Death in Paradise: Season 14, Episode 1 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired February 19, 2025)

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

Last night at 10 I watched a charming PBS mystery show called Death in Paradise which was celebrating the first episode of its 14th season with this program. It’s set on a fictitious Caribbean island alternately called Saint-Marie and Honoré (played by the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, whose actual film commission is listed as one of the production companies). Previous episodes have gone into the racial politics of the islands and in particular the presence of white people on the local police force in command positions. Alas, the entire dramatis personae of this one were Black, and the lead police detective on the show is Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet). He’s retiring and leaving the island to move to London when literally on his way to the airport he stumbles onto a police investigation of the seemingly accidental death, but really murder, of newly hired police officer Benjamin Brice (Anthony J. Abraham). Benjamin Brice becomes a genuinely pathetic (in the good sense) figure since we meet him first using his smartphone to make a video expressing how he rose out of a criminal family to seek out a career in law enforcement. The sequence includes a flashback in which Benjamin and his brother Karlus (Stephen Odubola) are shown as teenagers. Karlus has just stolen a car and wants Benjamin to go for a joy ride with him, but Benjamin demurs. Benjamin explains in his video that that’s when he first realized his purpose in life would be to enforce the law, not break it. Alas, Benjamin doesn’t show up on his first scheduled day of work as a police officer; instead he’s found dead in a ravine, having apparently taken an accidental fall off the bicycle he was riding to get to work. Wilson deduces that it was actually murder because, though Benjamin had taken all the other correct safety precautions, he wasn’t wearing a bike helmet. He also figures out that the killing was conducted as part of the fallout from a burglary of a rich white woman on the island who was in the throes of dementia. The burglary took place a year before and Karlus was actually arrested for it and served a year in the local prison, but though the police recovered the victim’s knit handbag the cash and jewels also taken were never found. Midway through the story, the local police precinct is broken into, and though nothing was taken the office is left in a state of disarray indicating that the crooks, whoever they were, were searching for something rather frantically.

One cute gag that was done as part of this episode even though it had nothing to do with the main plot was that Wilson had made a grocery order to be delivered to his new home in London. Later he tried to cancel it when he missed his plane, but he forgot about the time difference between London and the Caribbean and his order had already been delivered when he called to cancel it. Wilson is genuinely shocked when his co-workers inform him that food delivery services exist on Saint Marie, too. In fact, a lot of the best gags on this show are about how technically retro the police office is; they’re still using overhead fans and fax machines in the age of air conditioning and the Internet; in one scene, as the other cops are trying to hold a memorial for Benjamin, Wilson cranks up the fan in the precinct room to maximum and the strain on its ancient motor causes it to collapse and fall off the ceiling. Three suspects emerge: Karlus, his and Benjamin’s mother Paulette (Michelle Greenridge), and Damon Clarke (Mike Holden), who was Karlus’s cellmate in prison. All have alibis, but Wilson and the other police determine that [spoiler alert!] Karlus was the real killer. His motive was he was after a valuable stamp that had been used to mail an envelope inside the original burglary victim’s handbag (earlier I’d thought it would be a slip of paper with a clue inside as to the whereabouts of the stolen cash and jewels). His alibi was his girlfriend, with whom he was supposedly in bed at the time of the murder, though he moved back the hands of his alarm clock from 8 a.m. to 7:45 so his partner would think he was in bed at the time of the murder (a gimmick also used in at least one previous Death in Paradise episode). Karlus had been concerned that with Benjamin actually working in the precinct office where the handbag was stored, he would one day discover it. Karlus had already been ratted out for the original burglary by his mother, so this was not a clan with much in the way of family loyalties. This Death in Paradise episode was clever and genuinely moving – we truly feel sorry for Benjamin, who worked so hard to escape his family’s criminal past only to get sucked into it again and literally killed for it – and there was a subplot in which Wilson’s immediate superior, Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), is informed that his position is being eliminated and he’s going to be out of a job. But I do tend to agree with the Guardian critic Jack Seale, who called it “an undemanding detective show, with nice Caribbean scenery.”

The Kate: Marty Stuart and the Fabulous Superlatives (Connecticut Public Television, 2020)

