Elsbeth: "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, 2025)

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

Later in the evening, after I’d put my husband Charles through Jimmy Kimmel’s latest monologue and two Dave Hurwitz videos (one about recently deceased conductors and one about Michael Gielen’s formidable performance of Bartók’s complete ballet The Miraculous Mandarin), we watched the latest episode of Elsbeth, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant” (a title taken from a Billy Joel song). This one features Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), her Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) and his partner Roy (Hayward Leach) taking a tour of New York City’s most notorious true-crime sites. Among them is Pupetta’s Italian Restaurant, owned by Pupetta Del Monte (Alyssa Milano, who’s important enough that the promos for this show billed her heavily as a guest star), where a young soldier in the Del Monte crime family, Goldie Moresco (Anthony Pyatt), was both stabbed (with a corkscrew) and then shot, ostensibly by rival Mafia family soldier Eddie Nova (Adam Fontana). The killing provoked an all-out war between the Del Monte and Nova crime families that annihilated both of them until Pupetta Del Monte was the only Del Monte left. She has claimed not to be involved in the Mafia and says her sole source of income was as a restaurateur. She married Gene Genetti (Adam Ferrara), a waiter at Pupetta’s who was the only witness to the crime, and the two had a son, Gene Genetti, Jr. (also played by Anthony Pyatt). The incident took place in 1998 and inspired a big-budget crime film, City on a Knife Edge – the title comes from Goldie Moresco’s penchant for eating spaghetti with a knife instead of a fork, which he was in the process of doing when he was killed – which was 3 ½ hours long in the final released version and two hours longer than that in the director’s cut, included as a bonus item when the film finally came out on DVD.

Elsbeth questions the tour guide Henry Fellig (played by a marvelously gender-ambiguous actor named Murray Hill – who for a while I thought was going to turn out to be a woman wearing a fake moustache as part of her FTM drag) about the details of the case, and decides that they don’t add up. Elsbeth connects with the New York police detective who investigated the case when it originally happened, Buzz Fleming (Daniel Oreskes), when Gene Genetti slips her a note asking to meet her later at a secret location – only the “secret location” didn’t stay secret anymore, since Geretti is run down by a hit-and-run driver just before Elsbeth gets there. Elsbeth and Fleming connect the old case with the new one even though the current management of the New York Police Department insists they have nothing to do with each other. A person is finally arrested for the hit-and-run accident, but he turns out to be an accountant who was working for Pupetta. Elsbeth also realizes that Gene Genetti, Jr., who graduated from Wharton Business College in Pennsylvania (also Donald Trump’s alma mater) with a degree in accounting, was being recruited to take over as Pupetta’s accountant, but Gene, Sr. didn’t want him to take the job because he didn’t want Gene, Jr. to get sucked into Pupetta’s lifestyle, which included laundering money for the Mob through her restaurant. Elsbeth and her official police partner, Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) – who’s in line for promotion to plainclothes detective but whose promotion has been held back for either political or racial reasons (Blanke is African-American; so is her immediate supervisor, Captain C. W. Wagner [Wendell Pierce], but there are intimations of racism above them) – also realize that Gene, Jr. is several inches taller than either of his parents.

From this Elsbeth deduces that Gene, Jr. is not Gene, Sr.’s biological son; his real father was Goldie Moresco, and Goldie was actually killed by Pupetta Del Monte in a jealous fit after he refused to marry her. Elsbeth and Blanke finally get the clue they need from an outtake in the film City on a Knife Edge in which the actress playing Pupetta breaks a fingernail, and by faking a confession by which Gene, Sr. says he killed Goldie, they get Goldie’s body exhumed and find a fake fingernail with an emblem embedded inside that Pupetta was known to have worn at the time of Goldie’s murder. This Elsbeth episode had the quirky charm that has endeared this show to me, as well as a charming tag scene in which Teddy and Roy decide to launch a podcast about the so-called “white whales” – cases certain police officers were never able to solve and were haunted by for years – with Goldie Moresco’s murder as episode one. There’s also an intimation that Teddy and Roy will break up because one of them lives in New York, the other in Washington, D.C., and they don’t want to move to the other’s city or attempt a long-distance relationship, though the understanding at the end is they will stay together (and I hope so, if only because they’re an unusually positive depiction of a Gay male couple on TV, and that pleases me as a Gay man married to another man). Elsbeth is a charming show, which owes more than a little to Columbo (particularly the gimmick of having the “sleuth” character basically annoying the murderer into confessing) but which luckily has some of the same appeal as its fabled ancestor. This is also the episode in which Elsbeth gives away that she’s really Icelandic by birth (she gives a long and complicated Scandinavian name as her real one), and her Italian name only came from a long-since dumped ex-husband.