McCabe and Mrs. Miller (David Foster Productions, Warner Bros., 1971)

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

Last night (Saturday, February 28) my husband Charles and I watched a legendary movie neither of us had seen before (at least I hadn’t seen it; I’m not sure whether Charles did or not): McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a 1971 neo-Western directed by Robert Altman, co-written by him and Brian McKay (with uncredited contributions from Ben Maddow, Joseph Calvelli, and Robert Towne), based on a novel from 1959 by Edmund Naughton simply called McCabe. It’s set in the Pacific Northwest in 1902 and revolves around a mining-driven boom town (though we don’t see what’s being mined or any scenes of the characters actually working) with the improbable name of Presbyterian Church, after the town’s largest building. John McCabe (Warren Beatty), a gambler and typical Old West wanderer, arrives in town with the objective of making a lot of money playing poker with the locals – he’s passing himself off as “Pudgy” McCabe, a legendary gunslinger famous for knocking off a particularly nasty outlaw. He hopes to use the money from his poker winnings to open a whorehouse in town, and to that end he buys three prostitutes from a local dealer. Then he runs into Constance Miller (Julie Christie, Beatty’s real-life off-screen partner at the time), who pushes her way into his enterprise by pointing out all the problems he’s blithely ignoring, including the obvious complications of pregnancy and STD’s. Despite McCabe’s disinterest in any business partners, the two work together with Mrs. Miller taking charge of the prostitution operation and McCabe running the associated saloon and gambling den. Then complications arise in the form of two representatives from the Harrison Shaughnessy mining company in nearby Bearpaw, whose workers are the main client base of McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s enterprises. The two, Sears (Michael Murphy) and Hollander (Antony Holland), offer to buy out McCabe for $5,000, which they later raise to $6,250. When McCabe turns them down, insisting on $12,000 to $14,000, Sears and Hollander bluntly tell him that their employers have no intention of paying that much. Instead they’re going to bring in a hit squad of Breed (Jace Vander Veen), Butler (Hugh Millais), and The Kid (Manfred Schulz) to knock off McCabe and take his property by force. McCabe realizes that they’re going to kill him when he returns to Bearpaw and finds that both Sears and Hollander have left town. McCabe sees a local attorney, Clement Samuels (William Devane), who encourages him to fight the mining company in the courts, but it’s no use; Butler stalks McCabe and shoots him in the back, though as he’s dying McCabe is able to take a small derringer and shoot Butler in the forehead, thus killing him as well.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller was an important film in terms of its visual look; Vilmos Zsigmond was the cinematographer. He had fled Hungary after the failure of the 1956 revolution against the country’s Soviet-backed government, and because the business of cinematography in the U.S. was so hard to break into (the American Society of Cinematographers was a notoriously “closed” union, meaning you weren’t allowed to join unless a previous member invited you), he made his living the next decade working non-union jobs for really terrible cheap producers like Arch Hall, Sr. Hall gave Zsigmond his first full cinematography job on the 1963 film The Sadist, which like all Hall, Sr.’s productions starred his son Arch Hall, Jr. By 1970 Zsigmond had gradually began to work his way into more prestigious jobs, but McCabe and Mrs. Miller was the film that really “made his bones.” Zsigmond developed a technique called “flashing,” which meant briefly exposing the raw film stock to light, creating a slightly fogged look that added to the verisimilitude. Though the film was shot in color, the “flashing” made it look more like the black-and-white photos of the era in which the story took place. Altman also insisted on shooting the film as much as possible in sequence to illustrate the growth of the town as McCabe’s and Mrs. Miller’s business acumen brings more money into it and the town expands as a result. He had his set construction crew building the town as he was shooting, and some of them actually appeared in the film as the construction workers they really were. Oddly, Warren Beatty and Julie Christie weren’t Altman’s first choices for the leads: he wanted Elliott Gould (who would later star for Altman as Philip Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, the absolutely worst film ever made about Raymond Chandler’s detective character) and Patricia Quinn. That was interesting since the film was sold largely on the basis of Beatty’s and Christie’s star power and the publicity surrounding their real-life relationship.

