TV cop show Columbo, both in letting us the audience know who the killer is from the get-go and in having Elsbeth use Columbo’s strategy of annoying the murderer into confessing), it’s not until midway through the show that we learn her motive. It seems that in 1982 she was heading for a début of her own at the same ball, only she couldn’t afford a gown for the big event. So she stole a credit card from her father and bought a sale gown at 50 percent off the retail price – only Sebastian saw the “Half Off” sales tag on the gown, cut its straps off to humiliate her, and ever afterwards referred to Izzy by the nickname “Half Off.” What’s more, when her dad drove to the store where she’d bought the gown with his credit card to return it the next day, dad had a fatal heart attack on the way and Izzy blamed Sebastian for her father’s death.

There’s an intriguing subplot about Izzy’s theft of a pair of gloves belonging to someone’s “Aunt Jackie,” which she wears when she kills Sebastian and then burns – though the pearls on the trims of the gloves survive the fire and it later turns out that “Aunt Jackie” was in fact Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, the legendary Presidential widow and all-around do-gooding pain in the ass. There’s also the episode’s most fascinating character, Izzy’s husband Haydn Langford (Don Stephenson), an endearing child-man of appalling immaturity who spends all his time in the basement with a model train set. The irony is that his family made its fortune in the first place running a real railroad, only too much wealth and too little responsibility over too many generations has reduced them from running real trains to playing with electric models. Ultimately Elsbeth and the official New York police arrest Izzy after Izzy keeps threatening to have Elsbeth arrested for allegedly stealing the priceless “Jackie O.” gloves, much to the continuing irritation of Elsbeth’s direct superior on the New York force, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce). While I missed Elsbeth’s Gay son and his partner, who’ve figured in previous episodes and have helped make the show even more watchable, this Elsbeth was a nice, campy piece of entertainment – and it helped that there wasn’t an Internet podcaster or influencer anywhere near the dramatis personae!