Law and Order: "The Enemy of All Women" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 22, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 22) my husband Charles and I watched the usual Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes on NBC and another Midsomer Murders show on PBS. The Law and Order was called “The Enemy of All Women” – though it’s a good thing they don’t flash the episode titles in advance because that would have been a giveaway of the entire plot. It begins with a long tracking shot that follows a young woman, Amelia Hardage (Ren Montero), through New York City as she heads home, and is told from the point of view of all the surveillance cameras that are recording her on her walk, including her own as she enters the townhouse in which she lives. Then a shadowy figure we don’t get a good look at points a gun at her and kills her with one shot to the head. After the corpse is discovered, the detectives of the New York Police Department routinely order copies of all the surveillance footage as well as Hardage’s e-mails – only to find them all literally disappearing as they attempt to load them. From this, and from what Hardage did for a living – she worked for a company that amassed huge amounts of surveillance data on every individual in the area and then sold those data caches to the highest bidder – detectives Vincent Riley (Reid Scott) and Theo Walker (David Ajala) and their boss, Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney) deduce that the culprit is a person with an ultra-high level of expertise in computerized record-keeping and major hacker skills to erase all recorded data that might implicate him. This leads them to the victim’s boss, Marius Cole (Ennis Esmer), and also to her best friend, Vanessa Barrett (Virginia Kull), who had helped her get her current job and then had quit the same company and gone to work as information technology specialist for a women’s health care clinic. It turns out from an interview with Hardage’s psychological consultant, Sean Morris (Mathais Goldstein), that she had been raped one month previously. Sean had been trying to persuade her to report the crime to the police, which she’d been unwilling to do, until the day before she was killed, when her rapist returned to finish her off forever and thereby escape accountability. The cops briefly suspect Sean of murdering Hardage until he convinces them that he’s too ethical to do that and also that he’s Gay. (Presumably, since he’s not a licensed therapist, he’s not bound by the confidentiality regulations that would likely have been invoked by a professionally licensed person even though their client was dead.)

The cops take Marius Cole to trial before a tough woman judge, Angela Dillow (Eileen Galindo), only even before the trial begins Marius’s attorney makes a motion to dismiss the case because Marius has used elaborate AI software to manufacture himself an alibi. (This is one of my main concerns with the future of politics in this country; the use of AI to manipulate video footage so it no longer shows what actually happened, but what the government wants people to think happened. It won’t surprise me at all if the next time ICE agents kill an innocent bystander like they did with Renée Good, the authorities not only tell people they didn’t see what they actually saw in the video, they use the raw footage to create an AI version in which the victim actually was threatening to kill the ICE agent and he shot her in self-defense.) Marius, who like Harvey Weinstein has made a lot of big donations to women’s rights organizations to cover his tracks as a sexual abuser, presents a sympathetic figure and seems to be on his way to acquittal until the cops and the prosecutors – District Attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and his associates on the case, Nolan Price (Hugh Dancy) and Samantha Maroun (Odelya Halevi) – guess that Vanessa Barrett was also raped by Marius Cole, only she signed a non-disclosure agreement and didn’t come forward. The prosecutors point out that NDA’s can’t be used to cover up a crime, but she still doesn’t want to come forward and testify because she’s afraid that her career in women’s health will be over if people find out she was a rape victim and did nothing about it. Then Nolan Price works out a stratagem; at first he offers Marius and his attorney a plea deal, which they turn down. Then he brings Virginia into court, and the mere sight of her seemingly about to testify scares Marius into agreeing to cop a plea after all and accept a 20-year prison sentence for second-degree murder. DA Baxter asks Nolan what he would have done if his trick hadn’t scared Marius into a cop-out – would he have risked destroying Virginia psychologically by making her testify? I suspect Ennis Esmer as Marius Cole is too good a villain for the Law and Order writing crew to let disappear; I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he manages to engineer an escape by hacking into the prison’s computers and generating AI footage of himself in his cell while he’s really outside. While this was more like a Special Victims Unit story than one for the flagship show, it still worked really well even though in the real world people like Marius Cole don’t get held accountable for their crimes; they get themselves elected U.S. President and all the charges against them magically disappear.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Career Psychopath" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 22, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episode that was shown on January 22 after the “Enemy of All Women” episode of Law and Order, “Career Psychopath,” trod over more familiar ground but had some interesting things to say about the bizarre cults that form around serial killers. During his long stretch in prison Charles Manson got a number of marriage proposals (one of which he actually accepted and went through a wedding ceremony via remote control) and innumerable requests for autographed photos. My husband Charles once read a report that Manson had actually farmed out the task of autographing some of these photos to fellow inmates. He seemed really put out by that until I reminded him that the reason Manson was in prison in the first place was not for killing people personally, but for getting other people to do it for him. Anyway, the “Career Psychopath” in this story is Henry Mesner (Ethan Cutkosky), who committed rape as a juvenile, served his sentence, then not only raped and murdered someone else but killed his parents too. His sister Ruby (Maxine Wanderer) survived and was taken in by foster parents, only they eventually cut her off because she was demanding too much money from them and using most of it to buy drugs. The show opened with assistant district attorney Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino) and his wife, SVU detective Amanda Rollins (Kelli Giddish), coming home from a dinner date. Rollins sees that their home has been broken into, and shortly thereafter the culprit, whom we don’t see enough of to get a recognizable image, is holding a knife to Carisi’s neck and ordering Rollins to toss him her gun. There’s a scuffle in which Carisi regains control of the situation, though his wrist is slashed and the assailant escapes despite Rollins’s attempt to track him down.

It turns out that the assailant is Phillip Wingate (Kimball Farley), who formed a sick attachment to Henry Mesner even though the real Mesner is safely in Sing Sing prison. Wingate goes as far as to date Ruby Mesner and enlist her as an accomplice in his assaults, including killing a Black woman court reporter who’d taken the transcript of the case and later retired. There are two confrontations between SVU detectives and Henry Mesner in prison; in the first of which Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay) is the interviewing officer. Henry makes it clear he only wants to talk to Detective Rollins, even though Benson has taken her off the case because she’s too close to it and she came on too strong in the interview room when the SVU cops busted Ruby Mesner and get her to reveal Wingate’s current location. Nonetheless, Rollins goes to Sing Sing without formal authorization from Benson, her boss, and gets Henry to give her the fan letters he got from Wingate, which he was so contemptuous of he never even opened any of them. From these the SVU detectives are able to figure out where Wingate is living and arrest him. Once again, this show had a particularly interesting villain; Ethan Cutkosky’s chilling matter-of-fact performance as the titular career psychopath Henry Mesner is scary precisely because he doesn’t underline. He seems like jes’ plain folks and we have to keep reminding ourselves of what the character is supposed to have done. And unlike Manson and some other real-life psychopaths who served long prison terms, Henry if anything seems rather embarrassed at the cult that’s formed around him and certainly wishes that his admirers “outside” would get over it and get a life.

Midsomer Murders: "Claws Out" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 18, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Thursday, January 22, after the two Law and Order episodes I watched with Charles, I briefly lighted on CBS for what I hoped would be another Elsbeth episode but it was another Matlock show instead. So instead I went on to PBS for another rerun of Midsomer Murders, this one an episode called “Claws Out” that begins with the murder of Frank Bailey (Nathan Sussex). Frank Bailey formed a major tech company and then sold it and retired, but when he settled in Midsomer County he found a number of people complaining about the mysterious disappearances of their pet cats and dogs. So he started investigating and soon formed a business as literally a pet detective. He’s currently on the trail of a large dog named “Storm,” a Czechoslovakian variant of a German shepherd, whose owners are Aden Hughes (Adam Scarborough) and his wife Eshani (Mina Anwar). We first meet Eshani at an Indian restaurant called Tandoor (no “i”), where she’s predictably upset when a waiter spills food all over her tight-fitting red dress. We also learn that Andrew’s ex-wife is now the wife of the owner of Tandoor, only they had the occasional fuck for old time’s sake. While all this is going on Sarah Barnaby (Fiona Dolman), wife of the show’s central “sleuth” character Detective Chief Inspector John Barnaby (Neil Dudgeon, who’s also listed as executive producer), is trying to train her dog for an upcoming “Dog Agility Contest” sponsored by Madeleine Saunders (Josette Simons), a tall, rail-thin African-British woman whose son Edison died years before while he was in medical school and seemingly headed for a stellar career as a doctor. Edison left instructions that on his death his organs were to be donated for transplants, and Madeleine gave Edison’s heart to Reece Fleming (Joe Edgar), either the younger son or the grandson of crusty, irascible old landowner William Fleming (Duncan Preston). Fleming also has a son named Perry (Charlie Condou), who works locally as a gardener and who’s supposedly Gay, though as with the Gay character on last night’s Law and Order and all too many “movie Gays,” we never see him either emotionally, romantically, or sexually involved with another man. There’s also a real young cutie named Tai Yang (Tom Moya), who’s more or less the boyfriend of Madeleine’s daughter Danielle (Tia May Watts) – we’re introduced to both him and Reese Fleming in Danielle’s bedroom, though when Madeleine walks in on them everything appears to be innocent.

Madeleine is determined to send Danielle to medical school to fulfill her ambition, frustrated by Edison’s death, to have a doctor in the family, but Danielle couldn’t be less interested in it. Instead she wants to take at least a year off her education and tour the world with Tai, starting with Canada. Tai is the nephew of Frank Bailey, and he’s living in a trailer (a “caravan,” they call it in Britain even though it’s just one unit) on William Fleming’s land. But when Frank Bailey is killed, and his body stuffed inside the kennel formerly occupied by the Hughes’s dog Storm, his will is read and it leaves Tai one-half of his estate. Needless to say, his widow Kim (Catherine Tyldesley) isn’t happy about this, and when Tai is himself murdered a week before his 21st birthday Kim heaves a sigh of relief that now she’s going to get all her husband’s fortune. (At the end she takes down the sign that said, “Frank Bailey/Pet Detective” and puts one up with her own name.) A third victim emerges: Lorna McIntosh (Josie Lawrence), who at first appears to be a dotty old lady, well out of it mentally, who’s collected other people’s cats and is raising them herself. Later she turns out to be a retired information technology professor (there’s a nice bit of dialogue where Barnaby’s associate, detective sergeant Jamie Winter – played by red-headed hunk Nick Hendrix – realizes that they’d been assuming that she was the widow of Professor McIntosh and now they know she was Professor McIntosh). Alas, Lorna gets strangled by an unseen assailant wielding a dog trapping device with which she’s dispatched to cat heaven. In the end [spoiler alert!] Perry Fleming turns out to have been the killer of both Frank and Tai, though he’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer already (given that I lived through the 1980’s, once I heard a Gay man had been diagnosed with a terminal disease I immediately assumed it was AIDS!). The real villain turns out to be [double spoiler alert!] Madeleine Saunders, who for reasons that escape me at the moment (one of Charles’s complaints about this particular episode is how weak writer Helen Jenkins was in terms of giving people actual motives) wanted to target Tai for having allegedly led her daughter astray, though on her orders Perry killed Frank by mistake before she aimed him correctly at Tai because they were both wearing similar motorcycle outfits. Then Madeleine dispatched Lorna herself after she realized Lorna might be a witness. After the previous Midsomer Murders episode shown one week earlier, “Book of the Dead” – a well-constructed thriller with a plot that made sense – “Claws Out” was a real disappointment, and it’s hard to believe that Madeleine could get Perry to commit murders for her by threatening him with an allegedly “cancer-sniffing dog” that could “out” him as terminally ill.