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

My husband Charles came home from work as the Death in Paradise episode was ending on Friday, January 9 and joined me to watch an hour-long TV music program on a series called The Kate, which was something like Live at the Belly Up except it came from the other end of the country. It was filmed “live” in 2020 at the Katharine Hepburn Cultural Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Hepburn’s home town, which is housed in a 300-seat theatre adjacent to the Katharine Hepburn museum. The featured performer was Marty Stuart (b. 1958), whom I’d never heard of before but Charles had because one of his previous partners was a major fan of country music and liked Stuart’s records. Stuart was born in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town most famous for the three civil-rights workers, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney, who were murdered by local law enforcement there in 1964. Stuart had a legendary career; he started playing electric guitar at age nine. At 12 he joined a white gospel band called The Sullivans, and his parents allowed him to go on tour with them. In 1972, when he was still just 13, Roland White, a mandolinist with Lester Flatt’s bluegrass band, heard Stuart and recommended him to Flatt. Flatt hired him and Stuart recalled walking into the main theatre at the Grand Ole Opry with Flatt and being acknowledged as if he were the crown prince of bluegrass. After Flatt died in 1979 Stuart briefly wondered what he would do next. He recalled hanging out at a party with Johnny Cash, who immediately offered him a job touring with his band. (Stuart noted the irony that the only two record albums he had owned as a child rather than just borrowing from his parents’ collection were by Johnny Cash and Lester Flatt with his original partner, Earl Scruggs.) Stuart left Cash’s band in 1985 and started a career as a solo artist, signing with Cash’s label, Columbia, but after a reasonably successful first album and some singles for them, they canceled his contract. In 1989 he signed with MCA Records and made albums called Hillbilly Rock, Tempted, This One’s Gonna Hurt You, and Love and Luck. Stuart’s albums were known for using guest stars both alive (Travis Tritt, Johnny Cash, Doc Watson, Earl Scruggs) and dead, via samples (Lester Flatt, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb).

In 2002 he formed a band called The Fabulous Superlatives, which recorded for Stuart’s own label, Superlatone. The Fabulous Superlatives have been together ever since, with just one personnel change; Stuart, his cousin Kenny Vaughan on second guitar, and Harry Stinson on drums have been there from the beginning, and the current bassist, Chris Scruggs (Earn Scruggs’s grandson), joined in 2015. Though Stuart isn’t a particularly great singer (as he’s the first to admit), he is a virtuoso guitar and mandolin player and his voice is fine for his material. The band began their hour-long set on The Kate (like Live at the Belly Up, The Kate blessedly features chyrons giving the song titles) with “Graveyard,” an instrumental that blends country with 1960’s surf music (a combination I’ve heard from at least one band on Live at the Belly Up as well). Then Stuart did one of his biggest hits, “The Whiskey Ain’t Workin’,” which he co-wrote with Travis Tritt and was originally released as a duet between them on Tritt’s album It’s All About to Change (1991). After that he did the title song from Tempted, about a man who’s tempted to stray from his marriage vows and engage in extra-relational activity. Then Stuart performed a song from his country concept album The Pilgrim called “Old Mexico,” in which he played a fugitive from justice who flees across the border because nobody wants him there. After that song he turned over the vocal reins to Kenny Vaughan, who looks vaguely like mid-period Keith Richards, who sang a song called “Country Music Got a Hold On Me” that, ironically, was the least country-sounding song on the entire show: it sounded a lot more like 1950’s rock. Then Chris Scruggs, who looked strikingly like MS NOW host Chris Hayes, sang and played a Bob Wills cover called “Brain Cloudy Blues” that was in turn largely ripped off of Kokomo Arnold’s classic “Milk Cow Blues.” (Greil Marcus, in his reprehensible book Mystery Train, tried to claim that Elvis Presley took his cover of “Milk Cow Blues” from “Brain Cloudy Blues.” This was just part of Marcus’s bizarre and racist claim that Elvis owed nothing to Black music; in fact both Wills and Elvis took the song from Arnold, and Elvis’s original release of “Milk Cow Blues” on Sun properly credited Arnold as composer.)

Then drummer Harry Stinson, who spent much of the show playing the sort of snare drum seen in marching bands which has a neck strap so you can wear it, and using brushes instead of sticks throughout, took the vocal mike for a cover of Woody Guthrie’s “Pretty Boy Floyd.” He sang some spectacularly long held notes that were thrilling in ways Guthrie’s more matter-of-fact performances weren’t. The song was Guthrie’s attempt to rehabilitate the real Pretty Boy Floyd’s reputation and turn him into a sort of Robin Hood figure, robbing banks to help poor people ruined by the Depression, and it ends with the lines, “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen,” and, “I ain’t never seen an outlaw drive a family from their home.” I remember when I first discovered Rose Maddox, the first woman country singer to project agency and independence instead of playing either the victim or the sex toy, being pleasantly surprised that she covered Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer” at a time when virtually nobody in the country-music world went near Guthrie because of his politics, but in 2020 that political era was gone (though Donald Trump and his minions are trying to bring it back). After another country-surf instrumental, Stuart retook the vocal mike for by far the best song on the program: “Six White Horses,” written by Larry Murray in 1969 as a memorial for John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. It was originally recorded by Tommy Cash, Johnny Cash’s younger (by eight years) brother, and Stuart introduced it with a stage rap about how it showed the evil guns can wreak in the wrong hands. (Country music has generally been solidly behind an extremist interpretation of the Second Amendment, a particular chicken that came home to roost on October 1, 2017, when a 64-year-old named Stephen Paddock took a room at the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas, brought an assault weapon, and fired into the crowd attending an outdoor country music festival, killing 60 people before taking his own life. The headliner at the show had been Jason Aldean, and one of the opening acts was Maren Morris, who was so appalled at the country music community’s lack of support for common-sense gun laws she officially left the genre and re-established herself as a pop singer.)

