Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 2 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired February 26, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, January 16) I had a bit of a disaster movie-wise: I had ordered a DVD from Amazon.com of the 1955 classic French thriller Les Diaboliques, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot as the two women in the life of a French schoolteacher; two of these people are in cahoots to murder the other, but Clouzot, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jérôme Géronimi based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac called Celle qui n'était plus (The One Who Was No More), saved until the very last minute revealing who the murderers were and who the victim was. (Boileau and Narcejac also wrote a novel called D’Entre les Morts – From Amongst the Dead, which later became the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In fact the writers deliberately created that novel with the idea of selling the screen rights to Hitchcock, and when the three met Hitchcock was amused at how skilfully they had constructed their story to pique his interest.) Alas, the DVD I’d bought of Les Diaboliques from Amazon.com was a bootleg from something called “Starry Nights Video” and it was in French with no subtitles. (Since then I’ve searched YouTube for Les Diaboliques and found both a subtitled print and one dubbed in English. Maybe later.) So my husband Charles and I gave up on it, watched YouTube videos (including Thursday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live monologue and a Techmoan report on a new Philips-branded combination record and CD player to which he gave an awful review because for some reason the current licensee of the Philips brand name put in circuitry that shuts off the audio when the signal gets soft, even if the track is still going on), and ultimately turned the TV back on at 10 p.m. for a Death in Paradise episode.

The show was about the murder of a contestant on Island Warrior, a Survivor knock-off being filmed on the island of Saint-Marie, Honoré or whatever the fictionalized locale of this series is. (It’s actually shot on the real-life Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and the Guadeloupe film board is listed as a co-producer – which seems curious given that the show depicts the island as a hotbed of murderers. That would seem more likely to discourage than encourage tourism.) Anyway, the front-runner in the Island Warrior contest, Jonny Feldon (Simon Lennon – any relation? Not as far as I can tell from the bare-bones “biography” on imdb.com), is mysteriously stabbed in the middle of a zip-line descent. He’s visibly O.K. when he starts the descent, then he’s hidden from view by some branches, and when he comes into sight again he’s dead. This was the second episode of the 14th season and it picked up some of the story threads from its immediate predecessor, notably the decision of Detective Inspector Marvin Watson (Don Gilet) to relocate to London, which has been delayed partly because of his renewed interest in investigating the mysterious, supposedly accidental death of his mother, and also because his would-be replacement was murdered in episode 1. The latest replacement for the job of low man on the police totem pole is Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), a thoroughly repulsive comic-relief character who proves a) that they didn’t break the mold after they made Frank McHugh and b) that they can pour black plastic into it.

Watson has signed a three-month contract to continue working on the island with Police Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), who received word in the immediately preceding episode that he’s being laid off but in this one seems to be continuing without any worries. Watson and the other police – including Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder) and Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), both of whom were anxious to see Watson go and are visibly disappointed they still have to work with him – identify four suspects whose whereabouts during Jonny’s descent can’t be verified. They are the show’s obnoxious producer, Rick Mayhew (Adam James); Chaz Simons (Bhavna Limbachia), the runner-up whom Mayhew had bribed with an amount equal to the prize money to throw the contest in Jonny’s favor; Mayhew’s assistant and show runner, Lisa Bulmer (Sofia Oxenham), who claims to have invented the concept of Island Warrior in the first place and been screwed out of the royalties, and who was having an affair with Jonny during the filming; and Dale Buckingham (David Avery), the show’s cinematographer. Dale had a hopeless crush on Lisa and got flamingly jealous of Jonny when he seduced her (though Lisa maintained that she didn’t care about Jonny one way or the other but was just seeking derogatory information about the show, which she wanted to sabotage to ensure that it never aired and Mayhew therefore didn’t profit from his theft of her idea). At first he flew a camera-equipped drone into Jonny’s bedroom and video-recorded him and Lisa having sex with each other. Then, when that didn’t work to break them up, he decided [spoiler alert!] to kill Jonny with one of those insanely complicated murder methods beloved of thriller writers and just as beloved, for exactly the opposite reason, by real-life homicide detectives. (Raymond Chandler said that the real homicide detectkves he’d interviewed told him that the easiest murders to solve were the ones in which the killer had planned an elaborate mechanism to cover up the crime, and the hardest were the ones in which killer and victim had been buddy-buddies until 20 seconds or so before one killed the other.)

