Carrie Preston Is Elsbeth! Need I Say More? OK I will

 

Almost a year ago to the day, I wrote a love letter to what I considered one of my favorite series of all time and one of the greatest in history: The Good Wife. Arguably the greatest series of the 2010s (with only The Americans rivaling it for consistency and high quality) it was without question one of the greatest network dramas in the history of the medium. I can’t tell you how many times during the decade I was infuriated beyond words with the Emmys maddening decision to recognize shows like Downton Abbey and Game of Thrones over it during its peak. It is in part because of the failure to recognize series like this that I trace network TV’s slow decision to move more towards reboots and procedurals over the brilliant dramas that it had been showing during the previous decade. What’s the point of doing great television if cable and streaming were going to get all the nominations?

Immediately after that, of course, This is Us became the first network drama to be nominated by the Emmys in that category. But at that same point the first spinoff of The Good Wife, the equally brilliant Good Fight, would be completely ignored by the Emmys despite its often equally high quality. Robert and Michelle King were all too aware of the double standard the Emmys had towards cable TV (it actually became a running gag in the later seasons of Good Wife) and the fact that another show on a streaming service was ignored might have been a sign the Emmys were never going to recognize the Kings for their work, nor matter where they aired their incredible TV.

I’m getting agitated on what should be a joyous occasion. Let me start again.

Over the many years I watched The Good Wife with my mother, the two of us were in awe of what we saw. Not just the brilliant dialogue, the sexiness that was honestly better than some Shondaland series and the wonderful performances by every lead, but all of the incredible secondary characters that would show up maybe two or three times a season. We loved watching Michael J. Fox play an attorney with so little moral compunction that he would use his impending death as a tool to manipulate Alicia and her associates. We were overjoyed every time Martha Plimpton showed up, somehow always pregnant and always able to manipulate the judges that way. But there was one character that every time she appeared onscreen I told my mother: “She should have her own series.” That character was, of course, Carrie Preston’s Elspeth Tascioni and now my dream has come true – as has that of nearly every fan of The Good Wife.

One can debate which characters on the show were the most fun, the most sexy or the most devious. But there’s no argument that Preston’s Elspeth was the most lovable. Words like ‘eccentric’ or ‘scatter-brained’ could be used to describe her every time we saw her and they didn’t seem to go far enough. Sometimes you thought that if you looked up ADD in a medical glossary Elspeth’s picture would have to be next to it as she seemed incapable of holding a thought in her head for more than a few seconds and was capable of changing subjects on a dime so quickly that it left everybody behind. But as Will Gardner pointed out in Season 4 Elspeth ‘was Rambo.’ 

It is the nature of the recurring character that you never know for certain how much of what you see is truly what you get: it was always a question whether what Elspeth was doing was an act or this was just how she did her job. What was always clear is that once she was on your side, the opposition had no chance. Elspeth was clearly both a legal genius and used her kooky façade to lull her opponents in to a false sense of security. And the reason you were always fooled was because…she was just so darn nice.

Here's the thing about Peak TV; in the last twenty years, genuinely nice and pleasant characters have been driven to near extinction. I’m not just talking about the age of the Antihero; in the world where the best television has always been dark, even the comedies we spent so much of the last twenty years enjoying have featured characters who are basically dicks. This has been just as true of all the shows that had female leads; from Nancy Botwin to Selina Meyer to Fleabag, we’ve mostly been laughing at bad women doing bad things. This has been true even in the ostensibly more cheerful comedies; Alex Borstein was perpetually dour on Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. And for all the strong female characters that Shonda Rhimes may have given us over the last twenty years, ‘nice’ is not a word one would use to describe the majority of them.

But over the last few years, particularly in comedy, there have been some promising changes. We see them in Abbott Elementary, Hacks and Somebody Somewhere; we saw in the messy relationship of Christina Applegate and Linda Cardellini in Dead to Me. And of course there was Ted Lasso who in a way is a descendant of Elspeth. The opening scene of her in Elspeth, shows her as the sole passenger on the upper level of a ‘hip-hop’ bus in NYC, wearing a Statue of Liberty crown with a huge smile on her face. One is reminded of Ted’s journey to England, including the way she gets off the bus and says: “This is my stop, but you keep going.” She has that same goofy grin on her face even as she is walking through police tape and a crime scene. Even if you knew nothing about The Good Wife, how could you not fall in love with her from that moment?

Once I describe the formula of the series, I imagine fans of the King’s work might be disappointed because by far Elspeth is the most conventional show they’ve ever done, at least from the perspective of the pilot. Elspeth Tascioni has left her home of Chicago and has been enlisted by the Justice Department to do legal oversight for the NYPD after a huge number of overturned convictions. (All right, that part’s keeping on brand with the King’s work.) Once she appears on scene, she uses her talents as an observer to realize that a death that has been staged as a suicide is a murder and she begins to investigate it against the police’s wishes.

This is nothing we haven’t seen before, and the fact that we have a red-headed mostly comic actress who can tell when things aren’t what they seem involving suspicious deaths would naturally make us think of Poker Face. That show itself was an homage to Columbo and Elspeth takes on much of the same format, badgering the murderer who we’ve already seen commit the crime in the opening scene (again like Poker Face) and making a nuisance of herself to anyone who will listen.