“Six White Horses” is a great song, far better than Dion’s “Abraham, Martin, and John” (the song I remember on the same theme from the same era), and a powerful statement against America’s continuing love affair with guns and the death toll it claims every year. Anything else after that would have been an anticlimax, though the next song, “Hobo’s Prayer,” was one Stuart wrote in honor of the hobo he met as a kid on one of the many trains that pass through Philadelphia and was so impressed by he told his parents, “When I grow up, I want to be a hobo.” (He’s done so much touring as a traveling musician he said he’s achieved that ambition, in a way.) The two songs that concluded his program were “Time Don’t Wait,” a country jam, and “Angels Rock Me to Sleep,” a Christian-themed song that offered a return to Stuart’s gospel-music past. All in all, Stuart’s performance on The Kate was mightily impressive and showed off the deep soul country music is capable of at its very best.

Law and Order: "Snowflakes" and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Purity" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 8, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, January 8) my husband Charles and I watched the welcome return of the two major shows from the Law and Order franchise, Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. They were united in a so-called “crossover episode” in which the Law and Order show was called “Snowflakes” (referring to the leftover frozen embryos remaining after in vitro fertilization) and the SVU half was called “Purity” (relating to a corporate mega-rich guy who’s using his money to breed a genetically superior strain of white people to take over the world). The shows had the same director, Jean de Segonzac, but different writers: “Snowflakes” was written by Scott Gold while “Purity” was the product of Kevin Deibolt and Brant Engelstein. “Snowflakes” opens with a recent Ukrainian immigrant named Nadiya Tecun (Anastasiia Zahrai) stumbling around the streets of New York. She’s picked up by police and taken to a hospital, and she seems to be on her way to recovery when she’s told by the hospital staff, “Your brother is here to see you.” She bolts from the hospital when she hears that news, and we assume that the “brother” is actually a criminal out to kill her. Nadiya is later traced to the streets of New York and is again picked up by police, only she’s ambushed by the supposed “brother,” really a hit man named Sergey Volkov (Vesselin Todorov-Vinnie), and shot to death while still in the police car. This time the cops who picked her up are the usual Law and Order leads these days, Detective Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and his commanding officer, Lieutenant Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney), who’s been working as his partner until they find him someone permanent. Nadiya literally bleeds out on Brady, and this gives her a particular hard-on to solve the case and find the shooter. An autopsy on Nadiya’s body reveals that she’d recently been pregnant but the baby had died inside her and been crudely extracted with forceps, and the remaining genetic tissue of the dead fetus reveals that she wasn’t the biological mother or any kin to the fetus at all. The cops ultimately trace her to a crude medical clinic located inside an abandoned warehouse where a gang of organized criminals were running a scam in which young Ukrainian women were recruited to serve as surrogate mothers for in vitro embryos, charged a hefty sum to come to America and give birth, and then their babies would be turned over for adoption.

Among the most pathetic (in the good sense) characters were an affluent straight couple who adopted one of the babies and then found out from the cops that their new child was part of an illegal scheme. The adoptive parents naturally freak out at the prospect that their baby, whom they’ve grown to love as their own, will be taken away from them, and the cops have to obtain a court order ensuring that that won’t happen before the couple will provide evidence. The cops ultimately corner the attorney for the corrupt enterprise, Derek Hobbs (Jess Prichard), as he’s on his way to take his daughter to a basketball game in which she’s playing. Hobbs’s evidence allows the police to find Sergey Volkov and his domestic partner, Sara Tandon (Colleen Foy), but it’s later thrown out of court because Lieutenant Brady crossed the line legally in threatening to grab Hobbs’s daughter to get him to talk. The cops trace Sara’s phony charity, which began as a legitimate operation to assure religious participants in IVF that their leftover embryos would not be destroyed but would be donated to other childless couples (a big deal among members of the anti-abortion Right, who regard all fertilized human eggs as fully human people whose destruction constitutes murder) but was soon converted into a baby-making enterprise. At least two attempts to raid the group behind all this end up in explosions, including one that wounds SVU detective Terry Bruno (Kevin Kane). At the end of part one the cops raid a compound that is full of C4 explosive and other bomb-making components, and they also see a flag with the emblem of the Vandals, one of the 5th Century A.D. German tribes (along with the Visigoths and the Huns) that picked the carcass of the Western Roman Empire clean. The Vandal emblem has recently been picked up by white supremacists who fly the flag to indicate their struggle for a whites-only kingdom in all or part of the current United States.

