noDespite being a devoted fan of The Good Wife, I never felt more alone than when I despised the recurring character, Elsbeth Tacioni (Carrie Preston), the lawyer who would sometimes appear with a mind-bending “eccentricity,” plucking answers out of thin air to win her client’s freedom as if they were mystical puzzles rather than divine intervention. Every time she showed up, it was like a cartoon started playing in the middle of an otherwise meticulously constructed, plotted, and acted courtroom drama. It never failed to make me want to slam my fist into the screen. Still, she became a fan favorite, and a spinoff became inevitable.
And now it’s here: Elsbeth. Robert and Michelle King, the creators of The Good Wife (and its excellent first spinoff, The Good Fight, starring the wonderful Christine Baranski, recaptures all the good things about the original with a touch of smoldering anger and surrealism as America moves into the Trump era), apparently had five minutes to spare and scribbled down some notes, which unfortunately made it to the screen.
Elsbeth moves from Chicago to New York to start a new job overseeing an NYPD department that’s come under fire for a series of controversial arrests, but it goes a lot deeper: she’s in New York to undercoverly investigate suspected corrupt police inspector Charles Wallace (Wendell Pierce, perfect in the role).
While that shapes the season’s storylines, the show itself follows a basic formula of a mystery-of-the-week: Elsbeth’s connections to the police department make her a de facto detective, able to turn up at any crime scene and question suspects — think of it as a more in-your-face Columbo, only in primary-colour costumes.
These aren’t hard cases; traditionally, a guest star takes charge. Usually, we watch them take charge, and then tediously wait for Elsbeth to put together the obvious clues, while we pretend she’s smarter than the police and that her unconventional personality is a superpower rather than the usual powerful irritant.
In the opening episode, Stephen Moyer plays Alex Modarian, a college drama professor who is sleeping with a student and then murders her in what appears to be a suicide after the student threatens to call the police. Elsbeth, who’s not deciding between buying tickets to Cats or The Lion King or staring wide-eyed at the wonder of New York as if she hasn’t seen a TV show or movie in the last 50 years, peers over the shoulders of the several officers on the scene and quickly deduces the truth. Evidence gathered includes spelling errors in the supposed stalker’s notes and drama course materials, two students who briefly admit to having affairs with Alex, and Elsbeth’s accurate intuition that Alex is plotting something to re-incriminate his scapegoat.
The second episode sees Linda Lavin in her infamous role as the apartment co-op president who rejects a lucrative offer to purchase a property from a high-profile client (“Rhymes with Boprah!”), creating multiple suspects among the apartment owners when she falls to her death shortly thereafter.
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The story continues. Jesse Tyler Ferguson plays a reality TV producer who murders one of the stars he’s trying to blackmail, whose case unfolds when Elsbeth spots a trail of glitter. Blair Underwood plays an ambitious father who poisons his son’s tennis rival. And if you watch long enough, actors like Gina Gershon and Keegan-Michael Key also play roles that drop clues while playing tricks on you.
Obviously, this show isn’t trying to be The Good Wife or The Good Fight, but what it does aspire to be isn’t so much a playful homage to the old-school detective dramas as it is a charming one. At best, its protagonist, Elsbeth, is about half as infuriating as she used to be. And perhaps the Kings would be better off just letting this one chug along until they can come up with the next venture worthy of their talents.
Some have argued that Elsbeth is a symbol of neurodiversity, which I think is mostly an attempt to cover up The Good Wife’s creative failings, but if that’s true, it might erase some of the criticism, or it might make you wonder why they made a representative of that community such an annoying character to star in her own awful show.
