Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Elsbeth’ On CBS, Where Carrie Preston’s Quirky ‘Good Wife/Good Fight’ Lawyer Solves Murders In New York City

There seems to be a resurgence of the “howdunit” format that was made famous by Columbo a half-century ago. It’s where the audience knows who the murderer is at the outset of each episode, and then the title character pursues that person until they can pin the murder on them. Peacock’s Poker Face was a high-profile tribute to that format, and now comes another one, using Carrie Preston’s quirky recurring character from The Good Wife and The Good Fight.

ELSBETH: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: We see a woman lying down and another woman hovering over her. The woman on top plunges a knife into the other woman. Then we see that they’re part of a stage play.

The Gist: Alex Modarian (Stephen Moyer, who also starred alongside Preston in True Blood), the acting teacher whose class is putting on the production, leaves the production booth and goes down to the dressing room. He replaces the pills of one of the show’s actresses, whom he was sleeping with and is not threatening to go to the dean with his history of sleeping with students. He goes to her apartment after the pills knock her out, and places a plastic bag over her head in order to make it look like she suffocated herself.

We then see the upper deck of a New York tourist bus; the only two people on it are the rapping tour guide and Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), carrying a number of large tote bags and wearing a foam Statue of Liberty crown. She’s just arrived in New York from Chicago and is taking in the sights. Oh, and she’s using the bus to take her to the crime scene where the acting student died.

She’s a former defense attorney who has taken a job as an independent observer of the NYPD precinct led by Captain C.W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce), a result of a consent decree that came out of a wrongful arrest lawsuit. The first cop she sees is Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), who brings her to the scene that’s being run by a Detective Smullen (Danny Mastrogiorgio). As soon as she gets into the apartment, Elsbeth notices things that would lead her to believe that the woman didn’t commit suicide, like teeth whitening strips in the bathroom wastebasket and men’s deodorant in the medicine cabinet.

Much to Wagner’s annoyance, Elsbeth keeps making visits to Modarian to ask questions, and the more she asks the more she starts thinking that Modarian is the murderer. She gets especially intrigued by the fact that every one of his recent productions stars a different young actress he was known to be sleeping with. She’s also concentrating on the fact that the final texts that came from the young woman’s phone had two spaces after each period. Wagner tries to keep Elsbeth from pressing further, telling Officer Blanke to keep an eye on her, but Blanke starts to realize the lawyer’s hunches are making a lot of sense.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Robert and Michelle King, who spun Preston’s Emmy-winning recurring character from The Good Wife and The Good Fight into her own series, fully admit that Elsbeth is takes many cues from Columbo, including the “howdunit” mystery format where the audience knows who the murderer is and watches as the title character figures out how they did it. A more recent series that’s similar in structure to Elsbeth is Poker Face.

Our Take: Like Columbo, Elsbeth is going to have a “guest murderer of the week”, usually someone of privilege who think they’ve outsmarted both the cops and Elsbeth, only to get their comeuppance from the super-nice lawyer by the end of the episode. Guest murderers include Moyer, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Krakowski, Retta and others.

It’s a tried-and-true format that really feeds off the likeability of the main character and his or her ability to really sell themselves to the murderer as a rube who’s fumbling for clues. In the case of Preston’s Elsbeth Tascioni, she fakes the murderers out with, of all things, sincerity.

Although she’s coming from Chicago, she acts like someone from a small Midwestern town who walks around New York with her eyes towards the tops of the skyscrapers and mouth agape. So when she talks to Modarian, for instance, she really is impressed by his teaching skills and truly likes the back and forth with him. But the entire time, she’s chipping away until she finds the evidence she needs.

Preston has played Elsbeth for years, so she handles her balance of guile and gutlessness well, and in the hands of the Kings and showrunner Jonathan Tolins, there is more than enough clever lines to go around. Preston and Pierce play off each other well, and Patterson does a good job of being the supportive Watson to Elsbeth’s version of Sherlock.

Is the show perfect? No; the 42-minute (without commercials) runtime is too short for the howdunit format, given the fact that we need to spend time at the top of each episode showing how the murderer of the week committed the crime and covered his or her tracks. There’s a backstory about the real target of Elsbeth’s observations that feels like an unnecessary concession to the notion that even network procedurals need an underlying story arc. But Preston is so ingratiating as Elsbeth that we don’t mind those flaws all that much.

Sex and Skin: None. It’s a network mystery procedural. You likely won’t see much.

Parting Shot: Standing in front of the fountain at Lincoln Center, Elsbeth gets a call from the DOJ agent that sent her to New York. She doesn’t want to go after his real target, but he tells her that “the truth means putting people in jail.”

Sleeper Star: As we mentioned, we liked Carra Patterson as Officer Kaya Blanke, who isn’t nearly as skeptical of Elsbeth’s skills as Captain Wagner or whatever detective working the case might be.

Most Pilot-y Line: The DOJ agent who sent Elsbeth to New York tells Wagner that the other lawyer he was considering sending was Cary Agos, Matt Czuchry’s character on The Good Wife. Not sure if that reference was necessary.

Our Call: STREAM IT. We’re suckers for the “howdunit” format of Elsbeth, and Preston has such a good handle on the character that we are looking forward to watching her catch wily killers week after week.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.