It turns out that the mastermind behind all this is Joseph Dahlsonn (Tom Lipinski), a tech billionaire and white supremacist who used Tandon’s charity to create white embryos (he specifically stated, “No Muslims or Jews”) which he would then genetically tweak in his labs to create a super-race, have adopted by would-be mothers in a whites-only community he’d set up in upstate New York, and use them to ensure the survival of the Caucasian race in the face of the “Great Replacement.” (The “Great Replacement” is a strand of white nationalist conspiracy-mongering that holds that, by deliberately reproducing faster while discouraging whites from reproducing at all, people of color and their leaders, the Jews, are plotting the total destruction of the white part of the human race.) The police arrest Dahlsonn for violating the anti-eugenics laws passed in New York state in the wake of World War II – eugenics had been a program of selective breeding of humans that was quite popular in the early 20th century until the Nazis gave it a bad name – and also confiscate his genetically engineered embryos. But ultimately they have to dismiss the case against Dahlsonn and let him go because, with the evidence from Derek Hobbs ruled inadmissible, Dahlsonn is the only person who can establish that Sara Tandon was part and parcel of the illegal operation and blow out of the water her defense that she was an abused woman whose husband forced her to participate in illegal activity out of fear for her life. Dahlsonn demands the return of his embryos, but the way writers Deibolt and Engelstein treat him, it’s obvious they’re setting him up for a sequel in which he’ll finally meet his comeuppance. As things turn out, that happens (to a degree) even before the episode is over; a coalition of the biological parents of those embryos bands together and files a lawsuit demanding that they get the embryos instead.

The judge in the case rules for the families and thus Dahlsonn is forced to relinquish control, though there’s one final irony: the judge rules that the embryos be destroyed, the very result both Dahlsonn and the families that created them in the first place were trying to avoid. To me Dahlsonn’s impassioned defense that the embryos are his “intellectual property” was the scariest part of this show: one can easily see a future court case in which the clear prohibition in the Thirteenth Amendment of one human being owning another runs into the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1970’s precedent that lower-level life forms could be patented – and I’m not sure how the current Right-wing Supreme Court, with its ideological opposition to abortion and sympathy for the Christian Right versus its inclination to let businesses do pretty much whatever they like to make money, would rule on that. This was a pretty sprawling Law and Order but the two episodes combined effectively despite the different writing teams, and it raised some pretty major issues even in the context of a policier thriller – as this show has sporadically but effectively done throughout its history. The late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. recommended that people watch Law and Order for an education in just how the guarantees of the Bill of Rights work in practice.

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

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

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

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

Harlen Coben's Final Twist: Episode 1 (CBS-TV, aired January 7, 2026)

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

Last night (Wednesday, January 7) I watched a rather grim opening episode of the new true-crime series on CBS, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist, in which the well-known writer of mystery fiction will be telling true-crime stories every week. Of course there was the usual hype around Coben’s name – he was hailed as the best crime fiction writer in the world today, which he isn’t (I’d rate Jonathan Kellerman, Michael Connelly, and Lee Child ahead of him; I think Kellerman and Connelly are the best modern writers at keeping the noir fiction world alive, though I lost a lot of respect for Child when he agreed to let Tom Cruise star in the Jack Reacher movies even though Reacher was described as overpoweringly tall and Cruise, of course, is not). It was also ironic that the story Coben and his staff, including director Jeff Zimbalist, chose to tell for their first episode was already one that ABC’s 20/20 had done virtually two years ago (April 5, 2024). Nonetheless, it was a pretty grim tale: the murder in January 2012 of two young Tennessee lovebirds, Billy Payne, Jr. and Billie Jean Hayworth, in the small town of Mountain View, where the crime rate is so low people routinely leave their front doors unlocked. The 37-year-old Payne and the 23-year-old Hayworth had met when they both worked for the same employer, and they moved in together and had a son named Tyler. The mastermind of their murder was a young woman named Janelle Potter, who had been in love with Payne and had never reconciled herself to losing him to Hayworth, especially once Payne and Hayworth proved the seriousness of their relationship by having a child together. CBS’s hype (as well as ABC’s two years ago) stressed the fact that Janelle Potter set up the whole thing through a series of increasingly hateful posts on social media, including ones she posted herself under the stolen identity of a mystery man named “Chris” who claimed to work for the CIA. “Chris” turned out to be Chris Tjaden, a man from out of town who’d worked as a local police officer but had never been with the CIA. He was an old high-school classmate of Janelle’s and that seems to have been how she chose his identity to steal and use to “catfish” her own parents, Marvin “Buddy” and Barbara Potter, into killing Payne and Hayworth. She also impersonated Hayworth on line and posted mock threats to her own life in Hayworth’s name.

