Law and Order: 'New Normal" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired February 26, 2026)

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

Last night (Thursday, February 26) my usual crime shows returned to the airwaves on Thursday night and I watched new episodes of Law and Order, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and Elsbeth. The Law and Order, “New Normal,” was a chilling tale that began with two young Black men walking down a ghetto street in Washington Heights when all of a sudden they’re accosted by a masked man with a gun who shoots and kills one of them. The victim was a young man who had nothing to do with gang life, but he had made what turned out to the fatal mistake of volunteering to tutor other young Black men in a neighborhood dominated by a gang called the Pleasant Valley Mafia. It was the other man he was with, a gangbanger who wanted to leave “the life,” who was the intended victim. His killer was Eric Robinson (Jason Lyke), and he’s arrested on information given to the police by a waitress who saw him and, though he was masked, she recognized his bright red sneakers and his green eyes, unusual for an African-American. But when Eric goes on trial the waitress recants her testimony out of fear for her life and that of her unborn son, symbolized by a character identified in the cast list only as “Intimidating Man” (Hank Strong) who sits in the courtroom and glares at her as she’s on the witness stand. The one person who can link Eric to the crime is a young Black man named “Book” (Nacqui Macabroad) who was wearing a multi-colored jacket in one of the crime-scene videos. It turns out “Book” is really Raymond Booker, a young police officer who’s been working undercover for two years to infiltrate the Pleasant Valley Mafia and bust them once and for all. Booker is initially reluctant to testify for fear that if he comes forward now, he’ll blow his cover and the two years’ work he’s put into infiltrating the gang will be rendered useless.

District attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and the prosecutors on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi), pull out all the stops to order Booker to testify, including going to his boss and his boss’s boss. It helps that the Black police detective working the case, Theo Walker (David Ajala), had himself worked undercover details before transferring to homicide. “New Normal” was a good Law and Order episode that could have been even better if the writer, Ajani Jackson, had done more to delineate the internal conflicts that beset a cop who for years has had to pose as a criminal and deal with the unending series of loyalty tests the gang’s leaders impose on its members. She could have done more to depict the inevitable conflicts of loyalties in a police officer working a long-term undercover detail and torn between his commitment to the law and his growing attachments to the gang members, to the point where it’s conceivable (though this is not an issue Jackson raises in her script) that at one point he stops thinking of himself as a cop and starts thinking of himself as a gang member. Still, “New Normal” was an effective episode and one which definitely highlighted the extent to which the well-intentioned housing projects of yesteryear degenerated into crime and drug dens. It’s become a staple argument of the radical Right that big housing projects never work – though New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was fortuitously in the White House office of President Trump February 26 to talk about building more such projects in the city. It was fortuitous because Mamdani got word during the meeting that at least one New Yorker, an American citizen, had been detained by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) posing as New York city police officers, and he was able to get Trump to order their release. It also begs the question of what Mamdani would do if Trump’s condition for authorizing the more than 12,000 homes Mamdani is asking for is that the projects all be named after Trump.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Corrosive" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC=TV, aired February 26, 2026)

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

After the Law and Order episode on February 26, NBC aired a Law and Order: Special Victims Unit show, “Corrosive,” written by Roxanne Paredes and directed by Martha Mitchell, that was even more chilling and full of the ironies Law and Order’s writers love so much. Assistant district attorney Dominick “Sonny” Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scannavino) is hosting a commemoration in honor of Judge Warren Fels (David Zayas) when the Special Victims Unit gets a video tip from a woman, Elsa Clark (Hannah Masi), who claims that Judge Fels cornered her in his robing room, pulled down her underwear with his teeth, and raped her. The SVU detectives launch an investigation and find that Elsa is a student at New York University who’s also listed on a sex-for-pay Web site. They make a phony “date” for her services and learn that she’s working out of a college dorm room that has been turned into a mini-cult by Robbie Miller (Ross Partridge in a quite nice smarmy-villain performance). Miller had just been released from a four-year prison term for fraud when he moved into the dorm room of his son Matt (Dan Thompson) and eventually took over. Judge Fels is shot in the parking garage as he’s leaving the event Carisi hosted and the shooter turns out to be Matt’s roommate Jeremy Coleman (Carter James McNeil). The SVU squad also finds out that Elsa Clark was out of town in New Jersey on the night of her alleged “rape” by Judge Fels. Though he’s only a small-time operator, Robbie Miller has all the classic strategies for domination endemic to would-be cult leaders, including torturing his victims (his favorite technique is to stick tweezers into their ears, touching the ear canal); keeping elaborate logbooks of how much money they supposedly “owe” him for trivial things; recruiting Elsa into becoming a prostitute and paying him her earnings to pay back her supposed “debts”; and doing coercive interrogations of the students on video.