Massacre River (Windsor Pictures, Allied Artists, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 21) my husband Charles got home from work relatively early, and I ran him a movie we’d run across on X nèe Twitter: Massacre River, a 1949 “B” Western from a company called “Windsor Pictures” releasing through Allied Artists, nèe Monogram. We’d both got interested in this film from an X post alleging that the two male stars, Guy Madison and Rory Calhoun, had had sex with each other in a parked car in front of the home of their manager, Henry Willson. The poster, who uses the screen name “The Gay Aesthetic,” wrote, “Claiming Rory was quite large, Guy was clearly feeling no pain, and that car was rocking; as often as Henry repeated the story, he obviously enjoyed the lascivious insinuation it wasn’t the first time.” Henry Willson was apparently a Gay version of Harvey Weinstein; his Wikipedia page diplomatically describes him as “an American Hollywood talent agent who played a large role in developing the beefcake craze of the 1950’s.” The page also quotes Richard Barrios’s book Screened Out: Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall as saying, “[T]alent agent Henry Willson... had a singular knack for discovering and renaming young actors whose visual appeal transcended any lack of ability.” His most famous client was Roy Scherer Fitzgerald, whom he renamed “Rock Hudson,” as he’d renamed Robert Mosely “Guy Madison.” Willson represented both men and women, and both Gay and straight actors, but his reputation around Hollywood was so notorious, especially his full-blown operation of the “casting couch,” that straight actors generally avoided him for fear that if they signed with Willson they’d be branded as Gay. That story about Rory Calhoun allegedly “topping” Guy Madison so piqued Charles’s and my curiosity that I ordered Massacre River from Amazon.com. It turned out to be a lot less Gay than “The Gay Aesthetic” had advertised, but a surprisingly interesting movie.

The story began in 1916, when popular Western writer Harold Bell Wright published a novel called When a Man’s a Man about an effete Eastern man whose girlfriend rejects him because he isn’t butch enough, so he goes to the wild West to “become a man.” (There were plenty of stories like that, including the fascinating 1930 film Way Out West that starred another one of Hollywood’s legendary real-life Gay men, William Haines.) It was filmed twice before under Wright’s original title, as a silent in 1924 and a talkie in 1935, both times directed by Edward F. Cline. Cline had been one of the original Keystone Kops, and when he became a director he specialized in comedies. His most famous films are the ones with W. C. Fields: My Little Chickadee (with Mae West in a spoof of David Belasco’s The Girl of the Golden West), The Bank Dick, and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Fields’s last three films in starring roles before age and alcoholism reduced him to playing just bit parts). Massacre River, directed by John Rawlins (a former Universal contractee who’d made the studio’s first three-strip Technicolor feature, Arabian Knights, and Universal’s first Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes film, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror), was also shot with When a Man’s a Man as the working title, but the story was so far removed from Wright’s tale that writer Louis Stevens got credit for “original screenplay.” About all that was retained from Wright’s book was the name of the male lead, Larry Knight (Guy Madison), and the basic situation of him losing the upper-class girl he loved to another man.

The film begins with Col. James Reed (Art Baker) negotiating a treaty with Native American Chief Yellowstone (Iron Eyes Cody, a real-life Native and one of Hollywood’s go-to guys just then for a sympathetic Native leader) which will set up a four-cornered reservation into which white settlers will not be permitted so the lands can remain in Native hands. One of the boundaries is the Wachupi River, which has earned the nickname “Massacre River” because so many bloody battles between whites and Natives have occurred on its banks. Chief Yellowstone, who has to speak through both white and Native interpreters because he doesn’t know English, warns Col. Reed that some of his younger, more militant braves might not honor the treaty and might continue to attack white wagon trains. Col. Reed has two adult children living on the base with him, his daughter Kitty (Cathy Downs) and his son Randy (Johnny Sands). Randy has just graduated from West Point with an officers’ commission and has been assigned to his dad’s fort. Already on the staff there are first lieutenants Larry Knight (Guy Madison) and Phil Acton (Rory Calhoun), who early on in the film get into a quite physical confrontation over which of them will be the first to take a hot bath. Remember this was at a time and place when bathing involved waiting to fill a tub by hand with boiling water (or, as here, getting a maid to do that for you), and in this film the maid warns both men that the first one who gets in the tub will be the cleaner one because he won’t have to use already dirty second-hand water. That is what they’re fighting over as they strip to long johns and have at each other in what “The Gay Aesthetic” described as “a level of chemistry between two men not seen again until Brokeback Mountain.” But the relationship between Larry and Phil soon settles into a classic Hollywood-era “bromance.” Phil grew up with the Reeds and assumed as they got older that he and Kitty would marry, but Kitty has decided she’s no longer in love with him and instead is attracted to Larry.

Larry in turn is torn between Kitty and the film’s most fascinating and complex character, Laura Jordan (Carole Matthews), who runs the local casino/saloon. Laura is a widow with a “bad” reputation, and when her husband died she was supposed to inherit his half of the business – only his partner, Burke Kimber (Steve Brodie), tries to force her out of it, including holding a gun on her and threatening to kill her if she doesn’t sell out to him on the spot. She’s saved by Larry, who opportunely shows up and shoots Kimber in the back just as he’s about to kill Laura. At one point Larry is at Laura’s establishment when a drunken Randy Reed shows up and threatens to kill Larry for dishonoring his sister Kitty with Laura. Randy gets one shot off, which wounds Larry, but Laura shoots him in the back and kills him so he can’t kill Larry. (This business of people shooting other people in the back to save the lives of third persons they’re about to murder shows up at least twice in Stevens’s script for this film.) Then Phil and Kitty both get upset with Larry, thinking that he killed Randy. Laura nurses Larry back to health after Randy’s gunshot and the two plan to run away together, but their only route out of town runs through the Indian reservation – and sure enough, the bad braves Chief Yellowstone warned the whites about early on in the movie ride out and ambush them. They’re only saved by the good Indians led by Chief Yellowstone, but in the meantime Laura has been fatally wounded and has a nice extended death scene reminiscent of Jennifer Jones’s in Duel in the Sun. In the end Phil and Kitty get together again and Larry rides off into the sunset (one of the few plot elements from Harold Bell Wright’s novel screenwriter Stevens kept).

Ironically, Massacre River practically qualifies as a film noir in Western drag, which by the late 1940’s was actually becoming a common sub-genre; already Jacques Tourneur had made Blood on the Moon with Robert Mitchum (1948), and soon to come were films like Anthony Mann’s Winchester .73 (1950) and Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952). Laura Jordan is a typical noir heroine plunked down in the middle of the West: a tough, no-nonsense woman surviving on her wits and with a cheery indifference to traditional morality. She’s not really a femme fatale but she’ll definitely do, and I suspect writer Stevens was thinking of Marlene Dietrich’s role in the 1942 The Spoilers when he created this character. Massacre River is also surprisingly well produced for a “B” Western; they went out to the familiar Universal locations at Canyon de Chelly, Arizona (where John Rawlins had previously filmed the last of the Jon Hall-Maria Montez Technicolor vehicles, Sudan) and had long strings of men on horseback riding through the countryside. Though these may have been stock shots clipped from earlier, bigger-budgeted Westerns, they are superbly integrated into the overall visual “look” of this film. Also, judging by the film’s high-contrast visuals, cinematographer Jack MacKenzie must have had a red filter on his cameras at almost all times. Massacre River is a surprisingly compelling film, with multidimensional characters instead of the all-good or all-bad figures of previous movies (another aspect in which it anticipates Winchester .73, High Noon, and the other “psychological Westerns” that became a craze in the 1950’s – though John Ford had anticipated them in his marvelous 1926 silent Three Bad Men). Charles was disappointed at the quite obvious papier-maché rocks in the setting of the final confrontation, which he found even more jarring since the film up to that point had been quite handsomely produced and free from the cheap shortcuts that marred all too many “B” Westerns of the 1940’s. But overall Massacre River is a surprisingly good movie, well worth watching; I’m glad we got the chance to see it even if, for my money, Howard Hawks’s 1948 Red River (with pretty-boy and real-life Bisexual Montgomery Clift actually out-butching John Wayne) remains the Gayest pre-Brokeback Mountain Western.

The Lemon Grove Incident (KPBS, 1985)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, January 19) KPBS celebrated the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday with a couple of unusual TV shows that made a more appropriate commemoration, at least to my mind, than the four National Basketball Association games in a row NBC was running. The first was The Lemon Grove Incident, a 1985 hour-long TV-movie actually produced by KPBS itself under the supervision of the late Gloria Penner. It dealt with a little-known backwater of San Diego County history: a lawsuit filed against the Lemon Grove school district in 1930 after the school board voted to build a separate and decidedly unequal elementary school for the schoolchildren of Mexican descent. At the time Mexican-American children were just a shade over half of the total enrollment of the Lemon Grove school district, and the all-white school board voted in secret (they held the meeting at the private home of one of the members) to set up a converted barn as a “school” for the Mexican kids. This came at a time when the Great Depression was creating a major anti-immigrant backlash and the Hoover Administration was calling for mass deportations of Mexicans and other Latinos on the ground that they were taking jobs away from deserving white Americans. (Plus ça change, plus ça même chose.) Like the Eisenhower administration’s “Operation Wetback” of 1953-54 and the Trump anti-immigrant campaign of today, the Hoover sweeps targeted anyone who looked brown or spoke English either haltingly or with an accent, without regard as to whether they were undocumented immigrants, documented immigrants, naturalized citizens, or U.S.-born citizens. Apparently the deportation campaign was also assisted by the government of Mexico (which was then under the leadership of one of the country’s most corrupt politicians, Plutarco Elías Calles), in hopes that Mexican farmworkers returning home after stints in the U.S. would have learned American agricultural techniques they could pass on to local growers.