This was presented as a story about the unique dangers of social media, yet I can readily imagine how the great noir writers of old could have told similar stories in a pre-social media age through anonymous letters or phone calls assuming someone else’s identities. One of the things that fascinated me about the show was its inclusion of actual interrogation footage, featuring an African-American Tennessee state investigator who for some reason looked a lot skinner and scrawnier in the interview footage shot by Coben’s crew in which he recounted the case than he did in the actual interrogation videos. Either he had a catastrophic health issue that drastically lowered his weight, or (as I suspect) the camera really did add 10 pounds (more than 10 pounds, judging by the looks of things) to his apparent weight. Also the Potters recruited Payne’s cousin Jamie Curd, whom Payne and Hayworth had tried to set up as an alternate boyfriend for Janelle, as a lookout and to help with the murder in case Buddy Potter, a Marine veteran who’d suffered from mobility issues, couldn’t do it all himself. Jamie eventually turned state’s evidence and got a sweetheart plea deal, while the three Potters were ultimately convicted and given double life sentences (though Barbara’s was later reversed on appeal and he agreed to plead guilty to “facilitation of murder” and have her sentence reduced to 15 years). To me the story was an object lesson in the evils of jealousy and the true tragedy lay in Janelle Potter’s inability to come to terms with having been rejected. There was also a twist in that the Potters were originally from Pennsylvania and had just moved to Mountain View, Tennessee two years before (though, oddly, Janelle in her interrogations had just as thick a Southern accent as anyone else in the case; she must have picked it up really quickly and thoroughly), and another twist in that Janelle Potter’s IQ was only 72, though given what she was able to do (to steal other people’s identities and mount this elaborate catfishing plot to get her parents and a young man who was genuinely in love with her to kill her rejected ex and his new partner while sparing their baby, who’s now being raised by a grandmother) it’s hard to believe she’s that unintelligent.

Bombshell (American Experience Films, PBS Western Reserve, 2025)

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

Last night (Tuesday, January 6) I watched a fascinating special on PBS, an American Experience episode called “Bombshell” about how the U.S. government not only kept the existence of the Manhattan Engineering District (the official name of the World War II atomic bomb program, though it’s become colloquially known to history as the “Manhattan Project” even though none of the work took place in Manhattan or anywhere near New York City) a secret during the war but worked furiously to shape the public’s view of the bomb project after the war. The show was produced under rather odd auspices because, while its credits have the familiar American Experience logo, it’s not listed under either imdb.com or PBS’s own Web site. It turned out it was produced under the rubric “PBS Western Reserve,” apparently a sub-network of which I’d never heard before. The first half-hour is a capsule history of the origins of the Manhattan Project, including the discovery of atomic fission in Germany in the 1930’s that, at least according to director and co-writer Ben Lofterman, gave the Nazis an automatic head start in building a nuclear weapon. Actually the Nazis frittered away that advantage because of Adolf Hitler’s racism: he denounced nuclear science as “Jewish physics” and drove out a lot of Germany’s top nuclear researchers because they were Jewish. The show hits all the high points of this familiar story: the letter Leo Szilard wrote to Albert Einstein in 1938 expressing the fear that the Nazis would build an atomic weapon and imploring him to use his prestige to get President Franklin Roosevelt to authorize a crash program to build an A-bomb before the Germans did; the formation of the Manhattan Project in 1942 and the appointment of General Leslie Groves, who had just finished construction of the Pentagon and had brought the project in ahead of schedule and under budget, to administer it; Groves’s choice of J. Robert Oppenheimer to run the project’s scientific end; and the successful detonation of Trinity, the first working atomic bomb, at Alamogordo, New Mexico in July 1945. Along the way Groves hired a New York Times reporter named William L. Laurence to handle public relations for the project, even though the public wasn’t supposed to know about it until the bomb was successfully deployed. Laurence was a fascinating character: he’d studied philosophy and law at Harvard and Boston University, but he never received a degree at Harvard because he kept defaulting on his student loans. (Lofterman says he was expelled for cheating; he took an exam in elementary German for a student he was tutoring.)

Laurence got a job on the New York World in 1926 and effectively invented the job of science journalist. Ultimately the New York Times hired him away from the World, and in 1940 he wrote a Times article, which the paper put on its front page, about the potential use of atomic energy in creating a super-weapon. Laurence was apparently hoping that his article would spark the creation of a U.S. atom-bomb program, but it didn’t. A copy did find its way to the Soviet Union, which took the hint and launched their own atom bomb program in 1942. (So much for the still widely believed myth that the Soviets couldn’t have made their own A-bomb and had to “steal” the secret from us!) In 1942 Groves hired Laurence and gave him carte blanche to stay at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the bomb was being developed. The price for Laurence’s access was total secrecy; he had to promise not to write anything about the bomb until it was actually used, and he kept his promise. Another condition of Laurence’s access was that he had to allow Groves’s censors to review any dispatches he did publish, and in particular to toe the official line that the death toll from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the first two (and so far the only) cities in the world ever attacked with atomic weapons, came mostly or totally from the blast effects and not from the radioactivity released by the bombs, which as we now know turned into a “silent killer” that continued to strike down the citizens of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for decades afterwards due to increasing their risks of cancer and other long-term toxicities of nuclear radiation. This remained the U.S. government’s official line for decades afterwards, including those insane A-bomb drills in Nevada in the 1950’s in which U.S. soldiers were marched into A-bomb test sites right after the bombs had been detonated to show that nuclear weapons could be used tactically without any significant harm to the people marching in after they were used. (In fact the death rates among those soldiers from cancer and other radiation-related chronic diseases were well above the average for people of their ages, backgrounds, and overall health conditions.)

