In ‘Elsbeth,’ a Quirky Side Character Becomes a Quirky Lead

While filming the new crime show “Elsbeth” in an Upper West Side apartment in January, Carrie Preston, playing the title character, tentatively patted the guest star Peter Grosz on the arm. The combination of the gesture and Elsbeth’s hesitant expression made the attempt at comfort come across as simultaneously awkward and funny — and unmistakably true to the consistently awkward, funny Elsbeth.

Robert King, who created the series with his wife, Michelle, and was directing that particular episode, chuckled in delight as he watched on a monitor. Nearby the showrunner, Jonathan Tolins, said, “She always finds things like that,” referring to Preston’s flourish. “That was probably not in the script.”

Premiering Thursday on CBS, “Elsbeth” is a new project but Elsbeth herself is not. One reason Preston inhabits her fully enough to improvise such small, telling gestures is because she has been playing her for almost 14 years.

Fans of legal dramas have long been acquainted with Elsbeth Tascioni, a seemingly scatterbrained but diabolically effective redheaded lawyer who popped up toward the end of the first season of “The Good Wife” in May 2010. From the start, the Kings, who also created that hit show, thought of Elsbeth as an answer to Columbo, the Los Angeles homicide detective that Peter Falk played in a series, then specials, between 1968 and 2003.

“I didn’t really watch ‘Columbo’ — it was a little before my time,” said Preston, 56. But “I knew he was a little unorthodox in the way he did things. I was like, ‘OK, I get it: They want people to not see her coming.’”

The Kings kept bringing Elsbeth back for guest stints on both “The Good Wife” and its first spinoff, “The Good Fight.” Despite her relatively limited screen time, she became a fan favorite, and Preston landed two Emmy nominations and one win, in 2013, for playing her.

The character was a little more subdued in her early appearances than she is now, but she became ever more madcap. “I guess they liked what I did with it and began responding to my playing of the role over time,” Preston said, referring to the Kings.

“I think they started to bring me on to add a comic note to the proceedings,” she added. “And it evolved from there.”

Nobody could quite let go of Elsbeth, and Preston recalls that the Kings first mentioned possibly building a show around the character when “The Good Wife” was winding down. They went on to make “The Good Fight” instead, led by Christine Baranski as the powerhouse attorney Diane Lockhart. Then during the Covid-19 pandemic, the couple found themselves bingeing episodes of “Columbo,” and Elsbeth was once again back on their minds, promising tantalizing narrative avenues.

“Peter Falk’s character is almost perfect, but if you think of him as a woman it creates a new, interesting dynamic,” Robert King said in a joint video interview with his wife. “Especially post-#MeToo, without putting our hand on the politics.”

“With Columbo it was all class — he got overlooked because he was a working-class guy,” Michelle added. “With Elsbeth Tascioni, you layer gender on top of that.”

While the previous two shows were set in Chicago, “Elsbeth” takes place in New York. (The pilot does include a mention of the “Good Wife” stalwart Cary Agos.) The heroine has been dispatched to New York to be an outside observer at a police precinct headed by Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce), where she ends up helping solve criminal cases.

Watching Preston and Pierce go through scenes on the show’s soundstage in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the precinct scenes are shot, the fraught relationship between the two characters was evident from their appearance and body language. She flitted around in a bright blouse, a colorful hummingbird darting quizzical looks every which way; he was a solid mass of a man in his dark-blue uniform, letting her eccentricity bounce off him.

“There’s something happening with us,” Pierce said of the budding chemistry between the two characters in a video interview. “Dare I say it? It reminds me of Lou Grant and Mary,” he continued, alluding to the characters played by Ed Asner and Mary Tyler Moore on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” in the 1970s. “That’s a bold statement, but it really does.”

That analogy is especially apropos because when Lou Grant was spun off from Moore’s sitcom into his own self-titled series, it was a drama. Elsbeth, too, has changed formats, going from two legal dramas to a lighthearted procedural.

“I would say this is a comedy,” Preston said. “It’s an hourlong show on network, but it’s a comedy.”

Elsbeth is the latest in a line of unconventional TV puzzle-solvers, following the prickly heroes of “Monk,” “House” and, of course, most anything that borrows from “Sherlock Holmes.” But as its creators suggest, it is “Columbo” that the new series most openly honors.

Both shows are “howdunits” in which we know the culprit’s identity from the beginning. Elsbeth’s antagonists also are affluent and powerful, or at least power-hungry. In the first season, she is thrown into rarefied micro-worlds that include reality television, luxe co-op boards, elite matchmaking and high-level tennis. Naturally, their denizens run on hubris and look down on the ebullient Elsbeth as a naïve Midwestern bumpkin. Each episode involves verbal cat-and-mouse games between her and a murderers’ row of, well, murderers. (Guest stars in the first season include Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Krakowski, Retta and Blair Underwood.)

Even those supposedly on Elsbeth’s side make the mistake of misreading her. As the cast ran through a scene on set, Gloria Reuben swanned in as Wagner’s wife, telling Elsbeth “Aren’t you a slice of heaven?” with a buttery undertone of condescension.

“I think all our shows have played with the idea of being underestimated, having characters who use their quirkiness and folksiness and their silliness to hide the fact that they’re really cunning,” Robert King said.

As Preston noted, being misjudged only helps Elsbeth win cases and, now, solve crimes. “She will cut you with a razor blade and you won’t know you’re bleeding until she walks away,” she said.

One of the reasons Elsbeth fascinates viewers is that it is unclear whether her sunny demeanor and free-associating non sequiturs stem from her unfiltered nature or are part of a strategy to ensnare her opponents. The show addresses this ambiguity in the pilot, in which the killer is an acting teacher (played by Preston’s “True Blood” co-star Stephen Moyer). He may be an overly confident, smarmy lech, but he is also good at his job, and at one point he tells Elsbeth, “You’re doing some very fine acting right now.”

Not even Elsbeth’s creators fully agree on her motivations, at least publicly. Michelle King said “the character is actually totally sincere. She’s not putting on an act.” But Preston was more equivocal.

“I don’t ever want the audience to know, because I think it’s more surprising and interesting,” she said. “Maybe she doesn’t even know sometimes when she’s manipulating.”

These divergences are par for the course for a character who remains largely opaque despite her many appearances over the years. Of her personal life, we only know that she has an ex-husband and a son. When asked if either would pop up in “Elsbeth,” Tolins was evasive.

“Possibly, possibly,” he said. “You’ll have to watch.”

“Elsbeth has always been a side dish, and it’s a delicate thing to move a side dish to the center of the plate,” he added. “So we are finding lots of cool ways to hint at unexpected layers to this character and of this woman’s life.”

What will definitely remain front and center is Elsbeth’s idiosyncratic charm, kindness and “childlike enthusiasm,” Tolins said. “Throwing that kind of character in the world of a police procedural, it’s a fun tension, but also you root for her and you care about her.”

In other words, “Elsbeth” is a departure from the usually gritty world of modern police shows, and the woman herself is a counter to the dour parade of troubled cops with predictable dark sides instructing us about the poor state of the world.

“When I turn on TV, I’m aware that certain shows feel like vegetables, like ‘OK, this is meant to be good for me in the long run but that doesn’t really appeal,’” Michelle King said, as her husband let out a laugh. “This show is dessert. It is meant to be fun and entertaining and comic, and just enjoyable.”