Elsbeth: "Four Body Problem" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 10, 2025)

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

After the Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode April 10, I switched from NBC to CBS for the latest Elsbeth episode, “Four Body Problem.” After the quite charming run of Elsbeth shows lately, this one was a disappointment. Funeral director Arthur Greene, Jr. (played by African-American Broadway star David Alan Grier) is paranoid over the conspiracy-mongering activities of his nephew Raymond (Charles Turner), in particular over the ongoing rumors that a legendary dead Black woman novelist for whom the Greene Funeral Home handled her service is still alive. Arthur sneaks up behind his nephew and clubs him over the head, killing him and plopping him into a conveniently available coffin which he can have cremated immediately so no one will be the wiser that Raymond was murdered by his uncle. Alas for Arthur, the crematorium he usually uses ls closed for repairs that weekend, and he can’t go somewhere else because then he’d be required to show a death certificate and orders from the next of kin to get the body burned. Meanwhile, a Senator, his girlfriend, his staff member and two crew members of his helicopter are killed in a crash, and while Greene callously and snobbishly refuses to bury the two proles who were flying the helicopter, he agrees to take on the Senator, his girlfriend, and the staff member. That makes his already crowded mortuary even more so, especially since he’s simultaneously dealing with a woman whose eco-freak sister just died and wanted an environmentally sound funeral. The sister is appalled when Greene quotes her a cost of almost $300,000 for a funeral in which the body will be buried in a biodegradable casket and allowed to return to the earth as organic chemicals to continue the life cycle (which is also the sort of funeral I want. Series heroine Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) starts hanging around the mortuary and encounters Raymond’s fellow conspiracy theorists, including a woman named Barbara (Jenn Harris) who insists that Raymond was kidnapped and is being held hostage by the FBI (which in the wake of the Trump administration’s mass deportations of Venezuelan and Salvadoran nationals to a notorious “black site” prison in El Salvador is a good deal more credible than it was when writers Erica Shelton and Sarah Beckett thought it up).

Barbara insists that she saw Raymond Greene being targeted by a drone in the cemetery that night, while fellow conspiratologist Jay (Tim Griffin Allen) insists that it was a spaceship. In fact it was a Greene Funeral Home hearse in which Arthur loaded Raymond’s body after killing him. The head of the precinct for which Elsbeth works as an advisor, Captain C. W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), is predictably upset when Barbara posts on her conspiracy Web site a photo of her and Elsbeth together and an announcement that Barbara is now working as an official consultant to the police. Ultimately Albert hits on the idea of persuading the late eco-freak’s sister to allow her body to be cremated, only Elsbeth insists that the coffin be opened before it’s cremated, and when it is the corpses of Raymond Greene and the white woman eco-freak are posed together inside it in a position that would have been considered sexual if either or both of them had still been alive. Arthur’s motive in killing his nephew was to cover up the mistake he made when, at the request of the Black novelist’s father, who was senile with Alzheimer’s at the time, his pet dog was buried instead of the novelist and her body was cremated – which they know because her gold ring was found amongst the ashes, allegedly of the dog. (Charles, who knows something about mortuary work because one of his sisters briefly tried to get into the field, said that a crematory oven is so hot any jewelry on the deceased’s person would either be totally vaporized or turned into an unidentifiable hunk of metal, so there wouldn’t be an intact ring in the cremains.) This was an Elsbeth better in its parts than its whole, including one great scene in which Albert Greene tries to get rid of the inconvenient Elsbeth by literally locking her inside a coffin. He insists she try it out, saying that a lot of would-be funeral home customers like to try out their final resting places while they’re still alive to enjoy the experience, but ultimately she escapes.