The Mexicans in Lemon Grove had mostly settled in and around Olive Avenue and worked in the lemon and orange orchards that gave the town its name. It’s not entirely clear why the drive to segregate the Mexican students in Lemon Grove took the racist form it did, but it was pushed by the local Chamber of Commerce, whose leaders thought that the presence of a large Mexican community would interfere with their attempts to market Lemon Grove as a desirable place for white people. It was also based on the belief that the presence of Mexican kids in the classroom was harming the education of white children because the Mexicans didn’t speak English well and the teachers had to explain their lessons over and over so the predominantly Spanish-speaking children would understand them. Actually, a lot of the Mexican children were proficient in English and certainly knew it well enough to be able to learn in it (another racist stereotype that refuses to die). The Lemon Grove school board planned to do this in secret, without any advance notice to the Mexican-American parents, and present it as a fait accompli when the new school year started in January 1931. That plan was blown by the school principal, Jerome Green (played in the re-enactments by Donald Browning), who started a public survey to determine just what the Mexican parents would think of having to send their kids to a separate and decidedly unequal school. The first parent presented with Green’s survey, Juan González (played by local Mexican artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña), literally tore it up.

On January 5, 1931, Green, under orders from the school board, made the children at Lemon Grove Elementary form two lines and sent the Mexican children to the new “school,” which their parents derisively called La Caballeriza (“The Barn”). There’s one chilling scene in the film that shows the local whites were willing to use the same intimidation tactics regularly employed by white Southerners to stop civil-rights actions: a widow who’s supporting herself and her two children on county relief payments is told by a local truant officer that she will lose that income if she keeps her kids out of school. She asks, “What do you have to do with the county?” – obviously she was aware that the Lemon Grove School District and the County of San Diego were separate entities – but the man tells her, “Word gets around.” The Mexican parents, under the leadership of Gonzålez and Roberto Alvarez, sought a meeting with the Mexican consul in San Diego, who put them in touch with a local attorney named Fred Noon (John Mathers), who agreed to file a lawsuit on their behalf. The film alternates between re-enactments of the trial scenes and fresh interviews with some of the people involved, including Robert Alvarez, Jr., who (probably because of an accident of alphabetization) got to be the first plaintiff in the case. It’s a lucky thing that this film was made in 1985, when many of the original participants were still alive and available for interviews.

Amazingly, the Mexican plaintiffs in Lemon Grove actually won the case – the first time in U.S. history a lawsuit challenging segregation in education had resulted in a legal verdict against it – though at least part of the judge’s ruling is wince-inducing today. He said in his opinion that Mexicans were “of the Caucasian race” and therefore the California laws permitting the segregation of African-American, Asian-American and Native American children didn’t apply to them. A lot of people don’t realize that there was a time in the history of American racism that Mexicans and other Latinos were considered “white.” It’s how Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz were allowed to marry in 1940 despite California’s anti-miscegenation law because they were both “white.” I remember doing research in the early 1990’s on San Diego Gay rights activist Nicole Murray Ramirez in which I and my fellow researcher uncovered his birth certificate, which listed both him and his parents as “white” even though his parents had both been born in Mexico. This explained the long-standing rumor that he was appropriating a Latino identity that wasn’t his; though he actually is Latino, it’s likely a lot of people had got the idea from his birth certificate that he was “white” because that’s what it said on the form. The Lemon Grove school board decided not to appeal their loss in court, partly because the Chamber of Commerce withdrew their financial support on the ground that the suit had already damaged Lemon Grove’s reputation and it would be best for the community if they let the controversy die out. But they got their revenge against Principal Green by firing him when his teaching contract expired.

Atlanta Symphony and Ebenezer Baptist Church: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Concert (Georgia Film Commission, Georgia Public Television, filmed January 20, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Lemon Grove Incident on Monday, January 19, KPBS showed a year-old concert from Atlanta, Georgia held at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had actually been pastor. Of course the current campus of Ebenezer Baptist is far newer, more modern, and more elaborate than the one at which Dr. King ministered! The concert was co-sponsored by Ebenezer Baptist and the Atlanta Symphony and took place on January 20, 2025 – ironically the day at which slimeball racist Donald J. Trump returned to the Presidency as well as the official date of the 2025 King Day holiday. The concert was led by a highly energetic Black conductor, Jonathan Taylor Rush, and began with an O.K. performance of the so-called “Negro National Anthem,” J. Rosamond Johnson’s “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” It’s long irritated he that this lame piece of music has somehow become the African-American go-to song instead of a work by Duke Ellington, one of Black America’s true musical geniuses, but we seem to be stuck with it. The version was performed by the Atlanta Symphony and a mixed-race choir blended from the Atlanta Symphony’s and Ebenezer Church’s own ones. Then came brief speeches from Raphael Warnock, who in addition to being a U.S. Senator from Georgia is also the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist and therefore has Dr. King’s old job; and the orchestra’s (white, female) executive director, Jennifer Barlamont. After that came a quite remarkable sequence of compositions by young African-Americans, two of whom, Joel Thompson and Carlos Simon, were interviewed on screen. Thompson said that he’d originally been asked to set Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech to music, but he’d decided that the speech was already so “musical” he’d have nothing to add to it. Instead, he composed a tone poem called An Act of Resistance which summed up Dr. King’s life’s work and message in purely instrumental terms.

Carlos Simon’s piece was “Lively,” the first movement of a suite he calls Amen! He said the work was inspired by his own childhood in the Pentecostal Church, where his father was a minister and his mother a trombone player. Accordingly he scored the work for three trombones plus orchestra, much the way Duke Ellington had written a hot trombone solo for Lawrence Brown in his song “Goin’ Up” from the 1943 musical film Cabin in the Sky. Simon used the three trombones much the way Ellington had used Brown: to represent a Black minister preaching an ecstatic sermon. During his interview Simon wore a shirt that read, “You Must Be Born Again” – a slogan that’s become associated with a far different sort of Christianity than Dr. King’s. Then came Gregory Porter, who in the online sources for the concert is listed as a jazz singer. He’s considerably more than that: he’s basically a dramatic performer whose music mixes classical, jazz, soul, and rap. Porter’s two pieces on the program, “1960-What?” and “Take Me to the Alley,” celebrated the explosion of the civil-rights movement on white America’s consciousness and King’s Jesus-like instinct to reach out precisely to the poorest and most marginalized people in the community. There was a bit of geographic confusion in “1960-What?,” since the song referenced Dr. King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, but Porter also drew on John Lee Hooker’s famous blues ballad “Motor City Burning” and thus located at least part of his song in Detroit. After another brief speech, this one by Ebenezer Baptist’s minister of music, Patrice Turner, the concert continued with two movements of a suite by Margaret Bonds called The Montgomery Variations, after the 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama that lasted over a year and sparked Dr. King’s emergence as a major civil-rights leader nationwide. Like Carlos Simon’s piece, Margaret Bonds’s was good enough to make me want to hear the whole work sometime (record companies, are you listening?). Then there was a piece by Scott O. Cumberbatch called “Praise the Lord.”

Afterwards gospel singer Tamika Patton came out for a version of Thomas A. Dorsey’s classic “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” which was Dr. King’s favorite song: Mahalia Jackson (who’d been instrumental in Dr. King’s most famous speech; at the 1963 March on Washington he’d been in the middle of a long, ponderous oration on the history of Southern racism and Mahalla hollered in his ear, “Give ’em the dream, Martin! Give ’em the dream!”) sang it at King’s funeral in 1968 and Aretha Franklin sang it at Mahalia Jackson’s funeral in 1972. Oddly, Patton sped up the tempo in mid-song for a gospel-rock version before slowing it down again, though when she was singing at Dorsey’s original tempo her version approached the eloquence of Mahalia’s and Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s. The next song was Alma Basel Androzzo’s “If I Can Help Somebody,” also known as “My Living Shall Not Be in Vain,” sung by Timothy Miller. Miller was officially listed as a tenor but his voice sounded more like a baritone, or even a bass-baritone, to me, and I thought it had the plangent power of the great 1930’s and 1940’s Black ballad singers like Paul Robeson and Jules Bledsoe. After that came the one misfire of the night: a rather nondescript gospel song by Kurt Carr called “For Every Mountain” that the church’s music director, Patrice Turner, made the mistake of singing herself. She started at the piano but gradually stood up and furiously went into full-blown belt mode on the song, launching high notes like heat-seeking missiles but only rarely on a recognizable pitch. I found myself thinking, “This is what Ethel Merman would have sounded like if she’d been Black.” Fortunately the concert closed with a chorus-and-orchestra arrangement of “We Shall Overcome,” arranged by Uree Brown; it took a while for the melody to emerge from Brown’s rich orchestral textures, but soon enough the choir joined in and luckily the tech people had enough skill the singers’ rendition of the familiar melody rose over Brown’s dense orchestral textures. A number of pieces ended rather abruptly because the producers were rather over-aware of audience applause and tried to edit it out crudely. But overall I was quite impressed by the concert and particularly liked the big orchestral works; indeed, I hope recordings get made of the entire multi-movement pieces Amen! and The Montgomery Variations.

The Love Light (Mary Pickford Corporation, United Artists, 1920, released 1921)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, January 18) my husband Charles and I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies’s “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart (an African-American woman whose presence on TCM is welcome proof that you don’t have to be either white or male to be a film geek), called The Love Light. It was filmed in 1920, though not released until 1921, and was a co-production between two powerful and influential Hollywood women: Mary Pickford, producer and star; and Frances Marion, director and writer. Charles and I had watched it together before off a videotape I’d recorded from TCM when the film was in an earlier stage of restoration: the current print runs about 100 minutes (the previous restoration was 89) and was pieced together from a partially decomposed print in the U.S. and another print preserved in Europe. (Silent films were frequently shot in duplicate: one negative for the U.S. and one for Europe and the rest of the world. Also, the European versions contained just one frame of each intertitle so the English titles could easily be removed and replaced with titles in the language of the country where that version was to be released.) Pickford and Marion were such good friends that when they both got married in 1920 – Pickford to Douglas Fairbanks and Marion to actor Fred Thomson – they honeymooned together in Italy, where Pickford and Marion heard a true-life story which became the basis for this film. The Love Light is set just before, during, and just after World War I (or “The Great War,” as it was usually called before there was a World War II) and it begins as a bucolic, pastoral comedy set in a small village on the Italian coastline just before the war begins. Angela Carlotti (Mary Pickford) is a farm girl and keeper of the local lighthouse who lives with her parents and two brothers, Antonio (Jean De Briac) and Mario (Eddie Phillips). Angelo is a hard worker; Mario is a cut-up who in one of the film’s most remarkable scenes is such a contortionist he’s able literally to wrap himself around a chair. There are some quite good, charming scenes as well as some gags that suggest Mary Pickford was, in her subtle way, potentially one of the screen’s great comediennes.

