Review: Elsbeth, “Glamazons” | Season 3, Episode 9 / Matlock, "Call It a Christmas Gift" | Season 2, Episode 8
You really do need to be a masochist to like the Mets.
“Just remember: they may be stunning, but we can solve crimes!”
Sometimes what can be most fun and unexpected about a formulaic show like Elsbeth is when it deviates ever so mildly from that formula in subtle ways. This show’s most obvious inspiration is, of course, Columbo, which was lengthier on an episode-by-episode basis, but largely hit the same types of beats this show does. One thing both Columbo and Elsbeth have in common is that the eponymous detectives never get too worked up or angry at the killer of the week. On Columbo, in particular, Peter Falk’s sleuth often got on well with the murderer, even though he was onto them much quicker than they would like. It was rare and delightfully charged when Columbo would get bothered, as he did in one episode against Leonard Nimoy as the baddie. (“A Stitch in Crime” is the installment, and it’s on Peacock. You should watch it.)
Elsbeth Tascioni rarely gets annoyed at the killers. She’ll get bothered, perhaps, at being dismissed or perplexed, but you don’t often see her get visibly irked at how the criminal of the week is trying to weasel their way out of things. But that does happen, as much through Carrie Preston’s performance as through Bryan Goluboff’s script, in “Glamazons.” Aside from returning us to the world of New York supermodels (and naturally bringing Laura Benanti back as Nadine Clay), “Glamazons” presents Elsbeth with a fairly tough customer in the form of Tiff Giles (Jaime Pressly). Tiff has, as another character notes, a perfectly good reason to be resentful of supermodels like Nadine or like her old frenemy Madison Fortune (Nicole LaLiberte), the latter of whom staged an attack on Tiff with her now-husband TJ. Tiff wound up disfigured and sporting an eyepatch, and was so understandably traumatized by the event that she left the world of modeling and became a bartender in Pennsylvania. She nursed those wounds long enough so that when Madison comes out of the woodwork to invite Tiff for a reunion photoshoot with her fellow Glamazons, inadvertently revealing that her old alibi was bunk, Tiff goes out for revenge.