My husband Charles correctly guessed Dale as the murderer but missed both his method and his motive. He stabbed Jonny not with a knife but with a particularly strong sort of pin used to make the show’s costumes. The pin is made of a remarkable metal (adamantium, maybe?) that even when refined to the width of a pin can penetrate human flesh. Dale stabbed Jonny with it before the descent started, and after Jonny (who on a previous scene in the program had injured his back so severely he was on major doses of painkillers and jammed the lethal pin into himself even farther as he tied his back brace) did his fatal plunge Dale dropped a knife in front of one of the trees Jonny passed as he was going down so both his colleagues on the Island Warrior crew and the police would think the knife was the murder weapon. His motive was jealousy over Jonny for having made it with Lisa when Dale desperately wanted her but was too shy to approach her honestly. Meanwhile, DI Watson is going through the effects of his late mother (ya remember Watson’s late mother?) and discovers a reggae record of a rather funereal song she particularly liked.This suggests (at least to me) that her death might have been a suicide, since one of the reasons Watson is so sure her death wasn’t an accident (as the authorities ruled it) was that she was too experienced a sailor to go out on the ocean in a serious storm. This Death in Paradise episode was mixed; Don Gilet got a few genuinely emotional moments but I certainly could have done without Shaquille Ali-Yebuah’s so-called “comic relief.” And of course I liked the implied critique of the major amounts of artifice and deception that go into so-called “reality” TV shows! I remember when the Los Angeles Times published an article about a threatened strike of reality-show writers, and I joked that it told you all you needed to know about the basic falsity of the genre that a job called “reality-show writer” exists.

The Kate: Delbert McClinton and the Self-Made Band (Connecticut Public Television, 2019)

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

The next show on PBS after Death in Paradise was an episode of The Kate, a music show which is much like the local Live at the Belly Up except it’s from clear over at the other end of the U.S. (the Katharine Hepburn Memorial Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the Great Kate’s home town). The star was Delbert McClinton, an old-time musician who’s equally at home in blues, country, and pop-rock. The show was filmed on August 20, 2019 and featured McClinton with a mostly all-white, all-male band, though one of the horn players was a Black male trumpeter, Quentin Ware (who played much of the set with a plunger mute) and the other was a white woman, Dale Robbins, who played tenor saxophone. I was amused that her instrument’s keys were the regulation brass but the body was black, which made me suspect it was a plastic sax (though the only two plastic saxes I’ve seen photos of, played by Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman, were both white). Born in 1940 in Lubbock, Texas (also Buddy Holly’s home town), McClinton is a major veteran who recorded his first important record in 1962, as a harmonica player on Bruce Channel’s hit “Hey, Baby.” McClinton remembered being on a British tour with Channel in 1962 in which The Beatles were one of the opening acts, and he gave John Lennon pointers on how to play blues on the harmonica. (The Beatles covered “Hey, Baby” during their club dates at the Cavern in Liverpool, and years later Ringo Starr recorded it on his last truly great album, Ringo’s Rotogravure, on Atlantic in 1976, the final album on which all four Beatles contributed new songs.) Even before he hooked up with Channel, McClinton had played in a bar band called the Straitjackets who had played backup for Rice Miller (the second “Sonny Boy Williamson”), Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Jimmy Reed. In 1965 he formed a band variously called the Ron-Dels and Rondells with Ronnie Kelly and Billy Wade Sanders, who had a chart hit called “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go.”

He played this gig with the Self-Made Men, a band he formed in the late 2010’s that included, besides Ware and Robbins, guitarists Bob Britt and James Pennebaker, keyboard player Kevin McKendree (though for most of the set his electronic instrument was set to sound like an ordinary blues piano), bassist Mike Joyce and drummer Jack Bruno. McClinton has the raspy, well-worn voice typical of veteran blues singers, but that didn’t bother me because he used it with genuine power and soul. He opened with “Mr. Smith,” the lead-off track from his then-current album Tall, Dark, and Handsome, and for the second song he did a piece called “Lulu’s Back in Town.” That was also the title of a hit from the 1930’s which Nat “King” Cole covered in the 1950’s (though it was a sign of the times that he had to change the original lyric, “All my blondes and brunettes,” to “All my Harlem coquettes” because it wouldn’t have been acceptable to suggest that a Black man like Cole was dating blondes), but the one McClinton did was an original that not only was not the 1930’s song but had the opposite message. The one in the 1930’s was, “Great! At last! Lulu’s back in town!” The one in McClintock’s version was, “Oh, shit, that bitch Lulu is back again!” Then, after a couple more blues numbers, “Gotta Get It Worked On” and “Blues as Blues Can Get,” McClinton shifted to the more country-ish side of his style with “Oughta Know,” “Two More Bottles of Wine,” and “Why Me?” After that McClinton was shown in an interstitial interview segment (blessedly the makers of The Kate are sparing with these bits, doing only one per show instead of the constant interruptions we get on Live at the Belly Up with the musicians jabbering away) telling how much he loves Mexico. He has a house there and frequently goes there when he has to write songs for a new album because there he can work without the distractions that afflict him on this side of the border. Then he did a nice song in the Tex-Mex style called “Gone to Mexico.”