It also turns out that he particularly targeted Judge Fels because, though Judge Fels didn’t have anything to do with his case as a criminal defendant, Robbie tried to get Judge Fels to intervene for leniency with the judge who was handling it. When Judge Fels refused, Robbie declared him “the Devil” and made him Public Enemy Number One to his cult. Ultimately ADA Carisi brings Robbie Miller to trial, but when Matt is testifying against his father, Robbie insists on handling the cross-examination himself. Under the influence of his dad, Matt literally goes to pieces on the witness stand and ends up apologizing to his father for having dared to testify against him. The only alternative the prosecutors have is to recruit Jeremy Coleman as a witness against Robbie Miller. They and his attorney offer him a plea deal that would get him a lighter sentence, but Jeremy refuses. It turns out he actually wanted to be an attorney himself, though his involvement with Robbie Miller and his willingness to kill a judge for him has ended that dream, and Jeremy tells the prosecutors that he’ll testify against Robbie but won’t take a plea deal for his cooperation because he reasons Robbie and his attorney, Joel Mitchell (Shaun Woodland), could use that against him as a way to discredit his testimony. Ultimately, thanks to Jeremy’s testimony, Robbie is convicted on all counts of a far-reaching indictment including sex trafficking as well as coercion. The episode title comes from a word Robbie often uses to brainwash his victims. I remember a previous Law and Order franchise episode that also featured an adult moving into a student dorm and using his influence to take over the students’ lives, but this was a quite good example of cult control and how leaders who claim special authority can get their followers to do just about anything, including murder.

Elsbeth: "Ol' Man Liver" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired February 26, 2026)

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

After Law and Order: Special Victims Unit I turned to CBS on February 26 for Elsbeth, a TV show I’ve come to like especially even though I’ve often referred to it as Columbo in drag. Like Peter Falk’s character in Columbo, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) wins her cases by essentially irritating the killer into confessing. This one was called “Ol’ Man Liver” and the central villain is Archer Bryant (Hamish Linklater), a 32-year-old who is convinced that by following the exact same routine every day, eating nothing but health foods and dietary supplements, and keeping an in-house doctor named Kim (Jason Wayne Wong) on call 24/7, he can literally live forever. In the opening scene Archer accosts a hot-looking young man named Tyler Hollis (Case Walker) and we originally believe it’s a Gay cruise. Instead Archer is offering Tyler a job as his in-house trainer, though the price of that gig is permanent enslavement to Archer’s insane health regimen and signing a contract literally giving Archer full and complete ownership of his body whenever Tyler croaks. Tyler’s croaking occurs well ahead of schedule when Dr. Kim advises Archer that his liver function is subnormal due, Archer believes, to all the partying and high living he did before he adopted his health regimen. So he kills Tyler by injecting him with air (I didn’t know that was lethal until 1978, when I saw the movie Coming Home and one of the veterans in it used an air injection to commit suicide; it’s why medical professionals giving injections squirt liquid out of the needle first to make sure it contains no air bubbles that might be fatal) and passes it off as a stroke. He’s able to do this because the company that runs the health rings both Archer and Tyler wear all the time was doing a system upgrade that would turn their monitoring off just long enough for Archer to kill Tyler for his liver and switch rings so when the system came back online it would send an alert to 911 and emergency medical technicians would come out and pronounce Tyler dead.