There are also scenes with a local couple, Pietro (Alberto Pisco) and Maria (Evelyn Duomo), whom Angela adopts as role models for the sort of happiness she hopes to have some day with a man. And there’s a man named Giovanni (Raymond Bloomer) who has an unrequited crush on Angela and literally serenades her from afar. (It’s a testament to Frances Marion’s skill as a filmmaker that we get the point without sound.) Then the war starts and Antonio, Mario, Giovanni, and Pietro all set off to fight. Angela rescues a fleeing man named Joseph (Fred Thomson) who passes himself off as an American who got left behind when his ship set off to sea again after a particularly rambunctious leave in Genoa. (Remember that in World War I, unlike World War II, the U.S. and Italy were on the same side.) Angela is working as a lighthouse keeper, and Joseph, who has married her secretly (the local priest, Father Lorenzo – played by a quite distinguished-looking elderly actor regrettably unidentified on imdb.com – officiates the ceremony and is the only person in the town besides Angela and Joseph who know it’s taken place), implores her to demonstrate her love by flashing a signal from the lighthouse at midnight using Morse code for the letters “I LOVE YOU.” What neither she nor we know quite yet is that Joseph isn’t an American, but a German, and the real reason he wanted Angela to flash the lighthouse signal was to let a German submarine know that an Italian ship carrying wounded soldiers was about to dock nearby so they could sink it. Already Angela was reeling from the death of her brother Antonio in combat, and she really freaks out when she realizes that her brother Mario was on the troop ship the Germans sank, thanks to her signal, so in effect she’s responsible for his death. The townspeople chase Joseph and he falls to his death off a cliff, but Angela soon learns that she is pregnant with Joseph’s child.

The shock of her responsibility for Mario’s death sends her spiraling into a nervous breakdown, though the routine of caring for her baby, a daughter, gradually brings her back to sanity. The next complication arises when Maria, already grieving from the death of Pietro in combat, loses the baby son they had together. Maria hatches a plot to grab Angela’s baby by persuading the nuns who seem to run the village’s whole health care system that Angela’s too crazy to be entrusted with a child, so they should take the baby away from her and give it to Maria. Maria’s sufficiently off the deep end herself that she treats the baby as if it were her long-lost son and doesn’t seem to notice the gender difference. When Angela comes home and notices her baby gone, she starts putting two and two together. Maria is so determined to keep Angela’s baby that she and Tony (Georges Regas, just about the only person in this film besides Pickford who lasted into the sound era, albeit mostly as a character villain) plot an escape to Genoa, only they sail into a huge storm which acts as a deus ex machina. Ultimately their boat is shipwrecked, and Angela literally burns down her own house because the lighthouse fails on the precise night it’s most needed as a beacon. Tony and Maria are both killed in the shipwreck, but the baby survives and Angela stages an heroic rescue of her daughter. The film ends with yet another deus ex machina in the form of Angela’s old friend Giovanni (ya remember Giovanni?) turns up, alive but blinded from the war. Giovanni declares his love for Angela, who tells him that she will be his eyes from then on, and this weirdly co-dependent relationship is what passes for a happy ending.

The Love Light got mixed reviews at the time; a print ad in the Urbana Daily Democrat called the film “a thing so exquisite, so rich in detail, so full of human pathos and lovely comedy, that we do not hesitate to recommend it to our patrons as the greatest success in Miss Pickford’s remarkable career.” A more objective reviewer, Burns Mantle, wrote in Photoplay, “The Love Light is a poor picture in the sense of being quite unworthy of the star's talents. The story is developed without reasonable logic and filmed with only the value of the pictures in mind. The Love Light's one value to my mind is that it takes the nation's sweetheart out of curls and short frocks and makes a woman of her.” That last was a sore point with Mary Pickford, who when The Love Light was made was 28 years old and was getting royally tired of playing children on screen. In 1925 she desperately published an appeal in a movie magazine asking her fans what roles she should play from then on, and got exactly the opposite response from the one she was hoping for. One woman fan even wrote in and said something along the lines of, “It gives me great pleasure to see you portraying a child even though I know you are an adult woman.” When Charles and I first saw The Love Light in an earlier stage of the film’s restoration, my reaction was that if I hadn’t known that the director and the writer were the same person, I would have given the director credit for taming the unreasonable melodramatics of the script. This time around I liked the film considerably better; it could be used as a model for three-act structure by teachers of courses for aspiring screenwriters, and its understated but unmistakable anti-war message is communicated powerfully. This was a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans were convinced that our entry into World War I had been a mistake foisted on us by British propaganda, and films like The Love Light (even though it was a box-office disappointment on its initial release and Frances Marion got to make only two more films as director, though she’d be strongly in demand as a writer and would win back-to-back Academy Awards for screenwriting for The Big House, 1930; and The Champ, 1931) make it clear the source behind the isolationism that gripped so much of the American population it bedeviled President Franklin Roosevelt between 1939 and 1941, as he saw the imminent threat from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan but was at his wit’s end trying to figure out how to drag a recalcitrant America into the next world war.

I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story (Amazon MGM Studios, Carmel Media Capital, JarCo Entertainment, MGM Television, Safier Entertainment, Lifetime, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, January 17) I watched a couple of movies on Lifetime that were both at least ostensibly based on true stories: I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story and I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco. I remember both of those stories as tabloid fodder (and, in the case of Courtney Stodden’s, Internet fodder as well) when they happened but didn’t go overboard on either of them. I had expected the movie about Courtney Stodden (Holly J. Barrett) – an aspiring singer, model, and actress who at 16 fell in love with and ultimately married a 51-year-old actor named Doug Hutchison (Doug Savant) – to be the more interesting of the two, but it was less so, despite good work from director D’Angela Proctor (a Black woman whom imdb.com describes as “a rare entertainment professional that can easily transition between both the creative and business sides of media”), writer Kim Barker, and a generally good cast of whom Maggie Lawson as Courtney’s mother Krista stood out. I also made the mistake of looking up both Courtney Stodden and Mary Jo Buttafuoco on Wikipedia and finding out details about both their stories, especially Courtney’s, that would have made more interesting movies than the ones we got. I was struck by the fact that Courtney Stodden was referred to as “they” and “them” on her Wikipedia page, which was explained thusly in a footnote: “Stodden uses both she/her and they/them pronouns. This article uses they/them for consistency.” Courtney Stodden identifies as Bisexual and also as gender non-binary, aspects of her life I wish had been depicted in the film. But with herself as narrator and her current husband, producer and director Jared Safier, listed as one of the producers, I could see why they didn’t go to those places in her life even if Lifetime would have been willing to take the plunge, which they probably weren’t. The film that actually did get made remodeled Courtney Stodden’s story into a cautionary tale addressed to teenage girls to be wary of predatory older men.

Courtney Stodden was born in Tacoma but when she was still a child the family moved to Ocean Shores, Washington. Courtney was bullied at school by fellow students jealous of her beauty – she matured early, at least physically – and her mom Krista got her into modeling and entered her in beauty pageants to the distaste of Alex Stodden (Drew Waters), her dad. At age 16 Courtney was tired of being dragged by her mother from one beauty pageant to another, and she was easy prey for Doug Hutchison, who lived in L.A. and offered acting classes. Doug zeroed in on Courtney and they e-mailed each other regularly, with Doug inviting Courtney to visit him in L.A. and Krista resisting letting her daughter go that far from home alone. The two differ on just who contacted whom first – Courtney insists that Doug e-mailed her first while Doug says Courtney reached out to him, with her mother’s advance approval – but eventually Courtney went to L.A. with Krista. Their first meeting was a jolt because he looked much older than he had online; Doug had played the old trick of using a decades-old head shot on his online profile to make himself look younger than he was. Doug also claimed to have a lot of contacts in both the music and movie businesses which he could use on behalf of Courtney to help her career, but instead of actually using them (if they even existed, which with scumbags like this is always a question), he got super-jealous, insisted that she be a stay-at-home wife, and go out only when he told her to. What’s more, the scandalous publicity surrounding the May-December marriage, the paparazzi that effectively assaulted them (one of the cleverest aspects of D’Angela Proctor’s direction is the way she depicts the paparazzi as swarms of human locusts descending on Our Heroine), and the hostility engendered by Doug wedding his “Star Girl,” as he rather creepily nicknamed her, kills what was left of his career stone dead. Doug also pressures Courtney to fire her mother Krista as her manager and let him do it instead – though Courtney’s entertainment career is nil at that point.

When Doug gets Courtney pregnant he’s sure this is a comeback ticket for them; he contracts with a “reality” TV producer to do a show about the impending pregnancy, the birth and the first years of the new child’s life. But when Courtney has a miscarriage, the deal is suddenly canceled. Courtney is shown over-indulging on both alcohol and pills to handle the strains of the marriage (there’s a great scene in which she drinks champagne out of the bottle to cope with the wedding night, and a grim post-mortem in which she’s glad to see blood on the sheets as proof she was a virgin until her first night with Doug – both Courtney and her parents were committed Christians who regarded premarital sex as a horrible sin). Doug and Courtney officially separate, but she keeps living in a guest house on his property until, bereft of any current income, they’re forced to give up the house and move to an apartment. Inexplicably (and Courtney admits as much in her voice-over narration, delivered by the real Courtney Stodden as she is today and depicted in cut-in scenes that give this movie the air of an audio-visual instruction film for high schools) they remarry on their fifth anniversary before finally breaking up for good in 2020. Stodden announced her engagement to entrepreneur Chris Sheng in 2021 but they broke up in 2023, and she married her current husband, Jared Safier, in 2024.

