'Elsbeth' Is Already the Best Show on Network Television

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 1, 2024 |

By Dustin Rowles | TV | March 1, 2024 |

The first thing you need to know about Elsbeth, a spin-off of The Good Wife and The Good Fight, is that it is not necessary to be familiar with The Good Wife or The Good Fight, although The Good Wife is great and The Good Fight is exceptional. The second thing you should know is that Elsbeth is terrific, and everyone should watch it.

Both The Good Wife and The Good Fight were remarkably good at creating recurring characters — The Good Wife alone had 12 Emmy nominations for best guest actor, two of which went to Carrie Preston for the character of Elsbeth Tascioni. Carrie Preston appeared in 19 episodes over a combined 13 seasons, but along with Alan Cumming’s Eli Gold, she was easily the most memorable in a long line of memorable guest actors.

The character is a brilliant lawyer who disarms her opponents with kookiness that disguises her savviness. She’s such a bizarre character that no one takes her seriously, which is exactly what she wants. While her opponents are busy dismissing her as a wackadoo, Elsbeth picks them apart. They never see it coming. It is so much fun.

It turns out that those particular traits are also perfect for a Colombo-like police procedural, although showrunners Robert and Michelle King have found a way to have their cake and eat it, too. It’s basically a detective show, but it’s not copaganda. Elsbeth is not a cop herself; she is a lawyer who has been assigned to observe the NYPD because the department got itself in trouble over a number of wrongful arrests. Like Sherlock Holmes and Shawn and Gus from Psych, Elsbeth is of that proud tradition of investigators who are a pain in the ass to the cops but also their best asset. She is an antagonist to both the murder suspects and the police.

That dynamic is set up early on: Fredric Lehne plays Lt Dave Noonan, the by-the-books cop who spends most of his screentime telling Elsbeth to step back so he can do his job, while a beat cop, Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), slyly helps Elsbeth under the guise of spying on her for Captain Wagner, who does what Wendell Pierce does so well: Play a cuddly grump.

But it’s Carrie Preston’s show, and Elsbeth is such a fun character: Wide-eyed, innocent, and eccentric on the surface but diabolically clever underneath. In the first episode, I already love the sort of clues that help her investigate her murder suspect: Double spaces after periods (an older person thing!) and spelling mistakes. She’s a literal grammar cop! Stephen Moyer is the murder suspect in the first episode, which is a nice True Blood reunion for Preston, but also the first of many great guest stars (Retta, Jane Krakowski, Linda Lavin, Gloria Reuben, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Blair Underwood have already been lined up for future episodes, and no doubt, an occasional cast member from The Good Wife/Fight may show up). For fans of The Good Wife universe, there’s only one overt reference to the previous series: Captain Wagner keeps threatening to replace Elsbeth with Cary Agos, the Matt Czuchry character from The Good Wife.

The only challenge I see here is that Elsbeth has been such a remarkably fun scene-stealer that there is a small risk she doesn’t work as well as a lead. Can viewers withstand 42 minutes of quirks and eccentricities every week? I doubt it will present much difficulty for the Kings, who managed to turn a zombie series into one of the best political satires of the century in Braindead. I am also legitimately interested in learning more about the character, whose background and present relationships have never been explored with any depth. She is still a blank slate. The Kings can successfully fill it out.

Not for nothing, but I also love to imagine that Robert and Michelle King are best friends with Carrie Preston and her husband, Michael Emerson (who is a major character in another of their projects, Evil), and that they all have dinner together once a week and discuss politics and storylines. I also hope that Elsbeth runs another six or seven seasons before the Kings spin another character off into a series in the same universe. After one episode, this is already my favorite scripted series on network television outside of Abbott Elementary.