Elsbeth: "Toil and Trouble" (Nemorino Studios, King Size Productions, CBS Studios/Paramount, originally aired December 19, 2024; rerun May 1, 2025)

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

After the Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit shows on May 1 I switched to CBS and watched Elsbeth, a rerun originally telecast December 19, 2024 called “Toil and Trouble.” This time the show’s debt to Columbo was even more apparent than usual, as it features the cast and crew of a fictional TV series called Father Crime, The show is about a female police detective who teams up with a priest (obviously not a Roman Catholic, like the real British TV series Father Brown) to solve murders. The show has been running 19 seasons so far, but the woman who plays the police detective, classically trained British actress Regina Coburn (Laurie Metcalf), is getting restive. She’s accepted an offer to play “Lady M” in “the Scottish play” in a theatre on the West End of London, and to have enough time off from the show to do so, she’s persuaded the show’s producer, Calvin Reed (William M. Finkelstein), to write a story arc whereby her character will be in a coma for four weeks. Only Wilson has double-crossed her and written a new ending for the current season in which not only will Regina’s character be alive, conscious, and fully functional, she and the priest, played by actor Jack Wilson (Dominic Fumusa), will become lovers. So Regina determines to murder Wilson by using a method cooked up by Devin Riggs (Buzz Roddy), a crazed fan of the show who works on it as an extra playing a cop called “Stanhope” and sends long, insane fan letters to Regina hand-written in black ink on orange paper.

Part of Devin’s insanity was demanding not only that the show pursue the so-called “WAVEY” plot line in which the priest and the detective would become lovers, he’s written a script for a proposed episode in which the two get it on literally all over the place. Regina gets solo access to Calvin by calling his “masseuse,” Heidi (Alexandra Templer), who’s really his S/M dominatrix, to cancel and then take Heidi’s place so she can sneak into his office, render him helpless by handcuffing him to his office couch, and then kill him. In order to frame Devin, Regina copies the murder method from his script, only instead of stabbing Calvin with a stiletto knife as per Devin’s script, she misreads it and uses the high heel of her stiletto shoe to stab Calvin and do him in. It was easy to tell that this episode was from earlier in the show’s overall story arc, since Elsbeth Tascioni’s (Carrie Preston) best friend on the official New York Police Department, Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), is still a uniformed officer rather than a plainclothes detective (that came later), and while she appears to have found an acceptable roommate in hot, hunky Black doctor Cameron Clayton (Sullivan Jones), at this stage they are just roommates and not the actual romantically involved couple they became later. Ultimately Regina gets arrested, and just then a large, heavy overhead light falls on the set of Father Crime just when Elsbeth has uttered the name of the play, and her role, Regina was supposed to do in London: Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It’s become a bizarre superstition in theatrical circles that just saying the name of this play brings bad luck – it’s often referred to as “the Scottish play” to avoid speaking its actual title – and writer Matthew K. Begbie makes the most of this in his script while also giving Elsbeth her Columbo-like role of essentially annoying the murderer into confessing.