SPOILER ALERT: This story includes major plot developments on the first episode of “Elsbeth,” airing on CBS and streaming on Paramount+.
— On “Elsbeth,” Carrie Preston reprises her Emmy winning role as the eccentrically shrewd attorney Elsbeth Tascioni, a fan favorite character from the CBS drama “The Good Wife” and its Paramount+ spin-off “The Good Fight.”
On those shows, Elsbeth’s scatterbrained behavior disarmed her courtroom adversaries — and, just as often, her own clients — only for her to upend everyone’s expectations with some ingenious legal sleight of hand.
Robert and Michelle King created all three shows, but rather than another serialized legal series, “Elsbeth” is a crime procedural, relocating its title character from Chicago to New York City as part of a government consent decree requiring the NYPD to allow a lawyer to observe their activities. The conceit places Elsbeth on the other side of the legal equation in the vein of the classic series “Columbo:” The audience knows from the start who did it — in the case of the pilot, a well-respected theater director (Stephen Moyer) who kills a student to cover up their affair — and then watches Preston’s Tascioni try to solve it.
Preston talked with Variety about how Peter Falk’s iconic TV detective was an inspiration for Elsbeth from the very beginning, how she approaches performing her character’s daffy intelligence and why fans of “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight” shouldn’t hold out for cameos any time soon.
How was Elsbeth first described to you for “The Good Wife”?
It’s funny that you asked that, because the first thing that Robert King said to me 14 years ago when they offered me this role was, “We’re looking at her as like a female Colombo.” And here we are 14 years later, basically borrowing the structure of “Colombo” to make the show. She is an unconventional character in the same way that he was, somebody that people don’t see coming.
Did you rewatch Elsbeth’s first episode?
I went back recently, because I hadn’t looked at it in 14 years. It was fascinating. They say your cells change every seven years, so I’ve gotten two new complete cycles of cells since I played this part to begin with. But you can see that I was finding my way as we were all figuring out who this person is. I was there as a guest to serve the bigger story, so I didn’t know how far I was being encouraged to go. A couple of seasons later, when they bring me back, I think that was when we all found the flow with the character. The alchemy between the writing and the actor started to gel.
Elsbeth makes these hairpin turns of thought from something that seems frivolous to life-or-death serious. How do you find your way into that?
In the very first couple of scripts, they just wrote the word “pause” in parentheses, and I became more interested in what the pause was than what the words were. I started thinking, what is happening in that pause? What if there’s something that’s firing in her brain that nobody else knows? What if they were completely opposite from what I’m about to say?
Then they stopped writing the pauses, but I started figuring out where the twists and turns are. I started thinking of it almost like creating a map that I would follow: What am I thinking? What is my body doing? And what am I saying? If all three of those things are at odds, it makes her fun to play, and hopefully surprising to watch.
— Variety