She’s also pursued her music career, both under her real name and as “Ember.” I was curious to hear her sing and see if she’s any good or not, so I found a YouTube post of “Pleasure” at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4qdcdDzJEY&list=RDC4qdcdDzJEY&start_radio=1. The video presents her as a stereotypical “bad girl” with a lot of men around her, including a long-haired, bearded, scruffy biker type whom she chains to a gas-station pump in an engaging bit of BDSM fantasizing. Her voice? Oh, it’s the standard-issue dance-diva coo that’s become a major music template since Madonna hit it big in the 1980’s, not great but serviceable for that sort of song. Her biggest affection in the video is reserved for the animal she’s holding, reflecting her status as an animal-rights vegetarian, another counter-cultural aspect of her real life that wasn’t depicted in the Lifetime movie and should have been. I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story comes off as a standard-issue morality play – the lesson is, “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be victims of sexual predators” – but it could have been so much more, and I for one would have liked to see it told from both Courtney’s and Doug’s points of view, Rashomon-style.

I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco (Studio TF1 America, CMW Valley Productions, Champlain Media, Lifetime, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The second movie I watched on Lifetime January 17, I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco, was actually better than I Was a Child Bride: The Courtney Stodden Story, mainly because its director, Heather Hawthorn Doyle (a white Canadian woman described on imdb.com as someone who “has made a name for herself as being a strong story-based director who brings her passion for creating beautiful visuals and grounded performances to every project”), and writer, Gregg McBride (who after I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco made his major-studio feature-film debut with a horror movie called Six Till Midnight), were far more alive to the moral complexities of their story than their opposite numbers on the Courtney Stodden film. Like Courtney Stodden, Mary Jo Buttafuoco appears on screen in interview segments narrating the story, and she’s far less attractively photographed (by Diego Lozano) than Stodden was, but the very hard-edged plainness with which her scenes were shot underscores both the lingering physical damage she’s had to live with from “The Incident” (as it’s darkly referred to in McBride’s script) and the psychological destruction it wreaked on her. Mary Joe Buttafuoco (Chloe Lanier), nèe Connery, was a high-school student when she met and fell for Joey Buttafuoco (Dillon Casey). She was attracted by his boyish charm, but unfortunately he never grew up – in the script it’s called “Peter Pan Syndrome” – and didn’t see any particular reason why just being married shouldn’t stop him from staying out all hours of the night, drinking, partying, and womanizing. Eventually he ends up having an affair with Amy Fisher (Maddy Hillis), a 16-year-old who got nicknamed the “Long Island Lolita” (all this happens in the Long Island village of Massapequa, a souvenir of the weird part of American history where we were simultaneously massacring the Native Americans and appropriating their place names) and comes off here like a classic film noir femme fatale.

Amy is constantly crashing her car and bringing it into Joey’s auto body shop for repair, and on one visit she makes a brazen sexual come-on which he instantly falls for. Joey can’t do anything about Amy because her well-to-do dad is a major customer at the shop, but Amy wants to marry him and Joey keeps telling her that he’s already married and isn’t interested in divorcing his wife for her. So Amy decides that she’ll just have to kill Mary Jo so she and Joey can be together at long last. At first she recruits a drop-dead gorgeous young man named Steven Sleeman (Indy Lesage), a waiter at a diner she frequents, offering him the promise of sex if he’ll use his rifle and knock off the inconvenient Mary Jo. Amy shows up at the Buttafuoco home with Steven, rifle in hand, waiting outside, but he either can’t or won’t get a clear shot at Mary Jo without potentially hitting Amy as well. Ultimately he tells Amy he’s not cut out for murder, and Amy coldly brushes him off, saying that by refusing to kill on her demand he’s forfeited any possibility of getting to have sex with her. The next henchman she recruits is Peter Guagenti (who’s depicted in the film but not listed on imdb.com) because he has a gun he’s willing to sell her and she’s already decided to murder Mary Jo herself. She comes to Mary Jo’s home on May 19, 1992, posing as a fictitious older sister named “Anne Marie,” and shoots Mary Jo in the face. Fortunately for Mary Jo, the bullet lodges in her jaw, permanently paralyzing one side of her face and costing her the ability to smile as well as rendering her partially deaf, but luckily still alive – though she suffers so much pain and has to undergo so many surgeries one could readily understand why she might have wished she’d just died.

Weirdly, Mary Jo refuses to believe that her husband had a sexual affair with Amy Fisher – indeed, it took her so long to realize he’d gone extra-relational on her that she titled her autobiography Getting It Through My Thick Skull: Why I Stayed, What I Learned, and What Millions of People Involved with Sociopaths Need to Know – until he takes a vacation to Los Angeles and is arrested for solicitation while he’s out there. Like Courtney Stodden, she becomes both an alcoholic and a pill addict to dull the pain, both physical and psychological, of her existence. One of the most powerful and moving subplots of this movie is the presence of her and Joey’s two children, Paul and Jessica. (Alas, the imdb.com page on the film doesn’t list the actors who play Paul, either as a child or an adult, and lists only Amara Sanoy as playing the adult Jessica.) The surprising growth of her children into reasonably sane adulthoods – it’s eventually revealed that Paul is maintaining a “guarded” relationship with his father while Jessica has cut ties with him completely – gives us a healthy subplot to contrast with the madness at the root of the story. Certainly Joey Buttafuoco reminded me a great deal of Donald Trump, especially in his unwillingness to admit to anything wrong and his blaming all his problems on other people; and when Mary Jo expressed her frustration at all the public sympathy for Amy Fisher as a fellow victim, it reminded me of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s recent statement on the killing of Renée Good by an out-of-control Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent in Minneapolis that the Trump administration is literally investigating everyone in the case (including Walz himself, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and Good’s partner Becca) except Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed her.

Ultimately, at the behest of her rehab counselor, Mary Jo forgives Amy Fisher for attempting to kill her and even testifies on her behalf at her parole hearing. (The real relations between Mary Jo Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher were considerably more fraught than that, including a series of tense segments on Entertainment Tonight and The Insider in which the two appeared together and Amy later said, “I have no sympathy for Mary Jo.”) Overall I Am Mary Jo Buttafuoco is quite powerful and well-staged drama, and one of its best aspects is how it shows that ordinary people can be trapped in the same media machine that manipulates and exploits them as celebrities are. Within a few months of the attack at least three separate TV-movies were made about the case, and there’s one scene in the film in which Mary Jo watches as one of the film crews shoots a re-enactment of the assault on her – and she collapses as she watches it. Many celebrity journalists defend their aggressive attack-dog tactics by saying that anyone who pursues a career in the public eye and seeks fame is choosing to put up with this – but this and many other tabloid-fodder stories show how readily people who never wanted fame and certainly never wanted to be physically attacked to get it end up receiving the same rough treatment as the major stars.

Death in Paradise: Season 14, episode 2 (Red Planet Pictures, BBC, Région Guadeloupe, Film Commission of Guadeloupe, aired February 26, 2025)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, January 16) I had a bit of a disaster movie-wise: I had ordered a DVD from Amazon.com of the 1955 classic French thriller Les Diaboliques, directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring Simone Signoret and Véra Clouzot as the two women in the life of a French schoolteacher; two of these people are in cahoots to murder the other, but Clouzot, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jérôme Géronimi based on a novel by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac called Celle qui n'était plus (The One Who Was No More), saved until the very last minute revealing who the murderers were and who the victim was. (Boileau and Narcejac also wrote a novel called D’Entre les Morts – From Amongst the Dead, which later became the basis for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In fact the writers deliberately created that novel with the idea of selling the screen rights to Hitchcock, and when the three met Hitchcock was amused at how skilfully they had constructed their story to pique his interest.) Alas, the DVD I’d bought of Les Diaboliques from Amazon.com was a bootleg from something called “Starry Nights Video” and it was in French with no subtitles. (Since then I’ve searched YouTube for Les Diaboliques and found both a subtitled print and one dubbed in English. Maybe later.) So my husband Charles and I gave up on it, watched YouTube videos (including Thursday night’s Jimmy Kimmel Live monologue and a Techmoan report on a new Philips-branded combination record and CD player to which he gave an awful review because for some reason the current licensee of the Philips brand name put in circuitry that shuts off the audio when the signal gets soft, even if the track is still going on), and ultimately turned the TV back on at 10 p.m. for a Death in Paradise episode.

The show was about the murder of a contestant on Island Warrior, a Survivor knock-off being filmed on the island of Saint-Marie, Honoré or whatever the fictionalized locale of this series is. (It’s actually shot on the real-life Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and the Guadeloupe film board is listed as a co-producer – which seems curious given that the show depicts the island as a hotbed of murderers. That would seem more likely to discourage than encourage tourism.) Anyway, the front-runner in the Island Warrior contest, Jonny Feldon (Simon Lennon – any relation? Not as far as I can tell from the bare-bones “biography” on imdb.com), is mysteriously stabbed in the middle of a zip-line descent. He’s visibly O.K. when he starts the descent, then he’s hidden from view by some branches, and when he comes into sight again he’s dead. This was the second episode of the 14th season and it picked up some of the story threads from its immediate predecessor, notably the decision of Detective Inspector Marvin Watson (Don Gilet) to relocate to London, which has been delayed partly because of his renewed interest in investigating the mysterious, supposedly accidental death of his mother, and also because his would-be replacement was murdered in episode 1. The latest replacement for the job of low man on the police totem pole is Sebastian Rose (Shaquille Ali-Yebuah), a thoroughly repulsive comic-relief character who proves a) that they didn’t break the mold after they made Frank McHugh and b) that they can pour black plastic into it.

Watson has signed a three-month contract to continue working on the island with Police Commissioner Selwyn Patterson (Don Warrington), who received word in the immediately preceding episode that he’s being laid off but in this one seems to be continuing without any worries. Watson and the other police – including Darlene Curtis (Ginny Holder) and Naomi Thomas (Shantol Jackson), both of whom were anxious to see Watson go and are visibly disappointed they still have to work with him – identify four suspects whose whereabouts during Jonny’s descent can’t be verified. They are the show’s obnoxious producer, Rick Mayhew (Adam James); Chaz Simons (Bhavna Limbachia), the runner-up whom Mayhew had bribed with an amount equal to the prize money to throw the contest in Jonny’s favor; Mayhew’s assistant and show runner, Lisa Bulmer (Sofia Oxenham), who claims to have invented the concept of Island Warrior in the first place and been screwed out of the royalties, and who was having an affair with Jonny during the filming; and Dale Buckingham (David Avery), the show’s cinematographer. Dale had a hopeless crush on Lisa and got flamingly jealous of Jonny when he seduced her (though Lisa maintained that she didn’t care about Jonny one way or the other but was just seeking derogatory information about the show, which she wanted to sabotage to ensure that it never aired and Mayhew therefore didn’t profit from his theft of her idea). At first he flew a camera-equipped drone into Jonny’s bedroom and video-recorded him and Lisa having sex with each other. Then, when that didn’t work to break them up, he decided [spoiler alert!] to kill Jonny with one of those insanely complicated murder methods beloved of thriller writers and just as beloved, for exactly the opposite reason, by real-life homicide detectives. (Raymond Chandler said that the real homicide detectkves he’d interviewed told him that the easiest murders to solve were the ones in which the killer had planned an elaborate mechanism to cover up the crime, and the hardest were the ones in which killer and victim had been buddy-buddies until 20 seconds or so before one killed the other.)

