Elsbeth: "Unalive and Well" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired January 30, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 30), after I watched the Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit shows on NBC, I turned to CBS for the resumption of Elsbeth after a month-and-a-half-long hiatus. Elsbeth was a show I hadn’t thought I’d like from the previews, but I started watching it anyway because Found, the NBC show that replaced Law and Order: Organized Crime, looked terrible (and it had those fatal words at the beginning that turn me off completely: “Previously, on … ,” which to me indicate obeisance to the Great God SERIAL) Last night’s episode of Elsbeth was a good one called “Unalive and Well,” which dealt with one of my all-time favorite subjects: exposing a quasi-religious New Age cult. In this case, the cult leader is called Tom Murphy (Eric McCormack) and he preaches a strict regimen of health foods, meditation and cutting yourselves off from the outside world. He’s apparently attracted rich people and celebrities as “regulars,” and one of the things he does that he’s not supposed to be doing is administering a drug called “Combo” derived from the venom of poisonous Latin American frogs. He gives this to people by heating a red-hot needle containing it and burning the skin with it three times. His most recalcitrant camp member is a young man named “Bobby” (the genuinely cute Michael Hsu Rosen) who is getting tired of The Program and in particular all the overpriced food he’s supposed to eat as part of it. “Bobby” wants to leave and after an angry confrontation between them Tom is inclined to let him go. Only Tom has spiked all his junk food (he has various items of it in his car where he repairs when the camp’s regimen has got too much for him) with mustard-seed oil because “Bobby” is deathly allergic to sesame-seed oil and mustard and sesame are close enough in the plant world that if you’re allergic to one, you’re allergic to the other. “Bobby” is found dead in his white Mustang on the Van Wyck Expressway after he ran it off the road in a crash caused by his loss of consciousness due to the mustard-seed oil he’d been ingesting.

Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) – and I give kudos to the show’s director, Nancy Hower, for having all the actors pronounce the name correctly, “Tashioni” (one of the peculiarities of Italian is if you put an “h” in front of a vowel, it takes away the “h” sound that would otherwise be there) – is a former attorney turned consultant to the New York Police Department. While the New York Beat (or whatever this show calls its equivalent to the New York Post; in Dick Wolf’s New York it’s called the New York Ledger) is raking up Elsbeth’s sordid past as an attorney in Chicago and in particular her success in helping a super-rich man screw over his ex-wife in their divorce settlement by portraying her as a slut, Elsbeth grabs onto the “Bobby” case as a ticket to redemption. She infiltrates the cult and buys a ticket to one of its retreats even though that’s way more money than she can afford and her boss at the NYPD, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), makes it clear to her that the department won’t reimburse her. She discovers that “Bobby” was really Cole Campbell, whose older sister was killed 10 years before by Tom Murphy’s regimen and in particular the “Combo” drug. The family sued Murphy and his organization and won a settlement but had to sign a non-disclosure agreement to get it. Part of the settlement’s terms was that Murphy would stop using “Combo,” but Cole bought his way into the cult under a false name in hopes of proving that Murphy and the cult were still using the banned substance. He had just uncovered the evidence that he hoped would lead to Murphy’s prosecution for the murder of Cole’s sister when Murphy caught him and hit on this rather roundabout means of eliminating him completely.

Elsbeth gets herself locked into a geodesic dome that’s used on the site of the cult as a greenhouse, and as the temperature goes up and she finds herself locked in, at first I assumed that Murphy had locked her in and was using this as a way to get rid of her increasingly threatening presence – but in the end it turns out to be an accident and Murphy’s second-in-command, “Starlight” (Cailen Fu), rescues her. (If “Starlight” has another name, we never learn what it is.) Ultimately the cops come to the compound and arrest Murphy for murder in the middle of him leading a truth-telling session in which only the person holding the ball (which looks like a small coconut with a face painted on one side) is allowed to speak. From the promos I had assumed Elsbeth would be way too campy to be entertaining for me, but I’ve come to like the show and in particular the dry sense of humor expressed by Carrie Preston and the show’s writers (here, Matthew K. Begbie and Leah Nananko Winter) through which they express her character.