After that McClinton sang “Let’s Get Down Like We Used To” and a John Hiatt cover called “Have a Little Faith in Me.” McClinton’s next song was a soul cover of “Shakey Ground,” originally recorded by The Temptations in 1975 (and co-written by Eddle Hazel, who also played guitar on The Temptations’ recording and later was in George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic crew: Clinton’s two bands recorded for different labels but were the same people except Parliament had a horn section and Funkadelic didn’t). McClinton closed his show with “Givin’ It Up for Your Love” and a relatively quiet lament called “Every Time I Roll the Dice.” McClinton’s music, which he called “rock ‘n’ roll for adults,” is first-rate and a lot of fun, and I noticed that he did 13 songs. I’ve noted writing about Live at the Belly Up episodes that you can tell a lot about a band by the number of songs they get into the one-hour time slot – particularly whether they’re a tight, relatively disciplined pop act or do a lot of jamming, which means they play fewer but longer songs in the slot. At 13 songs, McClinton’s set list was towards the more disciplined end – a bit surprising for a blues band – though he did do some loose things along the way, especially with his two lead guitar players. McClinton doesn’t play any instrument besides harmonica, but he doesn’t have to; his chops on the mouth organ are still quite good. Overall this was a fun presentation and a worthy way for my husband Charles and I to send off our evening!

Law and Order: "Dream On" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 15, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, January 15), when I got home from the Bears San Diego dinner party, I settled in to watch the Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. I missed the first 10 minutes of the Law and Order show, “Dream On,” but what I saw was a quite compelling tale of an aspiring pop singer, Zina Worth (Lana Love), who was living with Leo Brady (Alex Neustaedter, a quite compelling young actor who has the James Dean stare down pat), son of one of the series “regulars,” squadron commander Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney). By the time I picked up the show Zina was already dead, so I don’t know whether they gave her a number to perform so we could see how good she was or not. Zina and Leo had been together long enough to have an eight-year-old daughter – unless we were supposed to believe the girl was Zina’s daughter by a previous partner, which is certainly conceivable. But their relationship got sidetracked when Zina met Sean Chase (Ryan Broussard), an African-American drug dealer and aspiring music mogul who offered to produce an album for Zina. Alas, Sean got her back on drugs after both she and Leo had successfully rehabbed, and Leo’s concern for her mixed with his jealousy over whether Zina was having extra-relational activity with Sean (I can’t help but wonder if the writers deliberately named the Black villain after Sean Combs, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, a.k.a. P. Diddy, a.k.a. Diddy), which she probably was since his defense as to how her blood got under his fingernails was they were having rough sex and he scratched her until she bled out a minor amount. Leo is desperate not only to avoid being convicted of Zina’s murder, which he swears he didn’t do, but to be allowed to keep custody of Zina’s daughter instead of having to relinquish her to Zina’s sister Izzy (Delaney Anne Cuthbert), who wants to raise her. There’s a brief red herring, a long-time stalker named Danny Cole (the quite cute Harrison Bryan) who’d been going to all Zina’s performances but left the last one she ever gave, on the night she was murdered, for reasons that remain unclear.