My husband Charles correctly guessed Dale as the murderer but missed both his method and his motive. He stabbed Jonny not with a knife but with a particularly strong sort of pin used to make the show’s costumes. The pin is made of a remarkable metal (adamantium, maybe?) that even when refined to the width of a pin can penetrate human flesh. Dale stabbed Jonny with it before the descent started, and after Jonny (who on a previous scene in the program had injured his back so severely he was on major doses of painkillers and jammed the lethal pin into himself even farther as he tied his back brace) did his fatal plunge Dale dropped a knife in front of one of the trees Jonny passed as he was going down so both his colleagues on the Island Warrior crew and the police would think the knife was the murder weapon. His motive was jealousy over Jonny for having made it with Lisa when Dale desperately wanted her but was too shy to approach her honestly. Meanwhile, DI Watson is going through the effects of his late mother (ya remember Watson’s late mother?) and discovers a reggae record of a rather funereal song she particularly liked.This suggests (at least to me) that her death might have been a suicide, since one of the reasons Watson is so sure her death wasn’t an accident (as the authorities ruled it) was that she was too experienced a sailor to go out on the ocean in a serious storm. This Death in Paradise episode was mixed; Don Gilet got a few genuinely emotional moments but I certainly could have done without Shaquille Ali-Yebuah’s so-called “comic relief.” And of course I liked the implied critique of the major amounts of artifice and deception that go into so-called “reality” TV shows! I remember when the Los Angeles Times published an article about a threatened strike of reality-show writers, and I joked that it told you all you needed to know about the basic falsity of the genre that a job called “reality-show writer” exists.

The Kate: Delbert McClinton and the Self-Made Band (Connecticut Public Television, 2019)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next show on PBS after Death in Paradise was an episode of The Kate, a music show which is much like the local Live at the Belly Up except it’s from clear over at the other end of the U.S. (the Katharine Hepburn Memorial Center in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, the Great Kate’s home town). The star was Delbert McClinton, an old-time musician who’s equally at home in blues, country, and pop-rock. The show was filmed on August 20, 2019 and featured McClinton with a mostly all-white, all-male band, though one of the horn players was a Black male trumpeter, Quentin Ware (who played much of the set with a plunger mute) and the other was a white woman, Dale Robbins, who played tenor saxophone. I was amused that her instrument’s keys were the regulation brass but the body was black, which made me suspect it was a plastic sax (though the only two plastic saxes I’ve seen photos of, played by Charlie Parker and Ornette Coleman, were both white). Born in 1940 in Lubbock, Texas (also Buddy Holly’s home town), McClinton is a major veteran who recorded his first important record in 1962, as a harmonica player on Bruce Channel’s hit “Hey, Baby.” McClinton remembered being on a British tour with Channel in 1962 in which The Beatles were one of the opening acts, and he gave John Lennon pointers on how to play blues on the harmonica. (The Beatles covered “Hey, Baby” during their club dates at the Cavern in Liverpool, and years later Ringo Starr recorded it on his last truly great album, Ringo’s Rotogravure, on Atlantic in 1976, the final album on which all four Beatles contributed new songs.) Even before he hooked up with Channel, McClinton had played in a bar band called the Straitjackets who had played backup for Rice Miller (the second “Sonny Boy Williamson”), Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, and Jimmy Reed. In 1965 he formed a band variously called the Ron-Dels and Rondells with Ronnie Kelly and Billy Wade Sanders, who had a chart hit called “If You Really Want Me To, I’ll Go.”

He played this gig with the Self-Made Men, a band he formed in the late 2010’s that included, besides Ware and Robbins, guitarists Bob Britt and James Pennebaker, keyboard player Kevin McKendree (though for most of the set his electronic instrument was set to sound like an ordinary blues piano), bassist Mike Joyce and drummer Jack Bruno. McClinton has the raspy, well-worn voice typical of veteran blues singers, but that didn’t bother me because he used it with genuine power and soul. He opened with “Mr. Smith,” the lead-off track from his then-current album Tall, Dark, and Handsome, and for the second song he did a piece called “Lulu’s Back in Town.” That was also the title of a hit from the 1930’s which Nat “King” Cole covered in the 1950’s (though it was a sign of the times that he had to change the original lyric, “All my blondes and brunettes,” to “All my Harlem coquettes” because it wouldn’t have been acceptable to suggest that a Black man like Cole was dating blondes), but the one McClinton did was an original that not only was not the 1930’s song but had the opposite message. The one in the 1930’s was, “Great! At last! Lulu’s back in town!” The one in McClintock’s version was, “Oh, shit, that bitch Lulu is back again!” Then, after a couple more blues numbers, “Gotta Get It Worked On” and “Blues as Blues Can Get,” McClinton shifted to the more country-ish side of his style with “Oughta Know,” “Two More Bottles of Wine,” and “Why Me?” After that McClinton was shown in an interstitial interview segment (blessedly the makers of The Kate are sparing with these bits, doing only one per show instead of the constant interruptions we get on Live at the Belly Up with the musicians jabbering away) telling how much he loves Mexico. He has a house there and frequently goes there when he has to write songs for a new album because there he can work without the distractions that afflict him on this side of the border. Then he did a nice song in the Tex-Mex style called “Gone to Mexico.”

After that McClinton sang “Let’s Get Down Like We Used To” and a John Hiatt cover called “Have a Little Faith in Me.” McClinton’s next song was a soul cover of “Shakey Ground,” originally recorded by The Temptations in 1975 (and co-written by Eddle Hazel, who also played guitar on The Temptations’ recording and later was in George Clinton’s Parliament/Funkadelic crew: Clinton’s two bands recorded for different labels but were the same people except Parliament had a horn section and Funkadelic didn’t). McClinton closed his show with “Givin’ It Up for Your Love” and a relatively quiet lament called “Every Time I Roll the Dice.” McClinton’s music, which he called “rock ‘n’ roll for adults,” is first-rate and a lot of fun, and I noticed that he did 13 songs. I’ve noted writing about Live at the Belly Up episodes that you can tell a lot about a band by the number of songs they get into the one-hour time slot – particularly whether they’re a tight, relatively disciplined pop act or do a lot of jamming, which means they play fewer but longer songs in the slot. At 13 songs, McClinton’s set list was towards the more disciplined end – a bit surprising for a blues band – though he did do some loose things along the way, especially with his two lead guitar players. McClinton doesn’t play any instrument besides harmonica, but he doesn’t have to; his chops on the mouth organ are still quite good. Overall this was a fun presentation and a worthy way for my husband Charles and I to send off our evening!

Law and Order: "Dream On" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 15, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 15), when I got home from the Bears San Diego dinner party, I settled in to watch the Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit episodes. I missed the first 10 minutes of the Law and Order show, “Dream On,” but what I saw was a quite compelling tale of an aspiring pop singer, Zina Worth (Lana Love), who was living with Leo Brady (Alex Neustaedter, a quite compelling young actor who has the James Dean stare down pat), son of one of the series “regulars,” squadron commander Lt. Jessica Brady (Maura Tierney). By the time I picked up the show Zina was already dead, so I don’t know whether they gave her a number to perform so we could see how good she was or not. Zina and Leo had been together long enough to have an eight-year-old daughter – unless we were supposed to believe the girl was Zina’s daughter by a previous partner, which is certainly conceivable. But their relationship got sidetracked when Zina met Sean Chase (Ryan Broussard), an African-American drug dealer and aspiring music mogul who offered to produce an album for Zina. Alas, Sean got her back on drugs after both she and Leo had successfully rehabbed, and Leo’s concern for her mixed with his jealousy over whether Zina was having extra-relational activity with Sean (I can’t help but wonder if the writers deliberately named the Black villain after Sean Combs, a.k.a. Puff Daddy, a.k.a. P. Diddy, a.k.a. Diddy), which she probably was since his defense as to how her blood got under his fingernails was they were having rough sex and he scratched her until she bled out a minor amount. Leo is desperate not only to avoid being convicted of Zina’s murder, which he swears he didn’t do, but to be allowed to keep custody of Zina’s daughter instead of having to relinquish her to Zina’s sister Izzy (Delaney Anne Cuthbert), who wants to raise her. There’s a brief red herring, a long-time stalker named Danny Cole (the quite cute Harrison Bryan) who’d been going to all Zina’s performances but left the last one she ever gave, on the night she was murdered, for reasons that remain unclear.

The police zero in on Sean as Zina’s killer even though the evidence against him is virtually all circumstantial. There’s one eyewitness, a Black woman, but she only saw the killer from far away while he was running away from her. His motive was that she supposedly stole a kilo of cocaine from him, and there’s video surveillance footage of her walking out of his apartment with a white satchel that later turned up in her and Leo’s apartment and contained the coke, but there’s the nagging question of what she would have done with it. Use it all herself? Possible but highly unlikely. Try to sell it? Hard to believe she could without the sort of infrastructure a professional dealer like Sean would have. Sean Chase’s attorney goes to the max presenting the idea that Leo actually killed his girlfriend and the police are covering for him because he’s the son of a police lieutenant. Leo insists at first that the night Zina was killed he was at home alone with the daughter all night, but eventually his mom discovers that for two hours, from 10 p.m. to midnight, he was relapsing at a bar called Lucky’s (an ironic name) while the eight-year-old was left home alone. In the end Sean is duly convicted, but there’s a bittersweet tag; Leo pleads with his mom to testify for him in the custody hearing over the daughter, but mom refuses and flatly tells Leo he’s not ready to be a father and the girl would be much better off being raised by her aunt Izzy and Izzy’s husband, decent people without histories of alcohol or drug abuse. I’d really like to see more of Alex Neustaedter; he made his screen debut in a short called Railroad Ties in 2009 and had his breakthrough role in Meg Ryan’s directorial debut, Ithaca, as a 14-year-old telegraph operator in 1942 who comes of age in a hurry since his older brother is off fighting in World War II. Here he turns in a tough, no-nonsense performance as a legitimately complex character, and Maura Tierney and he had previously played mother and son in an Amazon Prime TV miniseries called American Rust that might well be worth looking up.