His organs are distributed to various transplant recipients, who regularly get together and have parties celebrating their continued existence and Tyler’s role in keeping them alive. They refer to each other by the organs they got transplanted, and the man who got Tyler’s heart (Danny Jolles) becomes convinced based on dreams he’s having that Tyler was murdered. He reports this to the New York Police Department, and while Elsbeth’s boss, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), doesn’t believe it for a moment, at Elsbeth’s insistence he assigns Detective Daniel Rivers (Braeden de la Garza), who’s just broken up a relationship with Wagner’s daughter Julia (Brittany Inge) at her insistence, to work with Elsbeth on investigating the case. Elsbeth hangs out with Archer, ostensibly as a student learning his regimen, and meets his new trainer/assistant, Sven (Rainer Dawn), whom Archer fires on the spot when he catches Sven eating something with processed sugar. (Given what happened to the last man who had that job for Archer, we’re thinking, “Lucky you, Sven.”) Elsbeth also meets Tyler’s former girlfriend, who was planning an extended getaway with him just before Archer killed him, and the girlfriend gives Elsbeth the fitness monitoring ring Tyler had worn. Ultimately Elsbeth cracks the case with the rings as her key piece of evidence – the records from the company that made them revealed that Archer’s and Tyler’s rings were switched just before Tyler’s murder and switched back afterwards (they can tell because one of the things the rings monitor is the wearer’s age). There are a few unnecessary subplots involving Rivers’s and Julia’s relationship (there are hints they’re getting back together at the end) and also Elsbeth’s Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), but fortunately they don’t detract much from the central intrigue. It also has a neat ending in which Archer, about to be taken into custody, accepts Elsbeth’s offer of a frozen yogurt and enjoys it immensely now that prison will at least liberate him from the self-imposed tyranny of his diet regimen. The best compliment I can pay to the writers of this episode, Eric Randall and Matthew K. Begbie, is that while I was watching it I wasn’t conscious of the sheer preposterousness of the plot, even though my awareness came crashing back at me when I was trying to summarize it for this review!

Double Double Trouble (PF Cherry Productions, Studio TF1 America, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Yesterday afternoon (Sunday, February 22) my husband Charles and I watched a Lifetime movie called Double Double Trouble which had had its “premiere” on the network the night before but I’d bypassed it to watch the Winter Olympics. Double Double Trouble was on from 4 to 6 p.m. and, as I guessed, it was largely a rehash of the 1948 film A Stolen Life, directed by Curtis Bernhardt and starring Bette Davis and Glenn Ford. Double Double Trouble was one of Lifetime’s “race movies,” essentially their usual formulae with an all- (or mostly-) Black cast. Directed by Gabriel Correa and written by Sa’Rah Jones (that odd spelling of her name is correct; her only credits, at least as referenced on moviemagg.blogspot.com, are the 2023 film Girl in the Closet, a regrettably bad reworking of a true-life case of extreme child abuse, and the three films in their Single Black Female series, which she co-wrote with Tessa Evelyn Scott), it starred Tami Roman as twin sisters Ali and Drea. Ali was the “good sister” and was born 21 seconds ahead of Drea (Charles questioned that and said most real-life twins are born a few minutes apart because the mother’s womb needs that much of a rest between births), and the film starts with Drea in the hospital after her latest attempt to give birth through artificial insemination from her husband Kevin (imdb.com’s page on this show is inadequate and lists only four actors by character name) results in a miscarriage. Drea is anxious to try again even though she’s already failed three times, but Kevin couldn’t be less interested in her; he’s found another Black woman whom he’s impregnated and is waiting for her to give birth. Later someone corners Kevin and shoots him dead, but we can’t tell whether it’s Brea, Ali, or someone else.