The police zero in on Sean as Zina’s killer even though the evidence against him is virtually all circumstantial. There’s one eyewitness, a Black woman, but she only saw the killer from far away while he was running away from her. His motive was that she supposedly stole a kilo of cocaine from him, and there’s video surveillance footage of her walking out of his apartment with a white satchel that later turned up in her and Leo’s apartment and contained the coke, but there’s the nagging question of what she would have done with it. Use it all herself? Possible but highly unlikely. Try to sell it? Hard to believe she could without the sort of infrastructure a professional dealer like Sean would have. Sean Chase’s attorney goes to the max presenting the idea that Leo actually killed his girlfriend and the police are covering for him because he’s the son of a police lieutenant. Leo insists at first that the night Zina was killed he was at home alone with the daughter all night, but eventually his mom discovers that for two hours, from 10 p.m. to midnight, he was relapsing at a bar called Lucky’s (an ironic name) while the eight-year-old was left home alone. In the end Sean is duly convicted, but there’s a bittersweet tag; Leo pleads with his mom to testify for him in the custody hearing over the daughter, but mom refuses and flatly tells Leo he’s not ready to be a father and the girl would be much better off being raised by her aunt Izzy and Izzy’s husband, decent people without histories of alcohol or drug abuse. I’d really like to see more of Alex Neustaedter; he made his screen debut in a short called Railroad Ties in 2009 and had his breakthrough role in Meg Ryan’s directorial debut, Ithaca, as a 14-year-old telegraph operator in 1942 who comes of age in a hurry since his older brother is off fighting in World War II. Here he turns in a tough, no-nonsense performance as a legitimately complex character, and Maura Tierney and he had previously played mother and son in an Amazon Prime TV miniseries called American Rust that might well be worth looking up.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Fidelis Ad Mortem" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 15, 2026

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

Last night (Thursday, January 15), after I watched the “Dream On” episode of the flagship Law and Order show, I caught a surprisingly dark episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit called “Fidelis Ad Mortem” (“Faithful Unto Death”) that begins with three teenagers going retro with physical music media. They’ve bought an old cassette boombox and a supply of tapes for it at a thrift store, and one of them, with no labeling other than “#56,” has about 40 remaining seconds of a confrontation between a younger woman and a much older man in which the woman literally pleads for her life and the man is heard making the typical sounds of sexual assault. Fortunately one of the three kids who discovered the tape is Gabe Curry (Jay Mack), teenage son of Special Victims Unit Detective Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly, who quite frankly didn’t look old enough to me to have a teenage son), who brings the tape to his mom. Mom in turn gives it to SVU Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), and she has it digitally enhanced by the New York Police Department’s crime lab. The cops trace the tape to a building that is about to be demolished in a redevelopment scheme, but before the building is torn down the police find a skeleton behind one of the walls. There are actually two people’s bones in there, and one of them (the main one and the one they can identify) is of a young Black woman named Tyresia Davis whose father Jaden (Donald Paul) and daughter Tiffany (Cecelia Ann Burt) have understandably felt stonewalled because the NYPD took reports when Tyresia disappeared 27 years earlier but did nothing to find her. Then the police interview Tyresia’s former boyfriend, Miles Gibbs (Ski Carr), who’s in prison serving a long stretch for having been an enforcer for a drug cartel. Miles is at first unremittingly hostile towards the police, and later we learn why: in addition to two rival drug gangs, each with their own enforcement mechanisms, there was a third one that was composed of corrupt cops.

The bad police were ostensibly working in drug enforcement but in fact were short-weighting the drugs they turned in on raids and using their own connections to market the rest and make far more money than the city was paying them to be cops. They had initially cultivated Tyresia as a confidential informant, but then they decided that she was getting to be too much trouble because she, a young woman genuinely concerned about the effects of drugs on her African-American community, might turn on them and rat them out to their bosses. Among the corrupt police officers is a Black retired detective named Thomas Ahern (Chi McBride) who used his drug money to buy himself a yacht and other trappings of the good life. Eventually, though, he realizes the game is up and turns state’s evidence to implicate the real ringleader of the crooked-cops’ gang, Leo Eikmeier (Nick Sandow). It turns out Eikmeier is an investigator with the district attorney’s office, which causes district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and the prosecutor actually assigned to Manhattan SVU, Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), briefly to consider whether they need to ask the governor to appoint a special prosecutor to take the case off their hands. Ultimately they decide not to, and Carisi takes the case to court and wins convictions. But they also trigger a crisis of conscience in SVU’s newest detective, Jake Griffin (Corey Cott), who’d grown up believing his father, also a police officer, was honest. Like Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) in the later stages of Law and Order: Organized Crime, young Griffin has to come to terms with the idea that his dad, whose example led him to make the police his career, was just as corrupt as the rest of the crooks on the force – though the episode ends ambiguously with Griffin getting an answer from his mother, who assures him that his late father was honest. I liked the coincidence that the January 15 episodes of both Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit dealt with police officers’ children and their chancy, to say the least, relationships with their cop parents.

