Elisbeth: "Tearjerker" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired February 27, 2025)

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

The Elsbeth episode I watched after the two Law and Order shows was called “Tearjerker” and featured a long opening scene in which an elderly rich man named Nathan Jordan (Larry Pine) is being escorted – in more ways than one – by a hot young, though not too young (director Peter Sollett and cinematographer John B. Aronson give us enough close-ups of her that we can see she’s starting to get crow’s feet and the first visible signs of aging), woman named Chloe (Jordana Brewster). Nathan Jordan was a New York real-estate developer who built, among other projects, a condominium high-rise which was so sloppily constructed it literally sways in a high wind and the trash chute is so long that anything thrown away in it will make the sound of a bomb as it lands. Nathan has become a virtually total recluse; he never leaves his apartment except to eat at an ultra-exclusive restaurant within the building, where Chloe takes him that night before literally tucking him into bed in his room. Overnight he dies of an overdose of a drug called pentobarbitol which Chloe obtained from Dr. Jason Yamamoto (Phil Nee), who was dating and living with Nathan’s estranged wife Deborah (Victoria Clark). When the police find Nathan’s dead body, the case is assigned to Detective Rivers (Braeden de la Garza), who’s quite easy on the eyes but otherwise is a total asshole, trying to browbeat someone, anyone – Deborah Jordan, Dr. Yamamoto, Chloe – into confessing. Fortunately, Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) solves the case; based on the fact that Nathan was found wearing button pajamas instead of the snap-on ones he’d been wearing ever since he was diagnosed with a rare muscle disease, and how neatly he was tucked into bed, she realizes that Chloe killed him but it was essentially an assisted suicide. The two had had a meal together at the in-house restaurant where Nathan luxuriated in all the foods he’d been told by his doctors he shouldn’t be eating, then Chloe took him to his bedroom, tucked him in, and waited for the lethal dose of pentobarbital to kick in after she’d spiked his martini with it. Chloe avoided detection by the security cameras in the hall by loading take-out steaks into a to-go bag and throwing it down the trash chute, thereby faking out the cameras which were on motion detectors activated by sounds.

The most interesting character is Chloe, who’s matter-of-fact about being a sex worker – though I wasn’t sure at first whether she was an actual prostitute or an S/M dominatrix. One weird quirk in the anti-prostitution laws is that in order to count as an act of prostitution, actual contact involving sex organs must occur. So a man can pay a woman to beat him, tie him up, physically or verbally abuse him, and do whatever he likes as long as no sexual contact occurs, and it’s perfectly legal for both of them. (I learned this at least in part from memoirs written by former escorts, including a woman who successfully worked her way through college as a dominatrix and wrote about how careful she was to play by the legal rules; according to her, the only trouble she ran into came from men who begged her to masturbate them, which would have crossed the line into illegal prostitution.) The cops uncover three of Chloe’s other clients, two of whom beg them not to tell their wives, while a third says, “Please don’t tell my boyfriend” – which for me was the most intriguing one of all: why would someone in a serious Gay relationship be tricking out with a woman? There’s also a subplot about a $9 million Cézanne painting Nathan bought Chloe out of a secret fund, since his wife had had him declared legally incompetent largely out of all the money he was paying Chloe as “consultant” fees, and a plot twist in which Deborah got jealous of Chloe after she learns she got the pentobarbitol in the first place by seducing her boyfriend Dr. Yamamoto and stealing it from him while she was at his place doing her sex-worker thing. I like the rather loopy humor behind Elsbeth and Carrie Preston’s ability to make this rather bizarre character credible, and after watching the two-part PBS program about the international art market and Bruno Lohse, the Nazi art dealer who made tons of money after the war dealing in art he’d stolen on behalf of Hermann Göring and other Nazi bigwigs, which had made the point that the art market is as effectively unregulated as the trades in weapons or drugs, here was another story about the lawlessness of the market for classic art!