Elsbeth: "I See … Murder" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired March 13, 2025)

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

After that I switched from NBC to CBS March 13 and watched the latest Elsbeth, “I See … Murder,” which guest-starred Tracey Ullman as self-proclaimed psychic Marilyn Gladwell (I wondered if writers Sarah Beckett and Wade Dooley deliberately named her after Marilyn Monroe and Malcolm Gladwell), who gets an hourly rate of $1,500 (some big-name attorneys would drool over a fee that big!) for her consultations with people with more money than sense. Her biggest client/pigeon is Phyllis Pierson (Jill Eikenberry), whose husband George died two years earlier. Phyllis inherited a candy and snacks company from him, but George, via Marilyn, is telling her to let go of it and agree to a takeover bid from their biggest competitor. Unfortunately for both Phyllis and Marilyn, Phyllis’s son Tim (Max Jenkins) has just returned from Hollywood, where he ran a failed production company (he ruefully admits that his movies were too sophisticated for the general box-office taste), intending to take over his late father’s candy company and restore it to its former success. Then Tim is lured to a park by the promise of an online date and is shot through the breastplate with a bow and arrow. Suspicion first falls on a group of people who literally shoot rats in the park with bows and arrows – they don’t want to use standard rat traps because the poisons from them would leak into the environment and kill more desirable animals like squirrels – but they point out that the only arrows they use are blunt-tipped. Apparently these arrows kill rats in some way the writers aren’t that good at explaining, but are harmless to humans because their points won’t penetrate skin. Elsbeth’s former police partner, Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), gets promoted from uniformed officer to plainclothes detective in this episode, which means that Elsbeth needs another officer from the official force to partner her.

She gets assigned a gender-ambiguous officer named Nicky Reynolds, whose preferred gender pronouns are “they” and “them” and who is played by an actor of equally uncertain gender who’s billed on imdb.com as “b” (one letter, lower-case). As they investigate Tim’s disappearance and the discovery of the corpse – Marilyn leads them to it the day after the murder – Elsbeth keeps trying to draw out Reynolds in small talk and gets either no response at all or the most taciturn ones they can come up with. Eventually Elsbeth deduces from the sound of Marilyn’s voice that she’s not from Europe at all, as she claims. Instead she’s really from rural Pennsylvania, and by chance the arrow Tim Pierson was shot and killed with is a discontinued model which was pulled from the market precisely because its point was unusually sharp. Elsbeth and Reynolds canvass the hunting supply stores that used to carry those arrows and find that the one which supplied the arrow that killed Tim was from the same part of rural Pennsylvania that Marilyn was from. From that Elsbeth deduces that Marilyn herself killed Tim; her motive was that she was going to profit personally from the sale of the snack company to its principal competitor, and if Tim talked his mom out of the sale Marilyn would stand to lose a major amount of money. I couldn’t help but wonder if writers Dooley and Larson had read Josephine Tey’s A Shilling for Candles (1936), a marvelous mystery novel about the murder of movie star Christine Clay by a fortune-teller who had publicly predicted her death and then killed her herself to make her prediction come true. (A Shilling for Candles was filmed the following year by Alfred Hitchcock as Young and Innocent, but he used only about one-third of Tey’s novel and changed both the identity of the murderer and their motive; in Hitchcock’s version the killer was the movie star’s estranged husband, and the giveaway is his uncontrollably twitching eye.) After the heavy-duty issues raised by the two Law and Order shows I’d seen before, this Elsbeth was a breath of fresh air, and while ordinarily I’m not that fond of comedy-mysteries, this one manages to thread the fine line between campiness and darkness (thank you, series creators Robert and Michelle King!).