Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris are at the center of a late-night show with a working environment so toxic that it inspires murder.
Photo: Mark Schafer/CBS
Welcome to Elsbeth season three, dear readers! Don’t worry about the funky scheduling of a Sunday season premiere; the show is returning to its usual Thursday-night slot starting this week, so you can look forward to both normalcy and a second episode and recap before you look around.
Elsbeth often explores workplaces as spaces where tensions and resentments bubble over, and it goes for a big one in the season premiere as this week’s murder victim, Scotty Bristol, is a successful late-night host/miserable human being played by outgoing host of The Late Show and national treasure Stephen Colbert. Scotty is a real prince: He’s nasty and ungracious to his staff, doesn’t bother to prepare for interviews with his guests, and torments his writers by making sure they can see and hear him shredding their joke pitches.
Eventually, Scotty’s Way Late producer Laurel — played by Colbert’s real-life friend and collaborator Amy Sedaris — has had it up to here one too many times with Scotty’s draconian control-freakishness and uses their once-upon-a-time, could’ve-been history to feign seducing him and instead gets his necktie caught in Scotty’s much-hated high-capacity office shredder. Everyone assumes it’s a terrible accident, death by strangulation misadventure, at first, but Elsbeth, even in her heavily jet-lagged state after returning home from a visit to Angus over in Scotland, notes some suspicious things at the crime scene. Scotty had left his earbuds on his desk, rather than putting them away, suggesting another person was in the room with him when he died. Also, his tie would have to have been knotted pretty tightly in order for the strangulation to happen, and why would he have been lying backward over the shredder, anyway?
Detective Smullen takes on the case, and Elsbeth is assigned Officer Hackett (Lindsay Mendez) as her minder in Kaya’s absence (sob!). Smullen wants to pin the murder on Scotty’s oft-humiliated sidekick, Mickey Muntz (Andy Richter!), but Elsbeth notes that Mickey seemed genuinely torn up about Scotty’s death, while Laurel, who is Mickey’s wife, mostly just wants to get on with their day and protect Mickey, whose heart condition was the reason she killed Scotty in the first place.
Once Officer Hackett (is her name an homage to Buddy Hackett?) manages to reassemble all of the shredded paper from Scotty’s office into its original form, the team realizes that it was a packet of joke pitches submitted on spec by would-be comedy writers, and we get a bit more of the picture of the work culture at Way Late. Scotty was a known joke stealer, and though that would seem incredibly infuriating to a regular person, Officer Hackett draws on her experiences as a part-time comedian and past victim of Scotty’s practice to assure Detective Smullen and Captain Wagner that it’s a badge of honor and significant encouragement. But maybe being mistreated and disrespected by one’s boss/former idol so many times over a period of years could drive a writer over the edge, so back to the studio they go!
The writers all have the same, easily corroborated alibi thanks to their attending both comedy sets by head writer (and likely heir to Scotty’s desk) Ronan Gaines the previous night, making the scorned-writer hypothesis a dead end. On the plus side, they explain the meaning of the name of Scotty’s shredder, Mickey II — it’s an homage to Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors and a bit of mockery of the actual, human Mickey, who, like the shredder, was made to eat crap all day long. Nothing like respect among colleagues! Fortunately, Matthew the Page is there to fill in more lore-knowledge gaps for the investigative team, including how Scotty, Laurel, and Mickey got their start in improv comedy and his own pride in being the designated shredder-emptier on staff. Matthew also confirms what every Downton Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs viewer knows: that “people will say the wildest things in front of pages.”
Elsbeth is familiar with that phenomenon, as getting people to say wild things to her is a not-insignificant part of her mystery-solving tool kit. She gets the prickly and suspicious Laurel to let her guard down by asking her for an improv lesson. Although Laurel eventually regains her cautiousness, the tactic works just enough to give Elsbeth a vital element — the principle of “yes, and” — that eventually helps her discover the truth about what happened to Scotty.
Everything Elsbeth notices about the toxic work environment at Way Late — overwork, humiliation, an unsupportive and ultracontrolling boss — is not present at the precinct, but having been away for a while, she’s seeing the place with fresh eyes, and some of what she sees is distinctly not great. Formerly free coffee now costs $1 a cup; there are no more three-by-five cards in the supply closet, and she’s on a wait list for a Sharpie. A Sharpie! This is grim. Worse, Detective Smullen is being really mean to Lieutenant Connor about it all, as he has been the one to implement these belt-tightening measures.
Smullen starts an unfortunate trend of detectives presenting Connor with their unemptied wastebaskets as if to say, “You created this problem; you deal with this,” and eventually Elsbeth has a little heart-to-heart with the captain, urging him to step in and take the blame off of Connor’s plate. It takes a minute, but Wagner does the right thing and later explains to Elsbeth that as crummy as these changes are, they’re worth it because they make it possible to keep her on staff, emphasizing that he was unwilling to even consider the alternative.
