Elsbeth: "Finance Bros" (Nemorino Productions, King Size Productions, CBS Studios, aired February 6, 2025)

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

Later last night (Thursday, February 6), I watched an episode of the quite compelling CBS-TV series Elsbeth, starring Carrie Preston as Elsbeth Tascioni (and I give credit to the series’ writers and directors for having the actors pronounce her last name “Tasch-ee-own-ee,” correct in Italian, one of whose oddities is that if you put an “h” in between a “c” and a vowel, it takes away the “h” sound; the name of the title character in Puccini’s comic opera Gianni Schicchi is pronounced “Johnny Skee-kee”). She’s an attorney who was forced to relocate from Chicago, where she got caught in a scandal, to New York, where she’s hooked up with the police as a legal consultant and an overall detective character. This episode was called “Finance Bros” and deals with a pair of identical twins, Peter and Bill Hepson (both played by character actor Alan Ruck, who was heavily ballyhooed in the promos even though he was at most a minor player who’s best known as Cameron Frye, sort of Sancho Panza to Matthew Broderick’s Don Quixote, in John Hughes’s 1986 teen comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Together the two of them worked themselves up from poverty and built a huge hedge fund that made them both super-rich. But Bill thought better of it and decided to give away his entire fortune, including selling all his houses, fancy cars and collectible wines, moving into a walk-up apartment in Queens and handing out $100 bills at random to homeless people and other strangers. Ebenezer Scrooge gets name-checked in the dialogue, but it reminded me of the secret philanthropists in the two film versions of Lloyd C. Douglas’s novel Magnificent Obsession (1935 and 1953), not only the well-to-do doctor who gets killed by accident in the opening scene but Randolph (Ralph Morgan in 1935, Otto Kruger in 1953), who retired as a Wall Street financier to become a sculptor and talk about “an infinite source of great power” that can be accessed by doing random acts of kindness. Unfortunately, Peter is extremely unhappy about the turn in Bill’s life; in the opening scene, he dresses himself in the sort of ragged old robe Bill regularly wears, confronts Bill in Bill’s walkup apartment, struggles with him and ultimately pushes him off a balcony and kills him. I’m glad that writers Anju Andre-Bergmann and Eric Randall went the Hitchcock route of letting us know all along that Peter killed his brother and building the suspense out of how the characters are going to find out the truth and what’s going to happen to them when they do.

There’s a red-herring suspect: Conrad Deckels (Ed Moran), the former CEO of a major Internet company who was driven out by the Hepsons, who’d invested in his company, decided he wasn’t running it properly, forced his board to fire him and then took over the company themselves. Peter Hepson is a real piece of work – with his arrogance and relentless what’s-in-it-for-me selfishness, given what’s happened to America under Donald Trump’s reign we wonder why he isn’t running for President – and it’s nice that the writers came up with a good way for him to get his comeuppance. They basically ripped off the repeated gimmick from the Law and Order shows of having the culprit arrested in the middle of a major public gathering so the arrest comes at the most embarrassing time for him, only they cooked up a variant. Peter is shown chairing a meeting of his investment staff in front of an animated board showing the share price of his company going higher and higher – until, to his horror, it suddenly reverses direction and the animation plunges deeper and deeper into the red. One of his staff members looks down at the street below and tells Peter that police are arriving at his building, and Peter immediately says, “The Securities and Exchange Commission? Oh, I can handle them.” Then the cops actually arrive, and they’re New York City police detectives out to arrest him for his brother’s murder. It turns out Peter had an intriguing motive: he’d just spent a lot of his firm’s money to corner the market on cobalt, a major component in cell phones and computer equipment and also a mineral whose extraction is particularly ruinous to the environment. Bill had decided to take some of his fortune to develop a non-toxic alternative to cobalt, so Peter needed to kill him before Bill and his researchers could invent his cobalt replacement and thereby render Peter’s investments in cobalt worthless. Though we should enjoy anti-capitalist stories like this in the media while we can before virtually all communications channels are taken over by Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and the junta of billionaires now acting like they own the U.S. government, this Elsbeth was a particularly nice one and a welcome reminder that the storytelling spirit of Charles Dickens and Frank Capra is alive and at least kinda-sorta well.