All That Jazz (Columbia, 20th Century-Fox, 1979)

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

Last night (Sunday, March 1) Turner Classic Movies showed a night of Academy Award-winning or -nominated films about music and dancing, of which the one I decided to watch was Bob Fosse’s highly regarded, semi-autobiographical film All That Jazz (1979). This was the fourth of the five films Fosse directed, along with Sweet Charity (1969), an adaptation of a show Fosse had also done on stage but the studio, Universal, forced him to use Shirley MacLaine as the star instead of Gwen Verdon, Mrs. Bob Fosse, who’d played the part on stage; Cabaret (1972), which won Fosse the Best Director Academy Award; Lenny (1975), the biopic of comedian Lenny Bruce (which once again suffered a cast change from play to film; on stage Cliff Gorman had played Bruce, but for the movie they got Dustin Hoffman because he had a bigger movie “name”); All That Jazz (1979); and Star 80 (1983), about the rise to stardom of model and Playboy centerfold Dorothy Stratten and her murder at the hands of her ferociously jealous manager and husband, Paul Snider. I’d seen All That Jazz before in the early 1980’s at a party thrown by some of the friends Cat Ortiz and I knew at UC San Diego; they hosted a party of movies on videotape when that was still a major novelty. I remember not liking the film, finding it really self-indulgent and almost offensive, and calling it overrated while I thought Star 80 was underrated. But when I saw it on TCM’s schedule last night I decided to give it another try.

All That Jazz was based on an incident in Fosse’s real life: a heart attack he suffered while simultaneously directing the stage version of Chicago and editing the film Lenny in 1975. Fosse came near death as a result, and was inspired to create this film about choreographer and director Joe Gideon (Roy Scheider), a womanizing alcoholic and drug addict who begins every morning with an implacably consistent routine: he takes Alka-Seltzer and Dexedrine while listening to a Vivaldi concerto (on cassette, which really dates this movie) while facing his bathroom mirror, then says to himself, “It’s show time!” He also has an ex-wife named Audrey Paris (Leland Palmer) whom he continues to work with in his shows, and a current main squeeze named Katie Jagger (Ann Reinking), with whom he has an argument when she wants to leave town for a six months’ tour with someone else’s show and he wants her to stay in town. There’s one grimly funny scene in which Audrey lets herself into Joe Gideon’s apartment (she still has his key) while Katie is in bed with him, and we brace ourselves for the seemingly inevitable confrontation … only it never occurs because Katie is able to hide her body behind Joe’s so Audrey doesn’t see her. Gideon is simultaneously working on a lumbering stage musical called NY/LA and editing a movie he’s shot called The Stand-Up, and dealing with both sets of producers. The Broadway ones are concerned mainly about the sheer amount of sexual content he’s working into the big numbers, particularly one called “Class” which supposedly takes place on an airliner and features not only men dancing with women but women dancing with women and men dancing with men. (It’s an interesting index of the grudging level of social acceptance Gay men and Lesbians were just beginning to claw towards in the late 1970’s before the calamity of AIDS associated the Queer community in general with illness and death.) The Hollywood ones are upset with how far he’s gone over budget both in shooting The Stand-Up and in editing it, including obsessively recutting a sequence in which Cliff Gorman’s character performs a routine satirizing Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and her famous five stages of grief. (The routine features a nice line about how Kübler-Ross presented herself as a definitive authority on dying when she hadn’t yet died herself.)

Gideon is in the middle of rehearsing NY/LA when he starts getting symptoms of heart disease, which leads to a full-blown heart attack and eventually open-heart surgery. Having had open-heart surgery myself, I couldn’t help but think as the blatant med-porn of Gideon’s body being sliced open flashed on the screen, “Did this really happen to me?” (It did, and I have the chest scars to prove it.) The credits for All That Jazz contain an acknowledgment to Dr. John E. Hutchinson III as a technical advisor. It’s also grimly appropriate that Gideon’s doctor, Ballinger (Michael Tolen), is warning him to cut back on his drinking and smoking while both of them are puffing away like mad on cigarettes and coughing big-time from it. (One of my ongoing fascinations with older movies is seeing the sheer amount of smoking doctors, nurses, and patients all did in environments that today maintain rigid anti-smoking policies.) All That Jazz remains a fascinating movie, but not always for the right reasons. It co-won the Cannes Film Festival’s best-movie award the year it was shown there (1980) and was nominated for nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Cinematographer, Best Actor, and Best Original Screenplay (for Fosse and Robert Alan Aurthur, who also produced the film and whose last project it was), but it only won for four lesser categories: Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Score. Before Roy Scheider got the part of Joe Gideon, it was offered to Paul Newman and also to Scheider’s former Jaws cast-mate, Richard Dreyfuss, but it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Scheider in the role, he’s so spot-on.

At the same time All That Jazz is a film I respect a lot more than I really enjoy; there’s a certain sick level of self-satisfaction in watching the downward spiral of a man who is clearly destroying himself, but at least for me it only sporadically works. You have to be given some reason why you should care about this man, and you aren’t except for a few ultra-brief flashes. There’s a grim ending sequence in which the producers of the show-within-the-show NY/LA realize that they’re actually better off financially if Joe Gideon dies, since if he croaks they’ll be able to collect enough profit from the insurance company to pay off the incurred costs and have $600,000 left over, while if they wait the four months before his doctors clear him to return to work on it, they’ll have to use their own money to keep the cast together. (I wonder if this was a problem for all the shows on Broadway which had to close when the COVID-19 lockdowns went into effect, at least a few of which did open after all once the lockdowns were lifted.) On my first go-round with All That Jazz I had especially disliked the final number, with Ben Vereen as “O’Connor Flood” enthusiastically singing off Joe Gideon with the Everly Brothers’ song “Bye, Bye, Love,” with the lyrics appropriately tweaked to “Bye, Bye, Life.” This time around that seemed like one of the best parts of the movie, along with the “Class” number: artfully rewritten and tweaked in the lyrics to give Gideon the larger-than-life send-up the character deserves. Two women are wearing body stockings emblazoned with drawings of arteries and veins as they become part of his chorus line, alongside all the doctors, nurses (including one he’s repeatedly made passes at), and others who’ve tried to take care of him. Then this spectacular number comes through a thudding halt and we see Gideon’s real end: he dies and is zipped up into a plastic body bag. Those are the two big spectacular numbers; the others are pretty much a compendium of Fosse’s Greatest Hits, with lots of jerky, almost robotic movements; lots of people waving and strutting around in hats, a sequence that blatantly rips off the “Two Ladies” number in Fosse’s Cabaret, another driven by finger-snapping based on a similar song in Sweet Charity, and so on. There’s a marvelous sequence in which an older woman TV film critic blasts Gideon’s newly released The Stand-Up for being pretentious, self-referential, and dull: precisely the criticisms I would make about All That Jazz!

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.