How ‘Elsbeth’ Became the Surprise TV Hit of the Year

CBS has a bona fide hit on its hands with Elsbeth. Although the main character, Chicago lawyer turned murder-solver Elsbeth Tascioni, popped up occasionally in The Good Wife and The Good Fight, the latest series in that universe created by Robert and Michelle King is not a courtroom/political/relationship drama, but a rather light, warm-hearted procedural in the vein of Columbo and Poker Face.

Ostensibly in New York on assignment from the Department of Justice to observe the NYPD as part of the terms of a consent decree, Carrie Preston’s Elsbeth is quickly revealed to the audience as being present to secretly investigate local precinct Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce). Along the way, she partners with Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) to bring both the precinct’s homicide clearance rate and the spirits of everyone she meets way, way up. Thanks to her astute questions, intuitive leaps, and seemingly endless parade of vividly colorful ensembles, even the murderers she apprehends rarely seem to mind that she’s the one to catch them.

Impressively, Elsbeth weathered a wobbly series launch—a strong pilot was followed by a five-week hiatus caused by schedule conflicts with the State of the Union and March Madness broadcasts—going on to secure a full-season pickup for next year before the midway point of its 10-episode first season. The moment was captured on set in a video of Preston breaking character while shooting the first season finale to announce the happy news to her co-stars and the entire crew.

Showrunner and writer Jonathan Tolins, who previously worked on series including the musical dramedy Schmigadoon! for Apple TV+, East New York for CBS, and The Good Fight for Paramount+, returned to this universe to revel in working with a cast he can’t praise highly enough on a show that unexpectedly “brings a lot of kindness into the world.” Just before the first season finale aired, Tolins spoke with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed to discuss Elsbeth’s guest-star-studded storytelling, the joys of exploring one of New York City’s many micro-worlds in each episode, and how the stars aligned for the perfect song to play over the finale’s fashion show.

Your second season pickup came so early in the first series run, and must have been such welcome news. What do you think audiences are responding to with Elsbeth?

First, they respond to Carrie Preston, who is so wonderful and was made for this role; you want to be in her presence for an hour every week. The relationships she has with Carra Patterson and Wendell Pierce are great, too, and I think our show—which, yes, has murder in it, is just a lot of fun, because it’s always done in a way that is kind of satirical or a little bit loopy. We have a lot of fun with the different worlds we go into in New York, so each episode feels very different, and it doesn’t get stale. I also think it was a good time for a show like this. Audiences like the comfort of a procedural mixed with humor and kindness, and we’ve also managed to get really great guest stars who have terrific chemistry with Carrie.

It’s been fun to see who the guest stars will be each week. I know you have a ton of experience in theater as a playwright, and as a writer for the Tonys. How closely do you work on the casting of those guest stars?

Often, the writers’ room has great ideas, so we bring those to our casting director Finley Davidson, and with the other executive producers, we just start winnowing it down. I was lucky that there were a bunch of people this year who I knew personally—Jesse Tyler Ferguson, who I actually originally wrote the play Buyer and Cellar for; Jane Krakowski, who I worked with on Schmigadoon!; and Laura Benanti, too—I think that connection helped them commit to doing a show that hadn’t yet been seen. Now that people have seen what we’re doing, I’m hoping even more exciting actors will be ready to jump in. We did incredibly well for a brand-new show.

They’re one of the most fun elements of the show, for sure. Let’s talk a little bit about your relationship to mystery. It’s a genre with an enormous umbrella of subgenres and types of worlds you can visit. Were there favorite authors or TV series or films that you wanted to take a spin through this season?

I was not a huge mystery fan growing up, but I do love them. And I’ve been studying them a lot to see how they’re done. When we got picked up, it was right after the WGA strike began, so I watched every single episode of Columbo, because it’s the granddaddy of this “How to Catch ʼEm” genre. I also watched all of Poker Face, which was wonderful. I spent a lot of time paying attention to the techniques that I found most interesting and thinking about how much fun the playing at home part of it is.

The main thing I decided early on from those series was that I wanted to make sure that the clues Elsbeth uses to catch the killer are very specific to the world of that episode.