I’d like to report that McCabe and Mrs. Miller is a masterpiece, but no can do; the film was obviously trying too hard to be “different.” With the Motion Picture Production Code finally having broken down a few years before and been replaced by the movie ratings system we’re familiar with today, Altman and his writers are obviously taking a certain joy in being able to show things and talk about them on screen that wouldn’t have been possible in the 1930’s or 1940’s. They could present a whorehouse as just that instead of having to call it a “dance hall” (the usual Code-era euphemism) and even show the breasts of some of the actresses playing hookers. There’s a certain air of in-your-face cheekiness about this movie which, paradoxically, makes it a lot less fun than it could have been. But the film’s major problem is Altman’s ponderously slow pace. Charles found a lot of it boring and both of us sometimes had difficulty staying awake. McCabe and Mrs. Miller had a lot of Altman’s directorial trademarks, including overlapping and frequently repetitive dialogue (he wanted his actors to talk the way real people do, interrupting each other and saying the same things over again, and he did) and frequent cross-cuts that undermine any sense of pace. Just as we’re getting interested in and even engrossed by one story thread, Altman wrenches us away from it and whipsaws us into another. Altman’s best films, M*A*S*H and Nashville, make that device work and help him bring his stories and characters to vivid life. McCabe and Mrs. Miller just plods along from one not very interesting plot strand to another. It ends in what has got to be one of the all-time dullest and least exciting final shootouts in the history of the Western genre. There are some marvelously subtle bits in the film, including McCabe’s bitter opposition to drug use (especially among the Chinese mine workers in the area) versus Mrs. Miller’s carefully concealed opium addiction; and McCabe first paying Mrs. Miller to have sex with him (revealed quite cleverly by Altman keeping Zsigmond’s camera on the box where he’s put her fee rather than showing us them having sex) and then the two of them having sex without him paying her just before he gets tracked down and shot. Overall, though, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is an overrated movie, despite some good qualities, and one of my particular aggravations was the exaggerated Cockney accent with which Julie Christie spoke. She sounds like she’s auditioning for Eliza Doolittle rather than running a relatively high-end brothel in 1902 Washington. It seems unbelievable to me that in the 2008 American Film Institute poll it was rated eighth among the “100 Best Westerns of All Time” – I can think of a lot of better Westerns than this!

Death in Paradise: Season 14, Episode 8 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired April 9, 2025)

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

Last night (Friday, February 27) I watched an episode of the engaging if not altogether satisfying BBC/PBS policier Death in Paradise, set on a fictitious Caribbean island called “Saint-Marie” or “Honoré” but actually filmed on the real Caribbean island of Guadeloupe (whose tourism board is actually listed on the production credits; obviously they’re hoping this show will encourage people to vacation in Guadeloupe). An ambiguous listing on imdb.com suggested this would be a story about an actor who drops dead in the middle of a performance of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (it’s odd to suggest that particular play for this plot device, but I’ve always been partial to stories about theatre productions in which a character really dies during the course of a play). Instead it turned out to be a whodunit about an organization that ostensibly rescues sea turtles and protects them from going extinct, run by husband-and-wife team Callum (Rupert Young) and Sadie (Lyndsey Marshal) Jones. The victim is a short-haired butch woman who calls herself Rosa Martinez (Lily Nichol) who’s killed and left behind in “The Shack,” a beachfront residence occupied by detective inspector Mervin Wilson (Don Gilet). Wilson’s long-delayed departure to London has become a recurring gimmick in this show, and he locks “The Shack” behind him as he departs for his this-is-it flight to London – only he’s contacted at the airport and summoned back even though, given that the victim was found in his home, not only is he not allowed to investigate officially but he’s at least briefly a suspect. The local cops, including the annoying comic-relief character of probation officer Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah) – who in this episode admits he only took the job because his mom was desperate for him to find some way to make a living instead of sleeping on her couch all day, and being a police officer looked like the coolest job opportunity on the island – discover that there are no official records to show that “Rosa Martinez” existed or traveled to the island.

“Rosa” turns out to be Leah, a British investigative journalist working for a paper in Manchester (as Wilson realizes when he sees the interior of “The Shack” and sees it’s exactly as he left it on his way to the airport for yet another London-bound flight he’d miss except that a postcard from someone in Manchester has been turned around so the return address is visible) to expose the sea-turtle organization. Instead of actually preserving the sea-turtle eggs so they can hatch and keep the species going, the Joneses are actually selling them on the black market to a group of smugglers, who in turn place them with their eventual users, gourmands who like the idea of eating an endangered species. The Joneses had an “open relationship” in which they each could date (and have sex with) other people, and accordingly both Callum and Sadie drifted into affairs with their volunteers ¬– only the affair between Callum and Rosa/Leah turned out to be a lot more serious, at least on his end. In the end it turns out that both Callum and Sadie were involved in Rosa’s death: Sadie confronted her on the turtle group’s boat and clubbed her with a boathook. Fleeing for her life, Rosa hid out in “The Shack” before Wilson got there and called Callum, thinking she could trust him. Instead they got into a big argument over Callum’s discovery that Rosa was never in love or particularly interested in him. She was only having the affair with him to get information for her article exposing the fraudulent sea-turtle charity. In the end the Joneses are both arrested and life goes on for both Wilson and his immediate supervisor, Police Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), who was called away to a meeting on Jamaica on which the future of his job supposedly depended, though it’s still uncertain at the end of this episode (the final one of the 14th season) whether Wilson is going to stay on Guadeloupe or not. Death in Paradise is actually a charming little show, and if the intent of the Guadeloupian tourist board in co-producing and helping bankroll this show was to encourage tourist visits to their island, it’s probably succeeding. As a crime drama, it’s not exactly thrill-a-minute, but it’s a nice bit of fun.

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!