The crusading journalist who broke the myth was a young war correspondent named John Hersey, who was born in China to American missionary parents. He referred to himself and his fellow children of missionaries as “mish kids” and said they either excelled in whatever fields they entered or became hard-core alcoholics (nothing in between). In 1945 Hersey was already known as a World War II correspondent and author of the novel A Bell for Adano (1944), about an Italian-American major in Sicily who wins the admiration and affection of the townspeople of Adano. In 1945 he was approached by New Yorker publisher Wallace Shawn and editor Harold Ross to do a profile story on the Hiroshima bombing for the magazine. Hersey was skeptical at first, especially after the world’s fourth atomic weapon was successfully tested by the U.S. at Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, but Ross and Shawn told him to go ahead with it and scheduled the publication for the first anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. Hersey decided to focus on six Japanese survivors of the attack: Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk at the East Asia Tin Works; Dr. Masakazu Fujii, who ran a private hospital; Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, German-born Jesuit pastor of Hiroshima’s largest Roman Catholic church; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki of the local Red Cross hospital; and Rev. Kiyoshi Tanamoto, pastor of Hiroshima’s largest Methodist church. When Hersey started writing it, he thought it would be the average 7,500-word length of a typical New Yorker profile. Instead he kept on working until it was 30,000 words, long enough for a book, and to their credit Shawn and Ross not only decided to print it in full but to make it the sole content of the August 31, 1946 issue. It created a sensation when it first came out, largely because American readers had heretofore known about the atomic bomb and its results only from the sanitized version they’d got from William Laurence and other journalists approved by the government. It became a Book-of-the-Month Club premium selection when it was published in book form, and reportedly Albert Einstein tried to buy 1,000 copies from the publisher to use as warnings of the dangers of atomic warfare – only The New Yorker couldn’t sell him any copies because the issue had completely sold out. Hersey’s Hiroshima bothered the U.S. government enough that they directly commissioned a counter-narrative, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb, credited to then-U.S. Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson but co-written with Harvard University president James Conant and others, including physicists who’d actually worked on the Manhattan Project.

Ben Lofterman’s Bombshell also profiled various other people who tried to get the truth out to the American people about how destructive the A-bomb really was, including Japanese-American photographer and reporter Yoshito Matsushige, who when the Pearl Harbor attack occurred on December 7, 1941 had been in Japan visiting his parents. Matsushige had continued working as a journalist in Japan and just happened to be in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 when the first A-bomb was used. He said he was so horrified at what he was seeing that he could take only a few photos of the devastation, and his pictures were confiscated after the war by the U.S. occupation forces and not released until the U.S. ended its formal occupation of Japan in 1952. Then he got his photos back and sold them to Life magazine, which published them as a major spread. Another one of Lofterman’s heroes was Charles Loeb, an African-American who worked for a Black newspaper in Cleveland and got unfiltered accounts of the destruction of Hiroshima from Black servicemembers who’d been ordered into the city to clean it up. Lofterman explains that one of the reasons General Groves and others in the U.S. military were so determined to downplay the radiation effects of the bomb was that they were worried it would be considered a chemical weapon, similar to the poison gas attacks that had been used to devastating effect by both sides in World War I and had thereafter been banned by the Geneva Conventions. (It’s ironic that Adolf Hitler, who had been wounded by a gas attack as a corporal in World War I, had no problem using gas against helpless civilians in the Holocaust, but firmly forbade the German military from using it in wartime.)

KPBS followed this up with an intriguing half-hour documentary called The Atomic Bowl: Football at Ground Zero – and Nuclear Peril Today, narrated by Peter Coyote (who’s familiar as the narrator of virtually all the Ken Burns documentaries since David McCullough gave up the gig) and telling the bizarre story of an all-star two-handed touch football game played in Nagasaki, Japan on January 1, 1946. This was a morale-builder for the Second Division of the U.S. Marine Corps, who were stationed in Nagasaki as occupation troops, and was held on the site of an old middle school which had been near Ground Zero whose athletic field could be adapted for the purpose. The Marines cleared the field and erected goalposts and bleachers out of scrap wood. They decided to make the game two-hand touch instead of tackle because the field was full of glass shards that couldn’t be removed to make a tackle game safe. That wasn’t the only tweak in the usual rules; they also specified that a team would have to gain 15 yards for a first down instead of the usual 10. The two teams were the “Isahaya Tigers” and the “Nagasaki Bears,” and both had former football stars as their captains: Angelo Bertelli, 1943 Heisman Trophy winner for Notre Dame, for the Bears, and professional star “Bullet” Bill Osmanski of the Chicago Bears for the Tigers. At the time Japanese athletes had already taken up baseball, but American football was terra incognita, and one of the motives behind the game appears to have been to introduce the locals to America’s other pastime. Young Japanese women were recruited to be cheerleaders, and a U.S. Marine band played during halftime. American servicemembers sat in the bleachers or stood alongside the field, while the Japanese watched from afar on hilltops.