Ali is introduced along with Brea as co-hosts of a local cooking show called Double the Recipe which is based around the novelty of being hosted by twin sisters. The two get a meeting with an entrepreneur who wants to take the show nationwide, but only with Ali, not Brea, as the sole host. Brea is a regular at a local coffeehouse where she spots hot, sexy hunk Ryan Jackson (Colin Lawrence) and immediately decides he’s the right man for her. Unfortunately, Ryan, who in addition to being handsome is also a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur with a company called Reverb Tech, meets Ali at a business conference and falls head over heels for her. Ryan and Ali get to have a lot of sex, and one of their trysts leads to Ali becoming pregnant – which sends Brea into a jealous hissy-fit because conception is an especially sore point for her. Brea responds by spiking Ali’s drinking water with a combination of listeriosis and E. coli, and Ali gets sick; she recovers, but her unborn baby dies. Alas for Brea, the show’s director, Lamar (who it’s hinted is Gay, which inevitably made me look longer and harder at the actor playing him), accidentally caught Brea’s poisoning of Ali on camera and threatens to report her to the police. Brea responds by knocking Lamar out in the parking lot and pushing him into the path of an oncoming car, thereby dispatching him but making it look like the proverbial “accident.” Brea steals the house key Ryan has given Ali and seduces him – he can’t tell the two apart and neither can we except that Ali wears a brighter and redder shade of lipstick, which Brea uses to disguise herself – and then tells Ali that Ryan raped her. This causes Ali to break off their relationship, though later they reconcile after Ali realizes that Ryan is blameless.

It ends in a confrontation at Ryan’s home in the mountains by a lake, in which Brea goes after Ali with a knife, Ali goes after Brea with a gun (left there in a case, which Ali extracts and then is too nervous to load properly, so there’s only one bullet in it), and during their confrontation [spoiler alert!] Ali admits to Brea that she killed Brea’s late husband Kevin (ya remember Kevin?) to help Brea get over him. (That confounded my expectations because I’d thought the story would end with Brea conveniently dead, Ryan and Ali getting together, and Ali getting that great new nationwide cooking show which she could host solo.) The movie ends with Ali dead and Brea taking her place in Ryan’s arms (and bed), though there’s a diabolus ex machina in the person of Ryan’s ne’er-do-well brother Randy (Charles thought Ryan and Randy were supposed to be twins, but I didn’t get that impression), who was serving time in prison as Ryan built his fortune, who shows up at the end. I guess we’re supposed to assume he’s going to kill Brea for whatever reasons obtain in that family. Double Double Trouble has a lot of problems, starting with the silly title (it’s hard not to think of those old Doublemint gum commercials – “Double the pleasure, double the fun!”), but the big one is that Tami Roman is simply too old for her role(s). Makeup department head Kathleen Fowlstone and her associates plastered the stuff on her with a trowel to make her look younger, much as Dick Wolf’s people have been doing with Mariska Hargitay on Law and Order: Special Victims Unit lately. Tami Roman’s imdb.com page lists her birthday as April 17; it doesn’t say April 17 of what year, but her credits list goes all the way back to 1993. She’s certainly well preserved, and I give her credit for helping develop the project (she’s also an executive producer on it, though that’s a nebulous credit that can mean just about anything), but it’s hard to take this project seriously when the leading actress is just too annuated.

Murder in Music City (Cal’s Kitchen, Dastoli Digital, Reel One Entertainment, Storyteller Studios, Studio TF1 America, Lifetime, 2026)