Midsomer Murders: "Book of the Dead" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 11, 2023)

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

After Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on January 15 I initially turned to CBS in hopes that they were doing another rerun of Elsbeth, a police procedural that’s become a particular favorite of mine even though it’s basically just the old Columbo with a woman playing Peter Falk’s role of the police consultant who basically annoys the murderer into confessing. Instead they were showing another Matlock instead, so I switched to PBS in time to catch an unusually well plotted and structured episode of the British police procedural Midsomer Murders. It was called “Book of the Dead” and it deals with the antics of Bertram Jewel (Jon Culshaw – ironically also the name, though he spelled it “John Culshaw,” of the British Decca record producer who supervised the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen). Ten years earlier, Jewel published a sensationally successful picture book called Seeker, which contained a series of elaborate drawings, paintings, and text which allegedly would lead someone to find a hidden treasure if they could solve all the puzzles contained therein. Jewel comes to Midsomer County (a fictional locale in central England) to promote the 10th anniversary edition of his book, which will contain a new page that will supposedly reveal a new clue as to the locale of his treasure. Only when he holds forth for a book event at the local church, pastored by Rev. Sebastian Butts (Oliver Dimsdale) – who’s white, but his wife Ava (Mina Andala) is Black, or should I say “African-British” – a woman reporter, Billie Bernard (Christina Bennington), accosts him at the event and claims that “Bertram Jewel” is really former con artist Robert Grimes, who served 15 years in prison for his fraud and had just got out when he wrote Seeker. Billie also says flat-out that there is no hidden treasure; it’s all yet another con which Bertram a.k.a. Robert pulled on his unsuspecting readers.

Among his most fanatical devotees are Rev. Butts’s mother Venetia (Selina Cadell), who became so insistent on finding Jewel’s treasure that she spent hundreds of thousand of pounds on detectives, psychics, and all manner of fraudsters to get supposed “evidence” on how to solve Bertram’s puzzle; Ludo Trask (Zak Ford-Williams), teenage son of Eli Trask (Shaun Dooley) and his wife Danica (Sally Lindsay), who’s filled his shack on the Trask property with various blow-ups of the pages of Seeker in hopes that by magnifying them, he can work out the clues; and even detective sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), who at one point in his life was so wrapped up in solving Seeker that he lost a girlfriend over it. (Smart woman!) There are amusing scenes of the devotées of Seeker poring over the clues and debating them that reminded me of the ways similarly demented fans of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings talk amongst themselves about the minutiae of the books. Anyway, Bertram Jewel, t/n Robert Grimes, gets murdered in a particularly imaginative way: he is clubbed from behind and buried in a pit from which his head is sticking out. Then his killer puts a glass globe over his head and holds it there until he expires from suffocation. Apparently this is supposed to be a living recreation of one of the images in Seeker. Later the same killer murders both Venetia Butts and her son, staging Venetia’s body to duplicate one of the images in the original Seeker and Sebastian’s after the new page, which exists only in one copy plus a black-and-white reconstruction from memory Ludo Trask drew at Venetia’s insistence even though he only saw the image briefly when Jewel gave him a quick glimpse of it.

There’s also a subplot concerning two African-British owners of a local pub, Joel Myhill (Rhashan Stone) and his daughter Scarlett (Felixe Forde), who run a regular (though writer Jeff Povey doesn’t tell us how regular) trivia contest in their bar in honor of Joel’s late wife, who it turns out was killed by Bertram’s old con. Bertram t/n Robert was producing fake gas gauges that were supposed to show if you had a gas leak, only they didn’t work at all. The Myhills bought one of the fake gas gauges and then had a real gas leak; Joel and Scarlett were fortuitously out then but Joel’s wife was killed in the resulting house fire, and he’s never forgiven Bertram for it. In the end the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Eli Trask, Ludo’s father and contractor for the reconstruction of Rev. Butts’s church. Though Bertram as “Robert” was the only one prosecuted for the fake gas-gauge fraud, Eli was actually his accomplice and manufactured the phony gauges. Bertram blackmailed Eli into allowing him to live in the Trasks’ home while he was in the area, and Eli killed him and the others because he was seeing his son Ludo wasting a huge amount of time and money searching for the “treasure” that didn’t really exist – though, at one point, Bertram produced an incredibly ugly gold-plated statue and tried to pass it off as the treasure. Venetia found it and tried to sell it to local antiques dealer Othello Khan, only he revealed that it was manufactured only a year before and was just gold-plated instead of solid gold. This was an unusually well-constructed Midsomer Murders in which there was only one subsidiary crime (Rev. Butts’s embezzlement) besides the main murder intrigue, and it related directly to the main dramatic issue of Bertram’s history as a fraudster.

