Re: Stupid tv I'm watching Elsbeth pilot 2/29/2024 (spoilers)

On 3/5/2024 1:07 AM, anim8rfsk wrote:

shawn <nanoflower@notforg.m.a.i.l.com> wrote:

On Mon, 4 Mar 2024 09:28:16 -0700, anim8rfsk <anim8rfsk@cox.net>
wrote:
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Adam H. Kerman <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

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Starring Carrie Preston as the quirky defense counsel from The Good
Wife becomes a detective working with the police as a court-imposed
monitor to settle a lawsuit. These monitors aren't specifically assigned
to homicide in real life, but here she is on tv. She uses this as the
excuse to interfere with the investigation of the crime of the week. She's
recommended highly to Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce Hey! It's Bunk! but
not drunk) by Agent Celetano (Danny McCarthy) of the FBI in Chicago. Wagner
in turn inflicts her upon Det. Smullen (Danny Mastrogiorio) and then
assigns patrol officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) to follow her.
>
It's just one cliche after another. They aren't even hiding that it's
ripping off Columbo. In fact, there's a line of dialogue in which
Elsbeth is asked straight out why she suspects the acting professor with
no evidence; she has no idea. We see the professor commit the murder.
The current acting student he's mentoring (every night in his bedroom)
has broken up with him over the long string of students he's boinked
before and is threatening to "cancel" him by going to the Dean. But
what's the point of being a professor without the fringe benefits?
>
Like Columbo, we see the professor commit murder. He has substituted
sleeping pills for her medicine during a performance and he's counting
down on a timer; he doesn't get out early enough. Later, he sneaks the
real medicine back into her medicine bottle. They made a point of
counting out the pills, but really, he should have thrown one away. I
thought that might be a plot point but it wasn't. Then he set up an
asphyxiation by plastic bag as suicide. I guess it's possible but how do
you prevent yourself from tearing it off your head when you start
panicking and fighting to live? Anyone looking at the body would think
murder, right?

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Presumably the idea would be that she plans to put the bag on when
she's ready to fall asleep and assumes she won't pass out first.
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At one point she sticks her head into a scene sideways, ripped off from
a famous scene in The King's Speech (2010) in which Geoffrey Rush is
performing Shakespeare.

>
It was cute to me since I didn't know it was done elsewhere.
 

The clues she chases are every bit as insubstantial as they were in
Columbo, like only old people use two spaces after a period. Oh dear
gawd, yes that's how we were taught in a typing class as kids but I
stopped doing that on computers because the double space didn't look
right.

>
Yeah, I really hated how she made such a big deal out of the two
spaces. So only older people do that and no one else, but apparently
all older people do that and they do it consistently.

 I’d love to know what the age cut off is. Because those of us that double
space and do it right are pretty damn old at this point.
 

 

My age?  But I'm not that old!  :-/
I forgot all about this show.  They haven't aired an episode since the pilot.