Elsbeth: "I Know What You Did 33 Summers Ago" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, 2025)

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

Last night (Thursday, April 24) at 10 p.m. I watched an unusual and quite good Elsbeth episode with the rather awkward title, “I Know What You Did 33 Summers Ago.” Though imdb.com listed April 24 as the first air date for this program, it was obviously intended for earlier in the story arc than episodes that aired earlier. Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) is still a uniformed police officer in this one – later on she got promoted to plainclothes detective – and Elsbeth’s Gay son Teddy (Ben Levi Ross) has just announced he’s seeing a new boyfriend, Roy (unseen in this episode but later played by Heywood Leach). In later episodes Roy would become an on-screen character and he and Elsbeth would get along so well together that Teddy would feel a social obligation to his mom to make his relationship with Roy work despite some issues, notably over where the two are going to live. This Elsbeth features Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) getting a summons for jury duty just as she’s about to be visited by her son after he’s mostly grown up with his dad in Chicago. Officer Blanke takes him around New York while Elsbeth is stuck serving on an actual jury under a hard-ass judge, Milton Crawford (Michael Emerson), who’s a member of a fictitious organization that’s obviously supposed to be the Federalist Society and is hoping for an appointment as a federal judge. Judge Crawford is also notorious for skewing his court rulings in favor of the prosecution, and he’s anxious that the trial be wrapped up in a few days so he can bolster his reputation for efficiency. The defendant is a heavy-set middle-aged woman who’s on trial for murdering a man she was supposedly stalking. She was found naked in his apartment while he’d been clubbed to death, and she has a spectacularly incompetent attorney who advertises himself on the subways as “The Lawyer You Can Afford.” Elsbeth is seated as an alternate juror and is anxious to get on the real jury because she’s already noticing the mistakes the defendant’s lawyer is making, so much so that she starts giving him hand signals as to when he should object to the Black woman prosecutor’s questions.

It’s a bit surprising that writers Matthew K. Begbie and Eric Randall didn’t have Elsbeth asking questions from the jury box, a rarely used power real jurors have even though most don’t know they have it. Still, Elsbeth’s antics attract the attention of Judge Crawford, who calls her to his chambers in the judicial equivalent of a schoolchild being called to the principal’s office. Elsbeth finds her way into the jury room by ratting out a quite cute young man for recording the court proceedings for a podcast he does called “Psycho Slut Murderers,” thereby not only showing he’s making a recording in violation of court procedures but he’s also clearly biased against the defendant. Once Elsbeth is in the jury box for deliberations, the show turns into an offtake of the famous 1950’s TV show and film Twelve Angry Men, as Elsbeth shatters the prosecution’s case point by point. The defendant’s testimony was that she was in the shower when the crime occurred, and then she came out of the bathroom naked and grabbed a baseball bat that the real murderer had used to kill the victim, getting her fingerprints on it. Elsbeth argues that both the defendant and the victim were from Boston and were therefore hard-core Boston Red Sox fans, but the bat in question had the name of a New York Yankees player on it and therefore would not be likely to be the property of someone from Boston. One thing I liked about this show is it had an open-ended finish; the defendant finally gets acquitted of the crime but we don’t actually find out who really committed the murder. A lot of people (including my late roommate/home-care client) grew up watching Perry Mason and therefore got the idea that it’s the job of a defense attorney not only to prove that their client didn’t commit the crime but to play detective and find out who did. Actually, in the real world most criminal defendants who reach the stage of a trial (most don’t because they plead guilty to a lesser charge) are guilty, and it’s the job of a defense attorney not to exonerate them but to mitigate their punishment, either in pre-trial plea bargains or at the trial itself. I’m glad Matthew Begbie and Eric Randall got that right!