Harlan Coben's Final Twist: "Gambler's Debt" (Levels Audio, CBS-TV, aired January 14, 2026)

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

Last night (Wednesday, January 14) CBS-TV ran the second episode of Harlan Coben’s quirky true-crime series, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist. The odd subtitle represents Coben’s belief that in every murder there’s a “final twist” in the mind of the killer that makes him (or her, though in the two episodes so far the killers have both been male) not only contemplate a murder but actually do it. This time the story was called “Gambler’s Debt” (though I’m glad this is one show that doesn’t give its titles at the beginnings of the episode because for this one that would have been a big-time spoiler!) and it was about the brutal slaying (she was stabbed 97 times) of Anna Mae Branson, a woman in Madisonville, Kentucky who had managed to build a single ice-cream parlor into a regional chain and accumulate a major fortune, including a string of rental properties. Branson was found dead on January 13, 2003 by police doing a wellness check on her. Suspicion initially fell on two of her business associates, a tenant who had fallen thousands of dollars behind on his rent to her and a former employee, but it turned out both had life-threatening health issues (the tenant had just had abdominal surgery and the worker had had a heart attack), and doctors insisted that they could not have committed such a brutal, forceful murder without re-injuring themselves. Next the police started looking at members of Branson’s family and zeroed in on her nephew, Russell Winstead, who on the surface seemed to be a happily married coal miner (Madisonville is in the middle of the Kentucky coal country and most of its working-age males work in the mines) with a church-going wife and two kids. Underneath that identity he was a compulsive gambler, frequently visiting the riverboat casinos in that part of Kentucky and dropping an estimated total of $1.6 million. (I know something about compulsive gambling from having had a home-care client who was a gambling addict.) Over the years Winstead had borrowed over $100,000 from Anna Mae Branson to support his gambling habit, and the day before she was killed he wrote her a check for $12,000 but told her not to cash it without his O.K. Then he went for another all-night gambling session on a riverboat casino and I’m guessing thought he make enough money to cover his check to his aunt. Instead he lost once again, and the next morning Russell went over to Anna’s place, where she confronted him about the large and growing size of his debt to her (she kept careful tabs on how much her benefactees owed her in a little red book called “Addresses”) and he apparently lost it completely and killed her.

The case wasn’t as open-and-shut as the police initially claimed, especially after Russell was polygraphed and the examiner said it was the most complete case of deception he’d ever seen, especially in all the questions in which Russell was asked if he had any knowledge of the murder, and he repeatedly said no. But there were a few holes in it: the DNA evidence from the hairs and fibers found on the crime scene were tested against Russell’s DNA and did not match. Also, the one eyewitness the police were able to find, a Black woman who had seen Russell leave his aunt’s house just after the probable time of the murder had originally said the man she saw fleeing was six feet tall, and only later, after Russell’s photo had been published in newspapers, did she retract that and name the 5’6” Russell as the man she’d seen. Russell complicated the case by fleeing to Costa Rica, which won’t extradite people who face the death penalty in their home countries, so the Kentucky authorities had to agree not to seek to execute Russell if he were convicted of Branson’s murder. Ultimately he was arrested in 2005 and brought back to the U.S., though with one of America’s typically delayed justice systems he wasn’t put on trial until 2007. In the meantime he got a fellow convict to write an anonymous letter declaring that he had killed Branson, though this man, who was in prison awaiting trial for another murder of an old woman who lived alone two years later, ultimately recanted his confession after he realized he was facing the death penalty for both murders even though Russell, insulated from a death sentence by the deal Kentucky and Costa Rica had cut to get him back, was not. Russell allegedly tried to bribe this man by offering him money to set up a trust fund for his wife and kids – unless he was making it up out of whole cloth, one wonders where Russell would have got this money. In the end, Russell was convicted in 2007 and given a life sentence, though it carried with it the possibility of parole and he could be released as early as 2030. One of the things that struck me was how genuinely physically attractive Russell Winstead seemed to be – no doubt that was how he was able to have two girlfriends on the riverboats along with his wife – and another was that Branson’s family predictably split wide open on the issue of Russell’s guilt, with the Winsteads (including Russell’s father Eric, who pleaded guilty to having helped cover for him but got no jail time) steadfastly maintaining his innocence while the non-Winstead branch of the family were equally insistent that he did it. Like the previous week’s episode, this was about a case that had already been covered by previous true-crime shows, in this case one on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen network in 2021 as well as at least one Web-only podcast.

