Elsbeth: "Tiny Town" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired February 13, 2025)

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

After the two remaining Law and Order franchise shows I switched channels from NBC to CBS to watch a quirky Elsbeth episode called “Tiny Town.” It seems that a New York museum has established a connection with a small town called Tattersall, Scotland. The New York museum has set up an electronic connection called “The Iris” through which people in their New York courtyard can view an outdoor street scene in Tattersall, and vice versa. A Scottish folk musician named Angus (Ioan Gruffudd, the Welsh-born actor who particularly impressed me in the 20th Century-Fox Fantastic Four movies in 2005 and 2007; what especially astonished me about his performance was that while one of the DVD’s contained as a bonus item footage from a press conference in which his real-life Welsh accent was unmistakable, in the movies themselves as Mr. Fantastic he’d spoken perfect American-accented English) has witnessed an altercation between a young woman named Hayley (Kara Rosella) and two men. The first man is someone she appears to be on a romantic date with, and the second is a taller man who appears to be jealous of her for seeing someone else. Hayley worked at a cosmetics and perfume company until that morning, when she’d been fired after a random drug test revealed fentanyl in her system. Angus tries to warn the people on the other side of “The Iris” that Hayley is in trouble, but because the system is only a video link, not an audio one, his attempts to gesture to the passers-by in New York only result in mutual confusion as they can’t understand him. Heroine Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) finally is able to communicate with him via their cell phones after she gets his number from a Web site promoting his band, which plays authentic Scottish folk music and has a Spotify page which promises, “No Bagpipes!” Through him she gets enough information that she’s able to draft a police sketch artist to draw accurate enough pictures of what the two men in Hayley’s life looked like.

The man she started with was George Singh (Alec Nevin), and the man who apparently attacked her was her boyfriend Charles Jeffries (Alex Hurt). Elsbeth is able to discover that things were not as they seemed with either of those men. George, she discovers, was actually Gay and had a partner named Stewart (Evan Alexander Smith); he was an investigative reporter who was working on a story alleging that the cosmetic company’s products were carcinogenic. The cops later find George murdered, and though Charles was indeed Hayley’s boyfriend, their relationship was on the rocks – though Charles and Hayley had gone as far as to take tests for in vitro fertilization. The tests for that had been done on Friday and had come back clean for all manner of drugs, so the result from her cosmetic company test the next morning saying she was positive was obviously faked. It turns out both Hayley and George were murdered by the head of the cosmetics company, Harold Thorwald (Alfredo Narciso), whom Elsbeth confronts in his palatial office. She threatens to call the cops on him but he calls her bluff, saying her cell phone has totally drained, but the cops arrive anyway in time to arrest Howard and save Elsbeth’s life. In a cute tag scene, Angus (whose last name is listed as “Doyle” on the imdb.com page for the show but it’s really something much more complicated, featuring two long words of Scottish or Welsh syllables) turns up in New York and gets at least a brief chance to romance Elsbeth in person despite the fact that his band is about to do a European tour. “They can go on without me,” he says, explaining that he doesn’t make his living as a musician but as a fireman. (One wonders how well Scottish firemen are paid given that he can casually fly all the way to New York on a whim.) This Elsbeth episode was likable and had just the right mix of comedy and thrills; all too many policiers go for camp but this one is well balanced between laughs and thrills.