The movie got into the “why” of the Nagasaki bombing, and gave me a piece of information I hadn’t known before: it’s the only time in U.S. history the use of an atomic weapon has been authorized at a lower level of command than the President of the United States. There was a lot of criticism, even at the time, that the use of one atomic bomb could be justified as a means of getting the Japanese to surrender but two bombs were beyond the pale. After that, President Harry S. Truman decreed that the U.S. would never again use nuclear weapons without the President’s specific authorization. For the rest of his life Truman would defend his use of the bomb against Hiroshima and would frequently get testy or even angry when it was questioned. He maintained that by using the bomb America had spared itself the need for a costly invasion of the Japanese mainland, which would have meant many times the death toll of the atomic raids. Ben Lofterman in Bombshell and the director of The Atom Bowl both questioned that and said the U.S. government had originally planned to keep dropping as many A-bombs on Japan as American factories could make, not to induce the Japanese to surrender but to soften them up and undermine their ability to resist a U.S. invasion. Also a number of Lofterman’s interviewees argued that the bombs weren’t the last weapons of World War II, but the first of the Cold War: they were used to show the Soviet Union that we were the new world hegemon and they shouldn’t even try to resist as the U.S. took suzerainty over the entire world. That didn’t happen only because the Russians developed their own bomb in 1949 – and I’ve long savored the irony that both J. Robert Oppenheimer and Andrei Sakharov, who headed the bomb programs for their respective countries, ran afoul of their nations’ political police forces and were officially disgraced.

Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames (Danny Gold Productions, 2024)

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

Two nights ago (Monday, January 5) I watched a PBS American Masters program on the late writer, director and (briefly) actor Blake Edwards called Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames. It was made in 2024, 14 years after Edwards died, and director Danny Gold chose to focus it mostly on the long-term relationship between Edwards and his second wife, Julie Andrews, whom he started dating in 1968 (after the breakup of their first marriages, Edwards to actress Patricia Walker and Andrews to set designer Tony Walton), married a year later, and stayed with for 41 years until his death. Edwards was born William Blake Crump in Tulsa, Oklahoma on July 26, 1922, and reportedly his father left his mother even before he was born. His mom, Lillian Grommet Crump, remarried to Jack McEdward, son of important silent-film director J. Gordon Edwards, and in 1925 McEdward moved his family to L.A. to work in the movie business. Blake Edwards recalled sneaking onto movie lots and playing amongst the false-front exteriors. He graduated from high school in 1941 and went for a career as a movie actor, of which he said later, “I worked with the best directors – Ford, Wyler, Preminger – and learned a lot from them. But I wasn't a very cooperative actor. I was a spunky, smart-assed kid. Maybe even I was indicating that I wanted to give, not take, direction.” I wrote about one of these credits, Frank Wisbar’s PRC “B” horror film Strangler of the Swamp (1945), and liked the film overall but said of Edwards, “Blake Edwards is a competent leading man, though he offers nothing here that would lead us to question the wisdom of his subsequent career change to writing and, ultimately, direction (and his presence here puts Rosemary La Planche one degree of separation from Peter Sellers!).” In between acting stints Edwards served briefly in the U.S. Coast Guard and injured his back, which put him in pain for years afterwards.

Edwards then decided to take up writing and made his reputation on the network radio series Richard Diamond, Private Detective, a vehicle for Dick Powell after his sensational success as Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe in the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet. Richard Diamond, Private Detective ran from 1949 to 1953. Later Edwards developed a similar show for TV, Peter Gunn, which ran from 1958 to 1961 and spawned the iconic main theme by Henry Mancini. Edwards recalled that he wanted to work with Mancini after hearing his score for the Orson Welles film Touch of Evil (1968), and they worked together for decades after that. Mancini asked Edwards for permission to write the Peter Gunn score in jazz style, and Edwards happily obliged. Edwards also broke into feature-film direction with two of Columbia Pictures’ attempts to make stocky singer Frankie Laine into a movie star, Bring Your Smile Along (1954) and He Laughed Last (1955), but in 1959 he got his first foray into “A”-list filmmaking with Operation Petticoat, a World War II service comedy starring Cary Grant and Tony Curtis. Edwards was mostly known as a comedy director, including the 1962 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard. It generated the legendary hit song “Moon River” (which Hepburn sings in the film in her own voice; she’s not a great singer but her voice is right for the context and the song), though it also features an obnoxiously racist stereotype of an Asian landlord played (wretchedly) by Mickey Rooney. (Edwards later apologized for this.) In the early 1960’s he took forays into darker material like the Hitchcockian thriller Experiment in Terror (1962) and the alcoholism drama Days of Wine and Roses (also 1962) with Jack Lemmon in one of his rare serious roles.