83rd Annual Golden Globe Awards (Dick Clark Productions, Penske Media Group, Golden Globes, White Cherry Entertainment, aired January 11, 2026)

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

Yesterday (Sunday, January 11) I watched the CBS-TV telecast of the 83rd annual Golden Globe Awards. It was the usual lumbering beast these sorts of spectacles generally are, and there wasn’t much of the comic banter that has livened up previous years’ telecasts. The host was Nikki Glaser, repeating from the 2025 telecast after the awards weren’t televised at all in 2024. The telecast featured so many winners from “streaming” services I was tempted to joke that the real winner last night was Netflix, which is in the middle of a multi-billion dollar attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery that was the subject of a few jokes, notably one made by Glaser that the bidding for Warner Bros. would start at $5. Most of the movies that won were made for “streaming” services, as were virtually all the TV shows: good luck being able to watch any of this stuff if you’re a diehard like me clinging to an increasingly expensive cable TV connection and fiercely resisting the curse of “streaming.” The advent of “streaming” has wrecked all the models people of my generation (I’m 72) are used to in getting either audio or audio-visual entertainment. I’ve just read an article in The Week magazine that said filmmakers are worried about the implications of a Warners sale to Netflix because the current Netflix management is not only uninterested in but downright hostile to theatrical distribution. (A number of the movie winners pleaded with people to see their films in actual theatres, on big screens with other people in the audience, instead of waiting for them to “stream.”) “Streaming” has also almost totally destroyed the DVD market, much to my chagrin, even though I can see one good thing about it: I remember when I was trying to explain “streaming” to our (late) friend Garry Hobbs. He said he couldn’t understand why people would want to “stream” a movie instead of owning a copy they could watch anytime, and I just waved my hand at the stacks of DVD’s taking up what used to be our coffee table and said, “It’s because they don’t want their living rooms to end up looking like this!” I also find myself oddly bothered by the designation of the awards for acting as by “male actor” and “female actor.” I understand the P.C. reasons they’ve done that, and in a certain way it makes sense – after all, we no longer call a woman who writes books an “authoress” or a woman who flies planes an “aviatrix” – but I’m still old-school enough to miss the term “actress.” (Will the name of the classic 1953 film with Spencer Tracy and Ruth Gordon have to be changed from The Actress to The Female Actor?)

The Golden Globes gives out multiple Best Picture winners, including one for Drama and one for Musical or Comedy, though sometimes the lines get blurred. Chloë Zhao’s Hamnet, a slightly fact-based biopic of William Shakespeare and his marriage (for some reason Shakespeare’s wife, who in real life was named Anne Hathaway, is called “Agnes” in the movie), won Best Motion Picture (Drama), while a “streaming” movie called One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, won Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), and Anderson won for Best Director and also Best Writer. (Those awards don’t appear to have been bifurcated the way the Best Picture and the acting awards were between dramas and musicals or comedies.) The Best Motion Picture (Animated) award went to K-Pop Demon Hunters, which sounds absolutely ghastly to me (and it doesn’t help that it’s in that horrible, blocky computer-animated style; I really don’t like computer animation, though there’ve been a few films, like Ratatouille and Soul, where the writing and voice acting were strong enough to overcome my basic distaste for the technique). The Best Motion Picture (Non-English Language) award went to a Brazilian film called The Secret Agent (not based on the 19th century Joseph Conrad novel which Alfred Hitchcock modernized and filmed as Sabotage in 1936, but a new tale set in 1977 in which a fugitive scientist returns to his home town of Recife; though I don’t know for sure, it seems likely this is the first Non-English Language movie winner to be in Portuguese). Hamnet star Jessie Buckley also won the “Best Female Actor, Motion Picture (Drama)” award for playing “Agnes,”a.k.a. Mrs. William Shakespeare. The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura won “Best Male Actor, Motion Picture (Drama),” beating out (among other people) Michael B. Jordan as twin blues musicians in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. (I’m willing to watch just about anything made by Ryan Coogler; I think he’s one of the most amazing filmmakers working today, and he even got me to watch Creed, his regrettable contribution to the Rocky franchise, and actually enjoy it other than having to put up with Sylvester Stallone.) Sinners did win for an odd category called “Box Office and Cinematic Achievement,” which appears to be the Globes doing what the Academy Awards briefly considered, creating an award for “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film” until they backed off due to howls of derision from the movie community. (I’d still like to see the Academy go back to the split award they did the first year, honoring William Wellman’s Wings as “Best Production” and Friedrich Murnau’s Sunrise for “Most Artistic Quality of Production.” That way they could give awards both to nice little independent films and big blockbuster movies mass audiences actually go to see.)

