Photo: Michael Parmelee/CBS
No one likes being haunted by the past. Being invited to a reunion by mail or email is one thing — you can review the invitation and make a decision on your own timeline — but being tracked to your out-of-the-way workplace and confronted in person by a long-ago rival you’ve always suspected was involved in the assault that ended your modeling career is very much another. Such is the case for ex-supermodel Tiff Giles (Jaime Pressly), who lost an eye in a vicious attack over 25 years ago. Now working as a bartender in Chester, PA, Tiff seems very at ease pouring drinks for her regulars, and sports a jaunty eyepatch paired with a sleeveless undershirt featuring little flat metal studs around the neckline. Between the Phillies flag over the bar, which is located in the largest city in Delco, and the visual allusion to biker chic, I’m thinking this is Elsbeth’s nod to Task.
We get a lot of backstory in a typically brisk fashion, thanks to a combo pack of exposition from a voiceover by Julian Simons (Matthew Maher), who wrote the Dress Up magazine cover story on Tiff and a trio of fellow supermodels he dubbed the Glamazons, and from the guarded conversation between Tiff and Madison Fortune. It seems that they were best frenemies way back in 2000, when they shot the iconic Dress Up cover, and who knows what might have been, had Tiff not lost half of her vision and all of her confidence in the still-unsolved attack.
Tiff is not remotely interested in the anniversary re-creation of the vintage photoshoot until Madison offers a clunky apology for what Tiff has suffered, and then makes a soon-to-be-fatal mistake by mixing up details of her alibi. Tiff has long suspected that Madison and her husband, TJ (Josh Casaubon), were behind it, but the NYPD never arrested anyone for the crime. This changes everything, and the anniversary photoshoot featuring all four glamazons (including Laura Benanti as Nadine Clay, and a lovely Black model who had no character name or lines in the screener edit I saw before air) goes off without a hitch.
Tiff’s plan goes smoothly, too; she pilfers TJ’s wine glass when he puts it down to kick Julian out of the afterparty for asking too many questions about how Madison pulled the shoot together after so many years of bad blood and plants it in the trash as “evidence” after giving Madison an overdose of crushed-up bennies in a celebratory wine spritzer and shoving her off the open-plan bedroom ledge to the dining area below. The careful planner cleans up after herself, too, wiping down every surface to remove all fingerprint traces and scooting out the model house’s secret entrance to evade being captured by security. She’s right back at the house bright and early the following day when Elsbeth, Detective Fleming, and Officer Hackett are on the scene, comforting the young models Madison had been mentoring and pointing out that Madison’s attack was tied to her own. In each of Tiff’s scenes, she’s wearing nice-to-fancy ensembles that contrast starkly with what Madison, the other models, and Elsbeth are wearing. It’s a very simple palette dominated by black and white, with a pop of red at the afterparty, and not a sequin to be seen. She’s not one of them.
Things continue to look worse and worse for the seemingly hapless TJ, thanks to his flimsy alibi (in his mancave all night, with no witnesses but his headphones and edibles) and visit to the insurance agent to inquire about the death benefit he’ll receive through Madison’s policy. Worse, Captain Wagner remembers TJ pretty clearly from observing his interactions in all the downtown clubs in the ‘90s, too. The guy was a sleaze, but there’s a pretty big gap between sleaziness and murderousness. Tiff lays it on thick in her own fanciful account of what had been going on with Madison and TJ, when she comes in to speak with the investigative team, saying TJ was violent and that Madison had come to Chester to ask for her support in leaving and divorcing him.
Fortunately for TJ, he has a sort of ally in Nadine, who describes him and Madison as mutually devoted and as “partners in crime” just the night before. She believes strongly — we can add this to Nadine’s long list of strong beliefs from her appearances in Elsbeth’s first and second seasons — “that Clyde would never kill Bonnie.” Even more fortunately, TJ also has a real, if mortifying, alibi. Who knew an IRS audit could help protect him from prosecution for murder, but the laptop he and his lawyer immediately fork over proves he was working on getting his finances and paperwork in order, not murdering his wife.
Is this the first time we’ve seen an Elsbeth murder suspect confess to an old crime in order to convince the police to investigate the victim of his old crime as a viable suspect for the current crime? Since, as Elsbeth puts it, the statute of limitations on Tiff’s attack “has been over longer than Zima”, there’s no reason for him to hold back on the gory, shameful details any longer. Inspired by coverage of the Tonya Harding-orchestrated attack on Nancy Kerrigan, he’d intended Tiff’s injuries to be disruptive, not career-destroying, but her face and eye were cut very badly by the Jewel CD that popped out of her Discman™ in the fall. Well, there you have it. Let’s put this confession in the same TJ Is A Sleaze, Not A Murderer bucket along with Wagner’s memories of the guy and Nadine’s description of TJ’s longstanding role as the furnisher of models at luxurious parties. “Get[ting] paid by the party planners to bring the girls and make the introductions” to male VIPs at parties is a very fine hairsbreadth away from being a pimp.