In 1963 he made The Pink Panther, which started out as a comedy about jewel robbery starring David Niven in a retread of the Raffles character he’d played a quarter-century earlier, but the character audiences remembered and wanted more of was the comically inept French Inspector Jacques Clouseau (Peter Sellers). Edwards and the Mirisch brothers, who’d produced the film for United Artists, spun off a sequel, A Shot in the Dark, also featuring Sellers as Clouseau. Later Edwards made a particular favorite of mine: The Great Race (1965), starring Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, and Natalie Wood in a light-hearted spoof of a real-life 1908 auto race from New York to Paris – westbound across the U.S., north through Canada and Alaska, over the Bering Strait’s natural ice bridge, then through Russia on the right-of-way of the Trans-Siberian Railway and finally across Europe to Paris. (I like to think of this as the “other” Jack Lemmon-Tony Curtis movie, after Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot.) Oddly, The Great Race is referenced here only through brief clips of the famous pie-fight scene Edwards, a devotée of silent comedy in general and Laurel and Hardy in particular, inserted into an elaborate spoof of The Prisoner of Zenda as the race takes the central characters through Ruritania on the final leg of their drive to Paris. Edwards worked with Sellers again in The Party (1968), which took its lumps then and now for the “yellowface” casting of Sellers as an (East) Indian who crashes a Hollywood party. In 1969 Edwards’s career took a major nosedive with his film Darling Lili, starring Julie Andrews (in their first direct collaboration) as a British music-hall entertainer in World War I who’s really a German spy. Danny Gold hails this film as a forgotten masterpiece (I haven’t seen it since it came out and I’m not sure what I’d think of it now) and particularly enthused over the opening shot, which shows Julie Andrews’s face as a pinprick on an otherwise black screen until the camera pulls closer and her face expands to fill the screen. Gold hailed that as hugely innovative when it was obviously a ripoff of the opening of the “Lullaby of Broadway” number in Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935.

Co-starring Rock Hudson, Darling Lili was a commercial bomb, and so was Edwards’s next movie, Wild Rovers (1971), a light-hearted Western with William Holden, Ryan O’Neal, and Karl Malden – which ran into a chainsaw when liquor tycoon Edgar Bronfman bought MGM. Bronfman hired James Aubrey, who’d previously had a rocky tenure as program director for CBS, to run MGM, and Aubrey set up his own cutting room and proceeded to re-edit most of the films being made at the lot, including Wild Rovers. After a few more financial disappointments, including The Carey Treatment and The Tamarind Seed, Edwards decided that his way back to bankability would be to revive the Inspector Clouseau character and make Pink Panther sequels: The Return of the Pink Panther (1975), The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976), and Revenge of the Pink Panther (1978). Then he hit the jackpot with “10” (1979), starring Dudley Moore, Julie Andrews, and Bo Derek as the perfect “10” woman over whom Moore’s character obsesses. Edwards and Andrews again collaborated on S.O.B. (1981), in which Andrews plays an over-the-hill actress whose director (William Holden) insists that she go topless in one scene. Their next film together, Victor/Victoria (1982), was another transgressive comedy, based on the German film Viktor und Viktoria (1933) and its British remake, First a Girl (1935), in which a woman (Julie Andrews) is picked up by a Gay man (Robert Preston) and trained to work as a female impersonator: a woman playing a man playing a woman. She attracts the attention of gangster James Garner, who falls in love with Victoria a.k.a. Victor even though he’s informed by his fellow gangsters that “the Mob don’t consider homosexuality an acceptable lifestyle.” Edwards confessed that he’d fudged things a bit by showing Garner’s character seeing Andrews’s fully frontal in a shower and therefore he knew all along that she was a woman. When he redid Victor/Victoria as a Broadway musical in 1995, with Andrews repeating her role, he took out this compromise.

I’ll give Danny Gold points for one aspect of this movie: he shows all of the Edwards/Andrews children – two (son Geoffrey and daughter Jennifer) his by Patricia Walker, one (Emma Walton Hamilton) hers by Tony Walton, and two Viet Namese girls they adopted after they found they couldn’t have children together – making a surprising degree of success out of being a “blended family.” He even includes some of the many home movies the couple took, though ironically they had two cameras at their wedding (a video camera up close and a film camera farther away on a hilltop) and both malfunctioned. Edwards even called on the officiant to do a retake of their marriage, but the second take didn’t come out any better than the first. I’ve enjoyed a number of Blake Edwards’s films over the years even though I don’t really consider him a great filmmaker, but I still liked this tribute to him even though there was a bit of special pleading about it as if Danny Gold were deliberately trying to raise Edwards higher in the pantheon of filmmakers than he strictly deserves.