Elsbeth: "Hot Tub Crime Machine" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, aired April 3, 2025)

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

As usual on Thursdays, once the two Law and Order shows on Thursday, April 3 were finished, I switched the channel to CBS and watched the latest Elsbeth. It was a quirky story about a physical trainer named Axel Frostad (Will Swenson), with long black hair and a stocky, compactly built body I found very sexy, whose wife Freya (a beautifully honed performance by Mary-Louise Parker) has insisted that the two invite another woman, Taylor (Jess Darrow), into their relationship for a “thruple.” So we get to see Axel make out with Freya, Axel make out with Taylor, and Freya make out with Taylor. Only Freya apparently gets tired of feeling like the odd woman left out in the “thruple,” and she kills Axel in a carefully planned way. She clogs up the drain of his carefully designed state-of-the-art hot tub (the company that made it is called “Tub Tops” and the episode’s title is “Hot Tub Crime Machine,” after the film Hot Tub Time Machine that was apparently the last movie MGM made under its old management before Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com bought it) with Axel’s hair – old hair of his that she’s filched from one of his brushes – and locks him into the hot tub with a remote-control device. At first I thought it was one of those Roomba self-propelled round vacuum cleaners (though that was hard to believe given that there are no carpets in the Frostads’ apartment; all the floors are hard). But it turns out to be an odd gimmick that, among other things, can crash itself into the outboard on-off switch on the hot tub and disable its mechanisms, including the security feature that’s supposed to keep you from being locked in.

Axel is found drowned in the hot tub, and naturally the official police detective assigned to the case, Edwards (Micaela Diamond) – and what happened to the intriguing character of Nicky Reynolds, a gender non-binary person who appeared on the last new Elsbeth, “I See … Murder,” who appeared as Elsbeth’s official police partner, insisted on being called “they” and “them” as their personal pronouns, and was played by an equally gender-ambiguous performer billed only as “b” (one letter, lower-case)? I was really hoping to see more of them! – wants to dismiss it as an accident. There are also two officials from the Tub Tops company, who are worried that the incident will discredit their product and hurt sales. One of them is a middle-aged white guy and the other a quite hot-looking young Black woman who wears her hair in a Jimi Hendrix-style “natural.” The two Tub Tops reps decide that a murder would be a better image for their product than an accident or a suicide. Complicating the issue is the fact that Freya Frostad is also at least a minor celebrity, author of a major best-seller for people who want to discipline themselves from hoarding. She’s made a rule that no one can bring a new item into the house without giving up another because her book proclaims a “Rule of 44,” that being the total number of personal possessions you can have. (My husband Charles, who watched this with me and looked at it rationally – arguably more rationally than the actual writers, Erica Larsen and Jonelle Lightbourne – wondered how clothes would count. Would a pair of socks and shoes count as one item, two, or four, he asked?)

As with the old TV series Columbo (to which this show owes a lot, mainly in the character of a police-affiliated person who basically annoys and browbeats a murderer into confessing), we see Freya commit the murder in the opening sequence, so there’s no suspense as to who the guilty party is but rather in how they will be found out. While Freya’s motive for knocking off Axel seems to have been that she wanted Taylor all to herself (which poses some interesting possibilities the writers didn’t explore, including the character of a previously heterosexual woman who explores Lesbianism and finds she likes it a hell of a lot better than just letting guys stick their dicks into her), Taylor isn’t into old-fashioned two-person relationships. In the show’s best scene, the two women interview a young Black man whom they’d like to invite to take Axel’s place in their “thruple,” but though Freya obfuscates and says their previous male partner just “went away,” Taylor tells him the truth that Axel drowned in their hot tub, and the Black hunk gets scared, decides he’s not willing to take the risk, and leaves. There’s also a subplot between Elsbeth’s Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) and his on-again, off-again partner Roy (Hayward Leach), who genuinely love each other but are having commitment issues and are also fighting over where they’re going to live if they move in together, since one of them has a gig in Washington, D.C. and the other doesn’t want to leave New York. At one point Teddy asks Roy if he’s staying with him just because Elsbeth likes Roy so much – and of course I couldn’t help but joke with Charles about how well my mother-in-law and I get along. And there’s still another subplot about Elsbeth’s friend, official police detective Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), and how Elsbeth and Kaya’s boyfriend, Dr. Cameron Clayden (Sullivan Jones), are secretly meeting to plan a surprise birthday party for Kaya. I’m a bit surprised the writers didn’t think of having Kaya worry about these clandestine meetings between her partner and her best friend for fear Elsbeth is going to ask to join them for a “thruple” of their own!