Law and Order: Special Victims Unit: "Fidelis Ad Mortem" (Dick Wolf Entertainment, Universal Television, NBC-TV, aired January 15, 2026

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, January 15), after I watched the “Dream On” episode of the flagship Law and Order show, I caught a surprisingly dark episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit called “Fidelis Ad Mortem” (“Faithful Unto Death”) that begins with three teenagers going retro with physical music media. They’ve bought an old cassette boombox and a supply of tapes for it at a thrift store, and one of them, with no labeling other than “#56,” has about 40 remaining seconds of a confrontation between a younger woman and a much older man in which the woman literally pleads for her life and the man is heard making the typical sounds of sexual assault. Fortunately one of the three kids who discovered the tape is Gabe Curry (Jay Mack), teenage son of Special Victims Unit Detective Renée Curry (Aimé Donna Kelly, who quite frankly didn’t look old enough to me to have a teenage son), who brings the tape to his mom. Mom in turn gives it to SVU Captain Olivia Benson (Mariska Hargitay), and she has it digitally enhanced by the New York Police Department’s crime lab. The cops trace the tape to a building that is about to be demolished in a redevelopment scheme, but before the building is torn down the police find a skeleton behind one of the walls. There are actually two people’s bones in there, and one of them (the main one and the one they can identify) is of a young Black woman named Tyresia Davis whose father Jaden (Donald Paul) and daughter Tiffany (Cecelia Ann Burt) have understandably felt stonewalled because the NYPD took reports when Tyresia disappeared 27 years earlier but did nothing to find her. Then the police interview Tyresia’s former boyfriend, Miles Gibbs (Ski Carr), who’s in prison serving a long stretch for having been an enforcer for a drug cartel. Miles is at first unremittingly hostile towards the police, and later we learn why: in addition to two rival drug gangs, each with their own enforcement mechanisms, there was a third one that was composed of corrupt cops.

The bad police were ostensibly working in drug enforcement but in fact were short-weighting the drugs they turned in on raids and using their own connections to market the rest and make far more money than the city was paying them to be cops. They had initially cultivated Tyresia as a confidential informant, but then they decided that she was getting to be too much trouble because she, a young woman genuinely concerned about the effects of drugs on her African-American community, might turn on them and rat them out to their bosses. Among the corrupt police officers is a Black retired detective named Thomas Ahern (Chi McBride) who used his drug money to buy himself a yacht and other trappings of the good life. Eventually, though, he realizes the game is up and turns state’s evidence to implicate the real ringleader of the crooked-cops’ gang, Leo Eikmeier (Nick Sandow). It turns out Eikmeier is an investigator with the district attorney’s office, which causes district attorney Nicholas Baxter (Tony Goldwyn) and the prosecutor actually assigned to Manhattan SVU, Dominick Carisi, Jr. (Peter Scanavino), briefly to consider whether they need to ask the governor to appoint a special prosecutor to take the case off their hands. Ultimately they decide not to, and Carisi takes the case to court and wins convictions. But they also trigger a crisis of conscience in SVU’s newest detective, Jake Griffin (Corey Cott), who’d grown up believing his father, also a police officer, was honest. Like Elliott Stabler (Christopher Meloni) in the later stages of Law and Order: Organized Crime, young Griffin has to come to terms with the idea that his dad, whose example led him to make the police his career, was just as corrupt as the rest of the crooks on the force – though the episode ends ambiguously with Griffin getting an answer from his mother, who assures him that his late father was honest. I liked the coincidence that the January 15 episodes of both Law and Order and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit dealt with police officers’ children and their chancy, to say the least, relationships with their cop parents.

Midsomer Murders: "Book of the Dead" (Bentley Productions, all3 Media, ITV Channel 4, American Public Television, aired December 11, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Law and Order: Special Victims Unit on January 15 I initially turned to CBS in hopes that they were doing another rerun of Elsbeth, a police procedural that’s become a particular favorite of mine even though it’s basically just the old Columbo with a woman playing Peter Falk’s role of the police consultant who basically annoys the murderer into confessing. Instead they were showing another Matlock instead, so I switched to PBS in time to catch an unusually well plotted and structured episode of the British police procedural Midsomer Murders. It was called “Book of the Dead” and it deals with the antics of Bertram Jewel (Jon Culshaw – ironically also the name, though he spelled it “John Culshaw,” of the British Decca record producer who supervised the first complete studio recording of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen). Ten years earlier, Jewel published a sensationally successful picture book called Seeker, which contained a series of elaborate drawings, paintings, and text which allegedly would lead someone to find a hidden treasure if they could solve all the puzzles contained therein. Jewel comes to Midsomer County (a fictional locale in central England) to promote the 10th anniversary edition of his book, which will contain a new page that will supposedly reveal a new clue as to the locale of his treasure. Only when he holds forth for a book event at the local church, pastored by Rev. Sebastian Butts (Oliver Dimsdale) – who’s white, but his wife Ava (Mina Andala) is Black, or should I say “African-British” – a woman reporter, Billie Bernard (Christina Bennington), accosts him at the event and claims that “Bertram Jewel” is really former con artist Robert Grimes, who served 15 years in prison for his fraud and had just got out when he wrote Seeker. Billie also says flat-out that there is no hidden treasure; it’s all yet another con which Bertram a.k.a. Robert pulled on his unsuspecting readers.

Among his most fanatical devotees are Rev. Butts’s mother Venetia (Selina Cadell), who became so insistent on finding Jewel’s treasure that she spent hundreds of thousand of pounds on detectives, psychics, and all manner of fraudsters to get supposed “evidence” on how to solve Bertram’s puzzle; Ludo Trask (Zak Ford-Williams), teenage son of Eli Trask (Shaun Dooley) and his wife Danica (Sally Lindsay), who’s filled his shack on the Trask property with various blow-ups of the pages of Seeker in hopes that by magnifying them, he can work out the clues; and even detective sergeant Jamie Winter (Nick Hendrix), who at one point in his life was so wrapped up in solving Seeker that he lost a girlfriend over it. (Smart woman!) There are amusing scenes of the devotées of Seeker poring over the clues and debating them that reminded me of the ways similarly demented fans of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings talk amongst themselves about the minutiae of the books. Anyway, Bertram Jewel, t/n Robert Grimes, gets murdered in a particularly imaginative way: he is clubbed from behind and buried in a pit from which his head is sticking out. Then his killer puts a glass globe over his head and holds it there until he expires from suffocation. Apparently this is supposed to be a living recreation of one of the images in Seeker. Later the same killer murders both Venetia Butts and her son, staging Venetia’s body to duplicate one of the images in the original Seeker and Sebastian’s after the new page, which exists only in one copy plus a black-and-white reconstruction from memory Ludo Trask drew at Venetia’s insistence even though he only saw the image briefly when Jewel gave him a quick glimpse of it.

There’s also a subplot concerning two African-British owners of a local pub, Joel Myhill (Rhashan Stone) and his daughter Scarlett (Felixe Forde), who run a regular (though writer Jeff Povey doesn’t tell us how regular) trivia contest in their bar in honor of Joel’s late wife, who it turns out was killed by Bertram’s old con. Bertram t/n Robert was producing fake gas gauges that were supposed to show if you had a gas leak, only they didn’t work at all. The Myhills bought one of the fake gas gauges and then had a real gas leak; Joel and Scarlett were fortuitously out then but Joel’s wife was killed in the resulting house fire, and he’s never forgiven Bertram for it. In the end the killer turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Eli Trask, Ludo’s father and contractor for the reconstruction of Rev. Butts’s church. Though Bertram as “Robert” was the only one prosecuted for the fake gas-gauge fraud, Eli was actually his accomplice and manufactured the phony gauges. Bertram blackmailed Eli into allowing him to live in the Trasks’ home while he was in the area, and Eli killed him and the others because he was seeing his son Ludo wasting a huge amount of time and money searching for the “treasure” that didn’t really exist – though, at one point, Bertram produced an incredibly ugly gold-plated statue and tried to pass it off as the treasure. Venetia found it and tried to sell it to local antiques dealer Othello Khan, only he revealed that it was manufactured only a year before and was just gold-plated instead of solid gold. This was an unusually well-constructed Midsomer Murders in which there was only one subsidiary crime (Rev. Butts’s embezzlement) besides the main murder intrigue, and it related directly to the main dramatic issue of Bertram’s history as a fraudster.

Harlan Coben's Final Twist: "Gambler's Debt" (Levels Audio, CBS-TV, aired January 14, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 14) CBS-TV ran the second episode of Harlan Coben’s quirky true-crime series, Harlan Coben’s Final Twist. The odd subtitle represents Coben’s belief that in every murder there’s a “final twist” in the mind of the killer that makes him (or her, though in the two episodes so far the killers have both been male) not only contemplate a murder but actually do it. This time the story was called “Gambler’s Debt” (though I’m glad this is one show that doesn’t give its titles at the beginnings of the episode because for this one that would have been a big-time spoiler!) and it was about the brutal slaying (she was stabbed 97 times) of Anna Mae Branson, a woman in Madisonville, Kentucky who had managed to build a single ice-cream parlor into a regional chain and accumulate a major fortune, including a string of rental properties. Branson was found dead on January 13, 2003 by police doing a wellness check on her. Suspicion initially fell on two of her business associates, a tenant who had fallen thousands of dollars behind on his rent to her and a former employee, but it turned out both had life-threatening health issues (the tenant had just had abdominal surgery and the worker had had a heart attack), and doctors insisted that they could not have committed such a brutal, forceful murder without re-injuring themselves. Next the police started looking at members of Branson’s family and zeroed in on her nephew, Russell Winstead, who on the surface seemed to be a happily married coal miner (Madisonville is in the middle of the Kentucky coal country and most of its working-age males work in the mines) with a church-going wife and two kids. Underneath that identity he was a compulsive gambler, frequently visiting the riverboat casinos in that part of Kentucky and dropping an estimated total of $1.6 million. (I know something about compulsive gambling from having had a home-care client who was a gambling addict.) Over the years Winstead had borrowed over $100,000 from Anna Mae Branson to support his gambling habit, and the day before she was killed he wrote her a check for $12,000 but told her not to cash it without his O.K. Then he went for another all-night gambling session on a riverboat casino and I’m guessing thought he make enough money to cover his check to his aunt. Instead he lost once again, and the next morning Russell went over to Anna’s place, where she confronted him about the large and growing size of his debt to her (she kept careful tabs on how much her benefactees owed her in a little red book called “Addresses”) and he apparently lost it completely and killed her.