We try not to do anything that could be anywhere, like security camera footage. For instance, in the Keegan-Michael Key episode, a key clue is the watch that’s used in the bride and groom’s choreographed cringey first dance. We’re doing a country club wedding episode, so the murder mystery clues should be things that we all think are funny or interesting about a wedding. When we did the tennis tournament episode with Blair Underwood, we found ourselves wondering about the ball girl—that’s where our show gets the most fun.

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Would you walk me through the process of taking a supporting character like Elsbeth, who was always a very welcome garnish whenever she popped up in The Good Wife and The Good Fight, and making her the main character?

The great thing is, Carrie will play everything truthfully, so it never feels like pure schtick. She always finds ways to make it true to her. Elsbeth is the main character, but she’s always a fish out of water in a new world. So it keeps her feeling like the person who is leaning into the shot, as she does in the pilot, not in the center of it. That’s a visual touchstone for us—she is someone who just pops in and never feels like she’s dominant. She’s always that odd character who makes other characters wonder “why is this thing not like the others?”

What you said about Carrie always playing everything truthfully reaches its full flower in the season finale. It’s a crescendo, with Laura Benanti and André De Shields as the two big guest stars, lots of particularly funny jokes, a big friendship breakup scene between Elsbeth and Captain Wagner, followed by a full-on fashion show and their reconciliation. That’s so much stuff, but it still all felt emotionally true. How did you put together all of those elements?

We wanted to close out the Wagner investigation in Episode 9, because what we cared most about was not the investigation, but the emotional aftermath of it all coming out and once Wagner was clear, what did it mean for him and Elsbeth? Even for the whole premise of the show—was the consent decree ever real? As the season went on, we’d all been feeling how genuine the emotion and the love was between our three main characters and our three main actors, so everything came down to the question of whether or not it could continue. And then structurally, we wanted to show with the finale that we can break form, so that the audience realizes, “Okay, don’t think you know what every episode is gonna be.” It’s the first time we explicitly don’t let you know who the murderer is at the beginning.

Elsbeth is set in a very, very heightened reality, but it’s also a fully realized and consistent world. The finale brought home how much of a role costume design plays over the course of the whole series.

That’s one of the reasons why we wanted to do a fashion episode as the finale because people are just thrilled by Dan Lawson’s creations for Elsbeth. In a way, Dan has helped create this character as much as anybody. He just always is thinking in terms of the palette of the whole episode and how Elsbeth is going to pop. He’s able to walk that line where she never feels like a clown, she’s just someone who likes to wear things that make her happy. It underlines that feeling of joy that she brings to this world.

I love that in the finale she gets validated as a person with a really specific sense of style. Was that something you guys were writing towards?

No, in the original plan, we were going to do a Met Gala episode, but as we were writing the season we saw that it was always fun to put Elsbeth in some fun new activity, like rock climbing, or driving a golf cart or dancing or you know, or taking a tennis lesson. All these things we love to throw at her to see her do stuff. Elsbeth on the runway just felt like such a natural thing for our finale.

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The character is so game and willing to go for it, it’s very fitting. Tell me about some of your favorite moments of the season across the board.

I really love “Hot Honey Rag” with Keegan-Michael Key. We had a hard time figuring out a satisfying way of solving that case and getting the watch to come out of his pocket. We were trying all these different things and then realized that number always ends with a cartwheel. It just felt like such a fun, crazy, wacky thing to do. And yet the actors sold it so beautifully. We’d planted his history of being a Yale cheerleader earlier in the episode to add that sense of letting go after being pent up for too long. It’s hard for me to pick favorites! Each episode has things that I’m very proud of and excited about. But certainly the penultimate act of the season, which includes the fight between Elsbeth and Captain Wagner, and the sad montage, and then her fashion show. It’s less than seven minutes, it’s a real emotional roller coaster and I really am so proud of what we achieved there.

You chose Cass Elliott’s “Make Your Own Kind of Music” to play over the fashion show at the end of that roller coaster, and when that needle dropped, I realized it could be the series theme song! How did you arrive at that song at that moment?

I believe that was my idea—I’ve always loved that song. One of our writers immediately sent me the SNL sketch where they make fun of the fact that that song is such a cliché, and it’s used all the time for zombie and violent movies. But we just couldn’t beat it, it felt like the perfect song for Elsbeth. And I thought, the whole point of Elsbeth is that she doesn’t care if something is uncool! She doesn’t care if something is a cliché if it’s something she likes. It’s absolutely that character, and that moment. I’m glad we put it in.

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