Elsbeth: "Murder, He Wrote" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount; TV episode, aired April 16, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 16) I watched a new episode of Elsbeth after bypassing Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit because they were doing reruns. The Elsbeth was called “Murder, He Wrote” as an obvious pun on the name of the old TV series Murder, She Wrote, which starred Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, a murder mystery writer who got involved in solving real-life crimes in her home town of Cabot Cove, Maine. (Charles said he didn’t like the show because so many people in Cabot Cove got themselves killed he thought the entire town would have quickly been depopulated – and I suspect the people behind Murder, She Wrote felt that way, too, because in later years they had Jessica Fletcher get out more and solve crimes in other locales.) This Elsbeth show starred Griffin Dunne, whom I remembered as the cute young man who was Madonna’s co-star in the 1987 film Who’s That Girl?, which I thought was quite better than its reputation even though the two earlier films it was reworked from, 1938’s Bringing Up Baby and 1971’s What’s Up, Doc?, were even better. Getting back to Elsbeth, it was disheartening to see Griffin Dunne turned into a grizzled old man (but just consider how different I look now from what I did in 1987!), but he still acted with authority as Elliott Pope, a mystery writer who grew up in Massapequa, New York and became successful with a series of books containing such hot and steamy sex scenes they verged on pornography. (Was writer Jonathan Tolins thinking Mickey Spillane here?) Ultimately Pope started writing more ambitious mysteries and broke out of the neo-porn confines into the world of “serious” literature, though he always drew on people he’d known from Massapequa and wrote thinly disguised paraphrases of them into his novels. One such person was Barney Corman (Mark Linn-Baker), who grew up in Massapequa alongside Pope and then moved to New York City, opened a small bookstore called Barney’s Books, and also supplemented his income by writing book reviews for tiny publications. Corman never reviewed Pope’s books publicly because of their former friendship, which has remained strong enough that Pope regularly does book events at Corman’s shop.

In the opening scene Pope entrusts Corman with the handwritten manuscript of his latest novel, Troubled Pants, because Corman wants to read it. Since it’s the only extant copy of the work, and would remain so until Pope has it typed and it becomes a computer file, Pope threatens to murder Corman if the manuscript disappears. A year and a half later, Pope shows up at Barney’s Books upset that the manuscript of Troubled Pants is still missing, and he kills Corman by shoving a series of bookshelves onto him until they crush him. The police, of course, assume it was an accident, but Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) reopens the case a year and a half later after Pope publishes a new novel, Snow Keeps Falling, in which Pope’s usual alter ego, “Henry Bishop” (so named because his creator’s name is “Pope”), goes on a skiing trip with a friend who resembles Barney Corman who dies in an avalanche while Pope’s character is having an affair with his wife. One of the things we quickly learn about is that, like quite a few politicians, Pope has an insatiable appetite for sex, so much so that his publisher stopped paying him to hire young, comely female college students as “interns” because he was continually trying to seduce them, and they were filing too many human-resources complaints against him. Elsbeth’s B.S. detector is triggered by a passage in Pope’s book that says he and his late friend locked eyes and stared at each other just before the avalanche killed the friend. Elsbeth reasons that any such avalanche would have killed Pope’s character, too, if the two men had been close together enough to lock eyes. There’s a subplot in which Elsbeth’s friend Alec Bloom (Ivan Hernandez) actually wins the election for mayor of New York, only Elsbeth jilts him as soon as the results are in. There are also some engaging character performances by middle-aged women, including Sarah Steele as Marissa Gold, Alec’s campaign manager, and Joanna Gleason as Barney Corman’s widow Beverly, who took over the store after his death and seems to have built it back up into a going concern again.

Barney had been worried he’d have to close since the landlord had jacked up the rent on him, and to that end he had a first edition of E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End in a copy supposedly once owned by Henry James that he was reluctantly going to have to sell to keep the store open. Elsbeth ultimately discovers that Pope went through a bitter divorce from Maura Davidoff (Didi Conn), and that Barney Corman had been sending her bitterly negative reviews of each of Pope’s books as they came out. Elsbeth goes to see Maura and finds that Barney sent her a review of Troubled Pants, even though it was never published, only Pope had recovered his handwritten manuscript from the store’s files the night he killed Barney and it’s sitting in his apartment until, worried that its existence would give him away, he burns it and reports it to the fire department as a house fire. Ultimately Elsbeth is able to tie Pope to the crime through his habit of licking his fingers before he turns the pages of a book, which gives the police enough of his DNA to test it and find a match between the residue on the footstool Pope pushed out of the way to make sure that the shelves would crush Barney and the saliva Pope left on the pages of Howard’s End as he turned the pages on the book. Like a Law and Order writer, Jonathan Tolins has Pope arrested at the most publicly embarrassing moment, right when he’s about to do a public reading from Snow Kept Falling and take questions at a book signing. Mention should be made of this episode’s director, Robin Givens, who entered the celebriati in 1988 by marrying boxer Mike Tyson. Her imdb.com bio is a sad tale of multiple relationships with male athletes that all seem to have ended badly, two of which produced children whom she raised as a single mother. She turned in a perfectly professional job of directing here. I also liked the scene in which Elsbeth is out walking with her Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), and as is common in real-life friendships between straight women and Gay men, they’re both commiserating about how awful it is to date men!