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

Fortunately, the next Lifetime movie my husband Charles and I watched Sunday, February 22, a “premiere” from 8 to 10 p.m., was considerably better than Double Double Trouble. It was called Murder in Music City and takes place in Nashville, Tennessee, mostly at the grandiose estate of country-music superstar Abilene Tucker (Deena Dill). It starts in her guest house, where a hunky young man named Jimmy Stone (Ty Trumbo) is practicing a new country song called “Stephanie.” We get a lot of shots of his hunky, muscular back as he sings, only someone wallops him from behind with a red electric guitar, killing him. Abilene Tucker calls her daughter Caroline (Madison Crawford) in a panic because she’s understandably worried that she’ll be accused of killing Jimmy, who was on Abilene’s property as both her latest boy-toy and her collaborator on a set of new songs she’s hoping will revitalize her career. The police officers assigned to the case, Detectives Moreno (Clark Moore) and Fisher (Olivia Crosby) – a white man and a Black woman – immediately arrest Abilene and assume she killed Jimmy after a lovers’ quarrel. Murder in Music City was written by our old friends Ken Sanders (story) and J. Bryan Dick (script), and directed by Dave Thomas. Sanders and Dick give us an engagingly large suspect pool, including the murdered man’s brother, Kyle Schneider (Brigdon York), who shows up to collect Jimmy’s belongings, including the blue-covered journals in which he wrote all his songs. Others include Abilene Tucker herself; Barbara (Elizabeth Houston), Abilene’s personal assistant; Marcia (Sharonne Lanier), Abilene’s (Black) agent; Hank James (John Castle), Abilene’s second husband and former duet partner; and Devin Brown (David Turner), a former stalker of Abilene’s who once turned up in Caroline’s bed and was busted in California, sentenced to a mental institution, but escaped and turned up in Nashville and tried to assault Caroline again until Kyle rescued her.

There’s a grim scene in which Caroline delivers Hank’s alimony check (since she was making so much money than he when they broke up, he gets alimony), and then Caroline and Kyle, who’ve become lovers, sneak into his home looking for Jimmy’s journals. At one point Abilene admits to Caroline that she wasn’t that good a mother to her because she was too focused on her career – she was devastated when her first husband (Caroline’s father) died suddenly and she married Hank on the rebound. She offers to take a few months off and take Caroline on a trip to Europe, but just then Abilene is formally exonerated of Jimmy’s murder and she decides to strike while the iron is hot and do an elaborate concert at the old Ryman Auditorium where the Grand Ole Opry show launched way back when (the location isn’t specified in the script, but it’s easily recognizable in the aerial shot on screen) followed by a Vegas-style residency there. She reconnects with Hank James to be her duet partner, and the two do a song called “Hey Baby” that’s credited to Hank as composer, but somehow (since she’s never heard it or seen the sheet music) Caroline recognizes it as “Stephanie,” the song Jimmy was working on when he was killed. Stephanie (Isabelle Almoyan) turns up herself, and she’s a woman Jimmy and Kyle fought over way back when during their early days in Seattle before Jimmy moved to Nashville in search of country-music stardom. Stephanie had originally been Kyle’s fiancée until Jimmy seduced her away from him.

For a while I was expecting Kyle to turn out to be the murderer, if only on the general Lifetime principle that the sexiest man in the cast is usually the killer, but in the end it turns out [spoiler alert!] that Ken Sanders and J. Bryan Dick ripped off the central gimmick of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express and made four people legally responsible for Jimmy’s death. Abilene was the one who actually killed him after a fight, not over his affections, but over songwriting royalties: Abilene insisted on owning the copyrights of all the songs she and Jimmy wrote together, or the ones he wrote solo for their project. Jimmy was making the rounds of the record companies to land a solo deal for himself once his collaboration with Abilene Tucker made his reputation, and in a fit of anger Abilene clubbed him with her guitar. Hank, Barbara, and Marcia came together to cover it up, and when Caroline puts all this together they threaten to blacken her reputation and call her a drug-addicted psycho if she tells the cops or anyone else. They also burn Jimmy’s journal so there’ll be no evidence that he wrote the songs on which Abilene and Hank are staking their comeback hopes. Caroline greets the Unfantastic Four in Abilene’s dressing room on the night of her concert and extracts confessions from all of them, which she records not only on her own phone (which Barbara discovers and erases) but a separate one which none of the baddies notice. Caroline gives the evidence to Detectives Moreno and Fisher, who grimly note that they had the right suspect all along but the wrong motive, and Abilene, Hank, Barbara, and Marcia are all arrested.

