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.