This murder-of-the week drama – with its screamingly obvious solutions – was seemingly dreamed up in five minutes. It’s like a charmless Columbo, with brighter clothes
Never have I felt so alone as I did during my years as a devoted fan of The Good Wife but stone cold hater of recurring character Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston). She was a defence attorney who would periodically pop up with her maddening “quirkiness” and pluck answers from the ether to win her clients’ freedom as if she were a wondrous mystery instead of the deus ex machina she was. Every time she showed up, it was like a cartoon started playing in the middle of the otherwise meticulously assembled, plotted and played legal drama. It never failed to make me want to put a fist through the screen. Yet she became a fan favourite, and so a spinoff became inevitable.
Now it is here. It is called Elsbeth. Robert and Michelle King, creators of The Good Wife (and its excellent first spinoff The Good Fight, starring the wonderful Christine Baranski, which reproduced all the strengths of the original while adding some simmering rage and surrealist touches as the US moved into its Trump era) evidently had five minutes to spare and scribbled down some notes that unfortunately have made it all the way to the screen.
Elsbeth has relocated from Chicago to New York to start a new job overseeing an NYPD department that has come under fire after a series of controversial arrests. In fact it goes deeper than that and she is secretly there to investigate the captain, Charles Wallace (Wendell Pierce, way too good for this), who is suspected of corruption.
While that provides our seasonal arc, the show itself follows a basic mystery-of-the-week formula. Elsbeth’s connection with the department apparently makes her a de facto detective, able to rock up to any crime scene and start questioning suspects. Think of her as Columbo with a primary-coloured wardrobe and more face-pulling.
They are not tricky cases. As is traditional, the guest star did it. We usually see them do it, then it’s a tedious wait for Elsbeth to put the screamingly obvious clues together while we pretend that she is brighter than the police and that her unconventionality is a superpower instead of the powerful irritant it always was.
In the opening episode, Stephen Moyer plays college drama professor Alex Modarian, who is sleeping with his students and stages the murder of one to look like a suicide after she threatens to go to the authorities. Elsbeth, when not trying to decide between getting tickets to Cats or The Lion King, or staring wide-eyed at the wonders of New York as if she hasn’t watched a television programme or film in the past 50 years, peers over the shoulders of a few attending officers and quickly deduces the truth. The evidence amassed includes: misspellings in a supposed stalker’s note and the drama course literature; two students easily persuaded to admit to affairs with Alex; and – uh – Elsbeth intuiting exactly when Alex is going to try to plant something incriminating again on his fall guy.
The second episode has Linda Lavin as a vicious president of an apartment buildings’s co-op board who vetoes a lucrative offer from a famous client (“Rhymes with Boprah!”) to buy the property, thereby creating multiple suspects among the apartments’ owners when she falls to her death shortly thereafter.
So it goes on. Jesse Tyler Ferguson plays a reality show producer who murders one of his stars when she tries to blackmail him. His case turns on some glitter traces that catch Elsbeth’s eye. Blair Underwood plays an ambitious father who poisons his son’s tennis rival, and if you stick around long enough you’ll get the likes of Gina Gershon and Keegan-Michael Key tipping up to do their shifty-eyed, clue-strewing bit too.
It’s clearly not intended to be anything like The Good Wife or The Good Fight. But it’s not charming enough to be the playful homage to the unsophisticated detective shows of yesteryear that it wants to be either. The most that can be said for it is that Elsbeth as a main character is about 50% less infuriating than she used to be. And that maybe it’s good for the Kings to keep things ticking over while they come up with the next endeavour worthy of their talents.
Some have claimed Elsbeth as a neurodivergent icon. I think this has largely been an attempt to cover up a creative misstep in The Good Wife, but if it is true it could mean that some of the criticisms fall away. Or it might cause you to ask why they chose to make a representative of that community so annoying and then put her in such a poor show of her own.