The final shot is of Abilene Tucker, country star to the last, writing a new song on a yellow legal pad while in the jail holding cell, while Caroline and Kyle pair up even though one doesn’t hold out much hope for the longevity of their relationship – not when the biggest thing they have in common is her mother killed his brother. Murder in Music City is actually an engaging thriller, and I especially liked the two songs Deena Dill sang as Abilene Tucker in the final concert sequence just before she got arrested. I’m not sure if Deena Dill sang the songs or had a voice double – her Wikipedia page says she grew up in Nashville and appeared in a number of country-music videos with such stars as Billy Ray Cyrus, Aaron Tippin, George Ducas, and Trace Adkins, but not whether she has a voice herself – but I’m inclined to believe it's her own voice, if only because I can’t imagine a Lifetime movie having a big enough budget to hire a “ghost” singer. And while the ending is far-fetched, it’s at least conclusive and doesn’t have the maddening loose ends of the finish of Double Double Trouble!

Sister Boniface Mysteries: "There Is No 'i' in Slaughter" (BBC-TV, UKTV, Britbox, PBS, aired September 23, 2025)

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

Last night (Saturday, February 21) I watched two British mystery shows on KPBS: a Sister Boniface Mysteries episode called “There Is No ‘I’ in Slaughter” (after Great Slaughter, the fictitious town in central England where the show takes place) and a Father Brown show called “The Lord of the Dance.” It annoys me that KPBS’s announcer pronounces Sister Boniface’s last name as “BONEY-fass” when I’ve always assumed it’s “BONNI))-fuss.” “There Is No ‘I’ in Slaughter” was actually a pretty dreary episode – writer Asher Pirie seemed to assume that the way to enliven a show set in the mid-1960’s would be to camp it up in the manner of the 1960’s Batman and other shows of the time. It’s about a so-called “team-building exercise” two central English police forces, one from Great Slaughter and one from a neighboring town, are put through by a particularly obnoxious official named Lowsley (Robert Daws), which gets interrupted when a police official named Horace Winthorpe (Mark McDonnell) is found dead in a locked room. The gimmick Is that next to Winthorpe’s body is found a spinning top (though of course it had long since ceased to spin when Sister Boniface, played as usual by Lorna Watson, shows up on the scene and it’s lying in a pool of Winthorpe’s blood), and the trademark of the gangster who supposedly committed the fictional crime the real cops are investigating as part of their team-building exercise was to leave a similar wooden top next to the bodies of the victims he killed. Even more than usual for amateur detective stories, there’s an air of “step aside, you incompetent professional cops, and let the brainy outsider show you how it’s done.” When Lorna Watson enters as Sister Boniface, there’s a sense of fresh air blowing in from outside the silly rivalries between the two competing “teams.”

I spent a lot of this 45-minute episode nodding off and woke only in time for Sister Boniface to deduce not only the killer’s identity but how he pulled off the trick of making the murder appear to have taken place in the locked room. The killer was Constable Rupert Beagle (Tyler-Jo Richardson), an African-British officer whose quarrel with Winthorpe was that Winthorpe had killed Beagle’s father years before. Ostensibly it was an accident – Winthorpe had fired a gun at Beagle père thinking it wasn’t loaded, but it was, and the shot killed him – and Beagle’s killing Winthorpe was also an accident. They were quarreling and Beagle grabbed Winthorpe and slammed him against the metal foot of the room’s bed, causing Winthorpe’s death. Then, rather than report what he’d done to all the police on the scene, Beagle put the key to the room on a string attached to the top, pulled it through the outside window (which he was able to open from inside even though when the police and Sister Boniface discovered Winthorpe’s body, they checked the windows and they were inoperably locked from both sides), hung the key from the string, and thus dropped the key back in the room along with the top. Unfortunately for Beagle, in pulling the string he cut a wound in his hand, which gave him away to Sister Boniface. When he realizes he’s been discovered, Beagle threatens to commit suicide by jumping off a watchtower on the site of the exercise, but Sister Boniface talks him out of it and he turns himself in instead. Needless to say, the self-important goon who was running the silly contest insists on declaring it a tie because the other police who were participating stopped competing to solve the real-life killing. Despite Lorna Watson’s reliably sprightly appearance in the title role, this Sister Boniface Mysteries episode was pretty lame, and the contrast between the phony investigation and the real one just didn’t come off that well.