The acting awards went to Timothée Chalamet (male) for Marty Supreme – in his acceptance speech he joked about having had to bulk up to play a ping-pong player – and Rose Byrne (female) for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. I’d guessed that was a film about a disabled woman, but no-o-o-o-o; it’s described on imdb.com as, “While trying to manage her own life and career, a woman on the verge of a breakdown must cope with her daughter's illness, an absent husband, a missing person, and an unusual relationship with her therapist.” The Supporting Actor performance awards went to Stellan Skarsgård (male, and father of those Skarsgårds) for a Norwegian film called Sentimental Value (though Skarsgård himself is Swedish), whose Norwegian title was Affeksjonsverdi; Skarsgård plays a father who reconciles with his two estranged daughters. The female Supporting Actor award went to Black actress (there, I used the word) Teyana Taylor for a role in One Battle After Another, and she gave the usual plaint about being glad she could finally offer movie audiences a role that looked like her. (Well, who else would she look like? I know what she meant: she felt privileged to offer movie audiences a strong African-American character.) The Best Original Song award went to “Golden” from K-POP Demon Hunters, and though she said she’d promised not to sing on the show Nikki Glaser did a quite funny parody of it. (I’d probably have liked it even better if I’d known the original.) The TV awards were less interesting to me because virtually all the shows were on “streaming” services and therefore I shall never be able to watch them; a medical show called The Pitt won for best TV series (drama), and the Hollywood spoof The Studio won for best TV series (comedy). The makers of The Studio joked about having just made an episode spoofing the Golden Globes, and now here they were accepting an award at the real ones! The award for “Best Limited Series, Anthology Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television” (whew, that was a mouthful of a category name!) went to a British mini-series called Adolescence, described on imdb.com as, “A thirteen-year-old boy, Jamie Miller, is arrested for the brutal murder of a schoolgirl. To his family this all seems like a huge mistake – surely Jamie would not do something like that? To the police the evidence is clear, but what motive could he possibly have?”

The male lead, 17-year-old Owen Cooper, won an acting award. Also awarded for Adolescence were Stephen Graham for playing Cooper’s father and Erin Doherty for playing Briony Ariston, though none of the online sources I’ve seen offer any clue as to just how she fits in with the story. Noah Wyle won the Best Male Actor in a TV Series award for The Pitt, and the Best Female Actor was Rhea Seehorn for a show called Pluribus, whose premise sounds quite interesting: “In a world overtaken by a mysterious wave of forced happiness, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), one of the immune few, must uncover what's really going on – and save humanity from its artificial bliss.” Ricky Gervais, who used to host the Golden Globes until the organizers got tired of the controversy he used to engender with his insults, won for Best Stand-Up Comedy Special even though he was the only one of the nominees who didn’t show up for the ceremony. A new award for Best Podcast (pardon me while I go barf) went to Amy Poehler for something called Good Hang. I’m actually getting bored writing about the Golden Globes, especially since the awards all went to movies I haven’t seen and probably will never get to see because the “streaming” revolution has so totally upended just about every way I once had of watching current movies and TV shows (and the closure of San Diego’s Landmark chain of art-house cinemas hasn’t helped either). One oddity about this year’s Golden Globes telecast was the weird ambiguity about just who votes on them; previous years proudly proclaimed the awards as coming from the “Hollywood Foreign Press Association,” a group whose qualifications were allegedly so loose you could get it if you’d ever published one article about movies in a newspaper or magazine outside the United States. But this year the awards voters were described far more nebulously than that and the show gave no idea as to just who decides who gets the Golden Globes.