The case wasn’t as open-and-shut as the police initially claimed, especially after Russell was polygraphed and the examiner said it was the most complete case of deception he’d ever seen, especially in all the questions in which Russell was asked if he had any knowledge of the murder, and he repeatedly said no. But there were a few holes in it: the DNA evidence from the hairs and fibers found on the crime scene were tested against Russell’s DNA and did not match. Also, the one eyewitness the police were able to find, a Black woman who had seen Russell leave his aunt’s house just after the probable time of the murder had originally said the man she saw fleeing was six feet tall, and only later, after Russell’s photo had been published in newspapers, did she retract that and name the 5’6” Russell as the man she’d seen. Russell complicated the case by fleeing to Costa Rica, which won’t extradite people who face the death penalty in their home countries, so the Kentucky authorities had to agree not to seek to execute Russell if he were convicted of Branson’s murder. Ultimately he was arrested in 2005 and brought back to the U.S., though with one of America’s typically delayed justice systems he wasn’t put on trial until 2007. In the meantime he got a fellow convict to write an anonymous letter declaring that he had killed Branson, though this man, who was in prison awaiting trial for another murder of an old woman who lived alone two years later, ultimately recanted his confession after he realized he was facing the death penalty for both murders even though Russell, insulated from a death sentence by the deal Kentucky and Costa Rica had cut to get him back, was not. Russell allegedly tried to bribe this man by offering him money to set up a trust fund for his wife and kids – unless he was making it up out of whole cloth, one wonders where Russell would have got this money. In the end, Russell was convicted in 2007 and given a life sentence, though it carried with it the possibility of parole and he could be released as early as 2030. One of the things that struck me was how genuinely physically attractive Russell Winstead seemed to be – no doubt that was how he was able to have two girlfriends on the riverboats along with his wife – and another was that Branson’s family predictably split wide open on the issue of Russell’s guilt, with the Winsteads (including Russell’s father Eric, who pleaded guilty to having helped cover for him but got no jail time) steadfastly maintaining his innocence while the non-Winstead branch of the family were equally insistent that he did it. Like the previous week’s episode, this was about a case that had already been covered by previous true-crime shows, in this case one on Oprah Winfrey’s Oxygen network in 2021 as well as at least one Web-only podcast.

83rd Annual Golden Globe Awards (Dick Clark Productions, Penske Media Group, Golden Globes, White Cherry Entertainment, aired January 11, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Sunday, January 11) I watched the CBS-TV telecast of the 83rd annual Golden Globe Awards. It was the usual lumbering beast these sorts of spectacles generally are, and there wasn’t much of the comic banter that has livened up previous years’ telecasts. The host was Nikki Glaser, repeating from the 2025 telecast after the awards weren’t televised at all in 2024. The telecast featured so many winners from “streaming” services I was tempted to joke that the real winner last night was Netflix, which is in the middle of a multi-billion dollar attempt to buy Warner Bros. Discovery that was the subject of a few jokes, notably one made by Glaser that the bidding for Warner Bros. would start at $5. Most of the movies that won were made for “streaming” services, as were virtually all the TV shows: good luck being able to watch any of this stuff if you’re a diehard like me clinging to an increasingly expensive cable TV connection and fiercely resisting the curse of “streaming.” The advent of “streaming” has wrecked all the models people of my generation (I’m 72) are used to in getting either audio or audio-visual entertainment. I’ve just read an article in The Week magazine that said filmmakers are worried about the implications of a Warners sale to Netflix because the current Netflix management is not only uninterested in but downright hostile to theatrical distribution. (A number of the movie winners pleaded with people to see their films in actual theatres, on big screens with other people in the audience, instead of waiting for them to “stream.”) “Streaming” has also almost totally destroyed the DVD market, much to my chagrin, even though I can see one good thing about it: I remember when I was trying to explain “streaming” to our (late) friend Garry Hobbs. He said he couldn’t understand why people would want to “stream” a movie instead of owning a copy they could watch anytime, and I just waved my hand at the stacks of DVD’s taking up what used to be our coffee table and said, “It’s because they don’t want their living rooms to end up looking like this!” I also find myself oddly bothered by the designation of the awards for acting as by “male actor” and “female actor.” I understand the P.C. reasons they’ve done that, and in a certain way it makes sense – after all, we no longer call a woman who writes books an “authoress” or a woman who flies planes an “aviatrix” – but I’m still old-school enough to miss the term “actress.” (Will the name of the classic 1953 film with Spencer Tracy and Ruth Gordon have to be changed from The Actress to The Female Actor?)

The Golden Globes gives out multiple Best Picture winners, including one for Drama and one for Musical or Comedy, though sometimes the lines get blurred. Chloë Zhao’s Hamnet, a slightly fact-based biopic of William Shakespeare and his marriage (for some reason Shakespeare’s wife, who in real life was named Anne Hathaway, is called “Agnes” in the movie), won Best Motion Picture (Drama), while a “streaming” movie called One Battle After Another, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, won Best Motion Picture (Musical or Comedy), and Anderson won for Best Director and also Best Writer. (Those awards don’t appear to have been bifurcated the way the Best Picture and the acting awards were between dramas and musicals or comedies.) The Best Motion Picture (Animated) award went to K-Pop Demon Hunters, which sounds absolutely ghastly to me (and it doesn’t help that it’s in that horrible, blocky computer-animated style; I really don’t like computer animation, though there’ve been a few films, like Ratatouille and Soul, where the writing and voice acting were strong enough to overcome my basic distaste for the technique). The Best Motion Picture (Non-English Language) award went to a Brazilian film called The Secret Agent (not based on the 19th century Joseph Conrad novel which Alfred Hitchcock modernized and filmed as Sabotage in 1936, but a new tale set in 1977 in which a fugitive scientist returns to his home town of Recife; though I don’t know for sure, it seems likely this is the first Non-English Language movie winner to be in Portuguese). Hamnet star Jessie Buckley also won the “Best Female Actor, Motion Picture (Drama)” award for playing “Agnes,”a.k.a. Mrs. William Shakespeare. The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura won “Best Male Actor, Motion Picture (Drama),” beating out (among other people) Michael B. Jordan as twin blues musicians in Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. (I’m willing to watch just about anything made by Ryan Coogler; I think he’s one of the most amazing filmmakers working today, and he even got me to watch Creed, his regrettable contribution to the Rocky franchise, and actually enjoy it other than having to put up with Sylvester Stallone.) Sinners did win for an odd category called “Box Office and Cinematic Achievement,” which appears to be the Globes doing what the Academy Awards briefly considered, creating an award for “Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film” until they backed off due to howls of derision from the movie community. (I’d still like to see the Academy go back to the split award they did the first year, honoring William Wellman’s Wings as “Best Production” and Friedrich Murnau’s Sunrise for “Most Artistic Quality of Production.” That way they could give awards both to nice little independent films and big blockbuster movies mass audiences actually go to see.)

The acting awards went to Timothée Chalamet (male) for Marty Supreme – in his acceptance speech he joked about having had to bulk up to play a ping-pong player – and Rose Byrne (female) for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. I’d guessed that was a film about a disabled woman, but no-o-o-o-o; it’s described on imdb.com as, “While trying to manage her own life and career, a woman on the verge of a breakdown must cope with her daughter's illness, an absent husband, a missing person, and an unusual relationship with her therapist.” The Supporting Actor performance awards went to Stellan Skarsgård (male, and father of those Skarsgårds) for a Norwegian film called Sentimental Value (though Skarsgård himself is Swedish), whose Norwegian title was Affeksjonsverdi; Skarsgård plays a father who reconciles with his two estranged daughters. The female Supporting Actor award went to Black actress (there, I used the word) Teyana Taylor for a role in One Battle After Another, and she gave the usual plaint about being glad she could finally offer movie audiences a role that looked like her. (Well, who else would she look like? I know what she meant: she felt privileged to offer movie audiences a strong African-American character.) The Best Original Song award went to “Golden” from K-POP Demon Hunters, and though she said she’d promised not to sing on the show Nikki Glaser did a quite funny parody of it. (I’d probably have liked it even better if I’d known the original.) The TV awards were less interesting to me because virtually all the shows were on “streaming” services and therefore I shall never be able to watch them; a medical show called The Pitt won for best TV series (drama), and the Hollywood spoof The Studio won for best TV series (comedy). The makers of The Studio joked about having just made an episode spoofing the Golden Globes, and now here they were accepting an award at the real ones! The award for “Best Limited Series, Anthology Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television” (whew, that was a mouthful of a category name!) went to a British mini-series called Adolescence, described on imdb.com as, “A thirteen-year-old boy, Jamie Miller, is arrested for the brutal murder of a schoolgirl. To his family this all seems like a huge mistake – surely Jamie would not do something like that? To the police the evidence is clear, but what motive could he possibly have?”

The male lead, 17-year-old Owen Cooper, won an acting award. Also awarded for Adolescence were Stephen Graham for playing Cooper’s father and Erin Doherty for playing Briony Ariston, though none of the online sources I’ve seen offer any clue as to just how she fits in with the story. Noah Wyle won the Best Male Actor in a TV Series award for The Pitt, and the Best Female Actor was Rhea Seehorn for a show called Pluribus, whose premise sounds quite interesting: “In a world overtaken by a mysterious wave of forced happiness, Carol Sturka (Rhea Seehorn), one of the immune few, must uncover what's really going on – and save humanity from its artificial bliss.” Ricky Gervais, who used to host the Golden Globes until the organizers got tired of the controversy he used to engender with his insults, won for Best Stand-Up Comedy Special even though he was the only one of the nominees who didn’t show up for the ceremony. A new award for Best Podcast (pardon me while I go barf) went to Amy Poehler for something called Good Hang. I’m actually getting bored writing about the Golden Globes, especially since the awards all went to movies I haven’t seen and probably will never get to see because the “streaming” revolution has so totally upended just about every way I once had of watching current movies and TV shows (and the closure of San Diego’s Landmark chain of art-house cinemas hasn’t helped either). One oddity about this year’s Golden Globes telecast was the weird ambiguity about just who votes on them; previous years proudly proclaimed the awards as coming from the “Hollywood Foreign Press Association,” a group whose qualifications were allegedly so loose you could get it if you’d ever published one article about movies in a newspaper or magazine outside the United States. But this year the awards voters were described far more nebulously than that and the show gave no idea as to just who decides who gets the Golden Globes.