Father Brown: "The Lord of the Dance" (BBC Productions, Britbox, PBS, aired February 27, 2025)

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

Fortunately, the Father Brown episode KPBS showed immediately after the Sister Boniface Mysteries program, “The Lord of the Dance,” on Saturday, February 21, was considerably better. Directed by Caroline Slater from a script by Rebecca Ramsden, “The Lord of the Dance” had to do with a self-important and spoiled rich-kid dancer named Frederick Thorncastle (John McCrea) who’s a contestant on a 1950’s TV show called Go Dancing! With his previous partner unavailable, he picks local girl Brenda Palmer (Ruby-May Martinwood) as her replacement even though Brenda is not only untrained as a dancer, she’s also African-British. Thorncastle is nearly killed when one of the TV lights unexpectedly falls down on the “X” that marked the spot where he was supposed to stand. Fortunately, he’d moved away from the lethal location just a few seconds before, so it’s just a case of attempted murder. Father Brown investigates and finds out a number of dark secrets, including Thorncastle’s ways of getting ahead in the Go Dancing! contest through underhanded means. Not only is he the grandson of the legendary “Dancing Duchess,” he’s also discovered that the show’s producer, August Bestwick (David Westhead), is Gay. He found this out when he followed Bestwick to the local Gay bar, which since this is the 1950’s and Gay sex is still illegal in Britain (as it was throughout the U.S. until 1961, when Illinois did a major revision of its criminal code and inadvertently left out the anti-sodomy law in the process), gives him the chance to blackmail the poor man. Father Brown deduces this from the matchbooks given out at the bar, which unlike most matchbooks has the establishment’s logo printed inside the matchbook rather than outside. Of course, being the hero of a 2020’s TV show, Father Brown is far more understanding and sympathetic to Bestwick’s sexuality than a real priest would have been in the 1950’s, or even now.

There’s a red-herring suspect named Ron White (Dan Hammill), who was an ex-con who reformed when he discovered ballroom dancing and decided to go straight, but the true culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Melody Byers (Laura Pigott), who along with her husband Colin (Christopher Jeffers) is a Go Dancing! contestant. Her motive is that for some reason she blames Thorncastle for the death of her brother, who was also her former dance partner (shades of Fred and Adele Astaire!), who fell during a dance, became paralyzed, and she dropped out of the dancing circuit to be his caregiver until he died two years later from kidney failure. Thorncastle insists it was her fault for insisting on doing a lift they hadn’t adequately practiced, but it turns out Thorncastle was responsible because he hadn’t sanded down Melody’s brother’s shoes, apparently a common practice in ballroom dancing to give you more traction on the floor. There’s a clever ending in which Father Brown realizes from Melody’s confession that she’s set another booby trap for Thorncastle, even though in order to save Thorncastle’s life he has to walk onto the Go Dancing! set in the middle of a live telecast and shove him out of the way. In the end Melody is promised leniency and Thorncastle gets his at the hands of the Dancing Duchess herself (Angela Rippon), who makes a deus ex machina entrance at the end and announces that she’s so appalled at his tactics to win the contest that she’s disowning him and forcing him to go work for a living like everyone else. This Father Brown episode had real charm and made logical sense, and it was nice to see a member of the hereditary aristocracy “get his” in the end, as just happened to the real-life ex-Prince Andrew in Britain and isn’t happening in the U.S., where Donald Trump has effectively given himself Presidential immunity.