The Man in the Stadium (Season 2, Episode 7)
Premise: When a famous comic drops dead rehearsing his first stadium show, Graff and Bateman trace the poison to a joke he planned to tell about a news anchor’s affair.
- Air date
- Season/Episode
- Season 2, Episode 7
- Starring
- DS Henry Graff (Aden Young), DS Frankie Bateman (Kathleen Munroe), Insp. Vivienne Holness (Karen Robinson), DCA Theo Forrester (K.C. Collins), Mark Yohannes (Araya Mengesha), Dr. Lucy Da Silva (Nicola Correia-Damude)
- Guest stars
- Ennis Esmer as Kevin Russo, Laura Vandervoort as Jessica Cartwright, Jake Epstein as Andrew, Peter Keleghan as Neil Kent, Evany Rosen as Talia Klein
- Director
- Sudz Sutherland
- Writers
- Sam Godfrey
Summary
The Case
“The Man in the Stadium” follows stand-up star Kevin Russo through his last day: a line-by-line script review with his manager, a TV interview and a rehearsal at the Rogers Centre for the show that opens his tour. On stage he complains the lights look yellow, starts coughing and collapses, and paramedics cannot revive him. The yellow tint and a rare heart rhythm point to digitalis, and the lab finds a digoxin level five times the lethal dose, along with traces of herbs, horseradish and shellfish.
His manager says she made Kevin drop the celebrity takedowns that had brought a string of lawsuits, and the lab places the poisoning between 3 and 6 p.m. After a 3:30 interview on The National Report with anchors Neil Kent and Jessica Cartwright, Kevin went to a private cellar in Little Italy, where his favourite amaro and a shrimp cocktail explain the traces and a folded scrap of heavy card stock carries digoxin. Comic Talia Klein, who paid for parking behind the bar, admits she caught Kevin stealing her jokes, made him pay for her silence and became his secret ghostwriter, but says he drank nothing while she was there.
Talia points to Kevin’s fired ghostwriter, the man behind 30 payphone calls, who says he was invited to a secret preview show and taped it. The set ends with a joke about Neil having sex with a junior anchor on the news desk. Neil’s assistant, Brooke, admits she told him; Neil concedes a brief affair with Jessica years ago, but he was on air when Kevin was poisoned. Jessica, who asked for Kevin’s booking, says she begged him to drop the joke and then went home. A warrant search finds her cue cards are the same card stock, and her father’s care home had to refill his digoxin early.
The Interrogation
Jessica announces a leave on air, and afterward the detectives turn to her husband, Andrew, the show’s segment producer. They note that he recently visited her father and left the studio minutes after Jessica did, following Kevin to the bar. One detective suggests Andrew has a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder fixed on his wife’s past relationships and could not stand the joke being told to stadium crowds night after night. Andrew turns on Jessica, blaming her and saying someone had to shut Kevin up, and he is taken into custody as she accuses him of killing a man.
The ending
Spoiler: No trial is shown. In the last scene a shaken Jessica asks how she missed who her husband was, and is told he worked hard to hide his true self until it finally showed.
Suspect’s fate: Andrew, arrested.
Why it stands out
- At the scene, Theodore Roosevelt’s “man in the arena” passage is quoted; one detective knows the words not from Roosevelt but from LeBron James, who, the detective says, writes them on his sneakers.
- Real Toronto landmarks frame the case: Kevin dies at the Rogers Centre, has a theatre named after him at Second City Toronto and takes his last drink in a Little Italy cellar.