Story-Driven | Home of Screenwriter Paul Taegel

So that Ferris Bueller reference may not have been the cleverest, but neither was the wasted opportunity of this week’s episode of Elsbeth, “Finance Bros.”

Now, I adore this show, but like Billy Bob said in Bad Santa, “Well shit, they can’t all be winners, kid.”

In this week’s adventure, Cameron himself (Alan Ruck) plays identical twin billionaire hedge fund managers, one of whom has just had a spiritual awakening and decided to give his money away. If you’ve ever seen an Elsbeth episode, you immediately understand that one of these brothers is going to murder the other very shortly. It’s a fun setup—especially if the next few minutes cleverly subvert our expectations. Naturally, The most obvious choice here is going to be to cast the brother who still runs the hedge fund as the murderer. The writing on Elsbeth is consistently smart and unpredictable, and I desperately held out hope this episode would pivot from one of the more overused cliches of recent television: the cartoonishly evil billionaire.

It doesn’t. (In fact, there are two cartoonishly evil billionaires in this episode — both super evil). So yes, unsurprisingly, the greedy Alan Ruck kills the reformed Alan Ruck for… reasons. (Investor confidence? Manipulating the global cobalt market? I’m not making this up). Suffice to say the murder feels a little unmotivated, almost as if we shouldn’t need much justification to believe hedge fund managers murder siblings at the slightest provocation. Why even bother to build a multidimensional character?

But Seriously. Why not build a multidimensional character? It’s why we watch Elsbeth. The fabulous characters. Surely no one writing this episode suffered under the delusion there was a profound statement being made here about corporate greed. Surely.

Why not subvert expectations and give the murder to the do-gooder brother? Maybe make him a zealot, convinced that all the company’s money needs to be given away to charity — not just his half. Or maybe it turns out that the company bankrolls projects that ravage the environment, and the do-gooder brother had to choose between the trees he loves and his environmentally rapacious sibling.

It doesn’t really matter. Anything would have worked better than this predictable dry-humping of bourgeois platitudes.

Lest any of you come away from this with the notion that I’m simping for billionaires, I hope you under that’s not it. However, I am simping for storytelling that isn’t bland, familiar, and averse to creative risk.