He did not serve in that role the night of Madison’s murder, so it’s down to the new models living at the Sheroes house (Madison and TJ’s modeling agency) to fill in some more details from the party. The actors playing Nabria from South Sudan, Sveta from Kyiv, and Harper from New Jersey are among the highest highlights of “Glamazons”. I can’t comment on the accuracy or over the top-ness of their accent work, but their delivery on lines like “She saved me from war and got me Invisalign”, “I feel bad we were partying so hard while Miss Madison was falling down, but we were drinking the garbage vodka, so I hope we made her proud”, and “I danced with the actor who kissed his brother on White Lotus” are models of sly humor and are worthy of the three actors’ respective sizzle reels.
Who knows if the Sheroes will find their Julian Simons in today’s media environment, but, like TJ and Nadine, he’s got his own historical perspective on Tiff, Madison, and TJ. It turns out that the animosity between himself, Madison, and TJ was less about the spotlight he shone (in their minds, disproportionately) on Tiff in his original piece for Dress Up, and more connected to his refusal to stop asking questions about Tiff’s attack. It seems that he went farther than the police did way back when, and knowing what we do now about TJ being the assailant, it’s easy to see why he and Madison would want to smear Julian’s name. They convinced his editor that he’d been sleeping with Tiff (I feel strongly that Julian’s editor would have had at least an inkling that this was very unlikely, but we’ll set that aside), and he’d been blackballed ever since. Justice for Julian, I say — he got swept away by Tiff’s attention, sure, but his journalistic instincts were right on.
In the end, Officer Hackett’s side-gig as a stand-up comedian offers some nice character development moments for Lindsay Mendez and the moment where Elsbeth cracks the case. Such efficiency! Hackett’s jokes are pretty solid, and her on-stage persona is an appealing mix of breezy assurance and knowing self-mockery. Wagner later gets in a nice little heartfelt speech about how important it is to have interests outside of work and how equally important it is to have colleagues who support and show up for those interests.
The bartender at the back of the room, Ivy, helps Elsbeth figure out where to find the physical evidence necessary to arrest Tiff. Ivy (Paulina Singer) is another returning character, from the overzealous ally-turned-murderous bartender episode featuring Arian Moayed as Joe The Bartender. She explains that all bartenders develop a habit of popping the foil peeled away from the tops of wine bottles into their apron pockets, often forgetting to throw them away til much later. Sure enough, it’s Tiff’s fingerprints on the foil in her apron pocket from the night of Madison’s murder that lead to her being Mirandized and led away in cuffs. Too bad, so sad for Tiff that her good bartending habits overrode her otherwise-meticulous murder planning. I was glad to see, though, that Tiff went out on top in the glamour department, at least, busting out of her old palette with a gorgeous brown leather blazer with moto-chic details, and looking her most like Daryl Hannah’s similarly blonde and eyepatch-sporting character Elle Driver in Kill Bill.
Fortunately for the Sheroes models, who have lost two mentors in just a few days, Elsbeth has a great suggestion for them. Give Nadine Clay a call, she says, “I believe strongly that she’s wonderful and she might be ready for her next move.” See you next season, Nadine & Co.!
• A gentle, critical word on this episode’s cultural references and the 25th anniversary of the Glamazons: the math isn’t quite mathing. If the original Glamazons photoshoot took place in 2000, the 1994 attack on Nancy Kerrigan is unlikely to have been in the news after that. It was covered retrospectively in early 1998 in the run-up to that year’s Winter Olympics, though. All of the other references to things like Meg Ryan’s cute hair, Leonardo DiCaprio’s early ladykiller ways, Tamagotchi, Beanie Babies, Zima, a Discman™, and Jewel work for a Y2K photoshoot. I know this is a quibble! But it’s so easy not to include record-scratch details!
• Perhaps next season, we will be treated to a reading or two from Nadine’s future self-help book about having and living by one’s strong beliefs. Here’s hoping!
• Nadine is from Moldova? Like Tracey Ullman’s character in the murderous psychic episode last season, she turns out to be an immigrant with an unplaceable, quasi-Eastern European accent.
• One last Nadine note: the reversible black-and-white cape with the sinuous design on its deep lower panel is magnificent. It looks like it’s done with appliqué, and reminds me strongly of the wrought iron-inspired design on the House of Worth homage-paying gown Bertha Russell wears to the opera in the second season finale of The Gilded Age.
• Captain Wagner, trombonist! Fun fact: Wendell Pierce learned to play trombone for his role in Treme.