But there is a critical difference between Charlie Cale and Elspeth, aside from, you know, all the real ones. Charlie from the moment we meet her is naturally, unabashed cynical and refusing to trust anyone. Whereas Elspeth is…pleasant. After watching the entire pilot, I am beginning to think that with Elspeth what you see is what you get. I’m not saying she’s shallow or naïve (anyone who watched her over her tenure on The Good Wife would know that’s just not true). It’s just that she has empathy and kindness even for the people she knows are killers.

Let’s deal with the pilot. An acting teacher at a New York school (Stephen Moyer, who no doubt Preston lured in from their days on True Blood together) has just killed an underage student he was having an affair with and was going to expose him. He has staged it to look like a suicide, and we see just how he did it at the opening of the episode.

It is this crime scene that Elspeth wanders on to and realizes that because of the deodorant in the mirror and the fact the victim was wearing a diaphragm that she was very likely murdered. The police, who don’t want her there, are incredibly annoyed and the only reason they don’t tell her to get lost is because they get a call from the captain (Wendell Pierce) who tells them to humor her. He then immediately calls the Chicago Justice department. “Who have you stuck me with?” he tells the representative of the Attorney general. Laughingly, he tells the captain to give her a chance. “You’ll like her,” he says.

Elspeth very quickly realizes that Moyer’s character is responsible for the death and spends the rest of the episode (politely) hounding him. Tellingly, the instructor never gets outright angry but holds his temper in check, no doubt because he doesn’t want to give anything way.

Over the episode Elspeth becomes aware that he has a habit of sleeping with his students, giving them good parts and then moving on to younger faces. Elspeth then goes to approach the instructor who thinks that he’s outmaneuvered her. The cops have a suspect who they think is guilty and he confesses. It is only after Elspeth watches the ‘entire’ confession that she realizes that the man has been manipulated. (This is keeping with the King’s brand of not being able to trust the police outright.)

Elspeth is told to apologize to the teacher because he has registered a complaint. She comes to him, grovels and brings him cookies. She then has a conversation with one of the officers whose befriended her that the teacher clearly overhears. Later that night, he is about to kill the patsy he’s framed and while he’s doing so, the police walk in to arrest him.

A brief moment: in my review of the proposed spinoff, I suggested that if Elspeth were on the case if Elspeth were on the case not only might she catch such notorious killers as Zodiac, they’d say thank you when they did. Well, let me describe the ending:

Moyer is arrested. Elspeth apologizes. “What did I do wrong?” he asked her curiously. “Acting,” she tells him kindly. “In real life people don’t do that.”  He tells her he enjoyed the chess game. “Did you get tickets to Cats?” he asks. (She’d asked about it in her first meeting.) “I’m seeing it tonight,” she tells him. “Think of me when you see it,” he says as he is walked off. I don’t think I’ve ever seen on any procedural a debriefing for the killer, let alone one done with something that almost resembles respect on that person’s part.

And it gets better! In the last scene with the captain, Elspeth is gloomy. “I really liked him,” she tells him. I don’t even think Columbo was ever upset about sending a murderer and a sexual predator to prison. She hates what he did, don’t get me wrong, but she didn’t like doing it. That’s empathy. Hell, even in the last scene when he learn that Elspeth is there to see if there is corruption in the NYPD, she tells the man who sent her there that she doesn’t think the man she’s investigating could be guilty. Don’t get me wrong; if he is, I have no doubt she’ll spend all the energy in the world to track him down, but she won’t feel the least bit good doing it.

Reader, I laughed almost all the way through the first episode of Elspeth and when I wasn’t I was smiling. Part of it may have been the realization of something I have spent a decade hoping would happen, but part of it was just because, well, I love Elspeth and I think she’s the kind of character that TV needs as it heads into its new phase. As I’ve mentioned before, it looks very much like Peak TV will be driven by both females and kindness, both of which Carrie Preston’s character has in spades. And as procedurals go, this is also the kind of procedural that network television needs. It may be too much to analyze after just a single episode (the next one will not air until April) but it may be the Kings are reinventing the procedural the same way they tried to reinvent the legal drama with The Good Wife back in 2009. (That it failed was more due to the fact the courtroom drama was in retrograde; such exceptions as For the People did not last long.)

 There are also, to be clear, elements of so much of the King’s work throughout, despite the differences: investigations, lest we forget, were part and parcel of The Good Wife, and we constantly get signs of the oddities of the world. At one point Elspeth interviews a former student who is starring in a Broadway musical mashup of The Singing Nun and The Flying Nun and in the midst of the interview, is lifted into the air and starts to trill. There are references to the world we live in; the teacher commits the murder because he’s afraid of being ‘cancelled’ and the performance itself has the appearance of some of the avant-garde productions we’ve seen over the years in The Good verse. There are also links to the past: Elspeth pushes the captain to his limit, but when she hears she might be replaced  by Cary Agos, she grows serious for one of the few times in the episodes. (Will we see Matt Czuchry? Hope springs eternal.)

I want Elspeth to succeed and flourish. Not just because I love Carrie Preston and want her to get another Emmy for this role. (She won one for Best Guest Actress in 2013 and was nominated for two more.) Not just because I want the show to succeed. No, I’m hoping, as I said in this article, that if the series is a hit CBS, which as we all know, loves to do spinoffs, will invent an entire Good Wife universe, not unlike the ones that Dick Wolf has used to occupy two nights of NBC programming. However, considering these are the Kings and we’ve already seen what they can do with one Good Wife spin-off, the last thing we’d get is business as usual. Hey, it’s an election year. What’s Eli Gold up too?

My score: 4.75 stars.