Of course, everyone is delighted to see Elsbeth back from Scotland and relishing the gifts she’s brought back with her: whiskey for Wagner, shortbread for Smullen, a very sober navy-and-green tartan scarf (with the tiniest red thread for a reserved pop of color) for Connor, who is visibly touched by the gift.
The plot is very mystery-forward, so we don’t get much plot motion for Elsbeth herself, but we do get quite a bit of table-setting exposition this week. Things may not be a bed of roses with Angus, whom she’s not even sure she should refer to as her boyfriend. She waves away Teddy’s surprise at her early arrival home, saying she needed to be in New York to support her friend Cheryl from the wellness-retreat episode, who is on a press tour for her new memoir about the four years she spent at a variety of wellness retreats. Teddy has a new job as a fact-checker at the New York View, where, as we may recall, one of the reporters was murdered with a cattle prod. Elsbeth is so proud of him and notes that she knew all about that murder because she solved it, and Gonzo was that reporter’s dog. That’s at least two callbacks to earlier episodes already! They’re not essential for new viewers but are fun “if you know, you know” moments and reinforce the feeling of the show being a fully realized world.
Alongside the callbacks to previous cases and relationships — Cameron, the hunky and kind medical examiner, appears briefly and quietly confirms to Elsbeth that Kaya has completed her training and been given her first undercover assignment, yay! — “Yes, And” pulls out all the visual stops to remind us of how exuberantly colorful Elsbeth’s world is. We’ve got four tote bags in this episode, all sheep-themed, and one of them is in the iconic black-sheep design made famous by Princess Diana way back when. We’ve also got three all-time, Hall of Fame–level costumes to enjoy, starting with a hot-pink tartan suit and coordinating tam o’shanter worn over a white blouse with exuberantly lacy cuffs and a collar-scarf that would fit right in with Austin Powers at his most outré (complimentary). I think my favorite this week is the white-and-autumnal floral suit with a single-breasted jacket and elegant flares, but the episode-closing ensemble of tropical-fruit colors — mango, star fruit, and papaya — all sort of harmonizing together is quite magnificent, too.
As the investigation continues with their suspect list narrowed down to Laurel and Mickey, Smullen is certain that Mickey killed Scotty as revenge for all of those years of routine humiliation, but Elsbeth and Officer Hackett don’t buy it. Mickey is so clearly not a boat-rocker, let alone a murderer, particularly with his serious heart condition. In fact, he’d been psyching himself up in the elevator to give Scotty an ultimatum: Approve his time off to get his health stabilized, or he’d quit. When he confides in Laurel at home later, something like regret crosses her face. Mickey’s going to get his time off now, but he could have done that without committing a murder!
Unfortunately for Mickey, he doesn’t have time to defend himself formally, because the shock and horror of deducing that Laurel killed Scotty triggers a fatal heart attack. When Elsbeth overhears Laurel “yes, and”–ing Smullen, agreeing that Mickey’s feelings of intense guilt, which he confessed to her, must have triggered his heart failure, her suspicions are confirmed. But she can’t quite crack the case until she has a flash of insight while pondering the appearance of Smullen’s trash in her office wastebasket. He put it there to prove a point, so couldn’t someone have done the same with the paper shreds in Mickey II’s bin?
Indeed, someone (Laurel) could, and that same someone (again, Laurel) did! Seeing that Matthew the Page had already emptied Mickey II’s bin, she covered her tracks by shredding a joke pitch packet in her own office and then put it in Mickey II. As ever, the what and how isn’t as interesting as the why. Scotty, Laurel, and Mickey were united by a very special and particularly strong bond thanks to the early days of their career as an improv trio, but over time, Scotty’s exploitation of that bond led to all sorts of excessive control over his collaborators. Convincing Laurel and Mickey not to have children, refusing to let Mickey take time to recover his health, his callousness and cruelty toward them — it all added up and pushed her over the edge.
As almost always, all’s well that ends well, with Matthew the Page being promoted to Mickey’s old job as Ronan takes Scotty’s chair on Way Late, and Officer Hackett decides to revisit comedy. Ronan even buys one of her jokes for $200. This business, indeed!
• I’m not sure why I’m seeing multiple Mike Myers references in this episode, but it’s not just the lacy cuffs and cravats. The cup of coffee Elsbeth pays $1 for maximizes both caffeine and humor by her use of an NYPD-branded mug that’s almost as big as her face. It reminded me instantly of the massive cappuccino Myers’s character orders in So I Married an Axe Murderer.
• Lindsay Mendez has many screen and stage credits, but I know her primarily from her role in 21 Chump Street, the funny, catchy, and heartbreaking 16-minute musical that a pre-Hamilton Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote for a live performance of This American Life. Listen at the link above, or watch on YouTube.
• I’m choosing to believe that the whimsical décor elements in Mickey and Laurel’s kitchen — two mid-century cookie jars with lids in the shapes of a bunny and a kitten and a ceramic raw chicken being used as a big spoon holder — are items that Amy Sedaris kindly loaned to the production from her own home. If anyone can confirm or correct these musings, please do let me know!
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