Carrie Preston & Michael Emerson: My Favorite Power Couple of Peak TV

 

 

Peak TV, like every other aspect of Hollywood, has had its share of power couples over the years. And the majority of them, while they look glamorous walking red carpets, are inclined to do the kind of dark dramatic work where the only good thing about them is frequently the work they’ve done.

I’ve seen more than my share over the 21^st century and I have my favorites. I’ve always admired the subtle nuances of Angela Bassett and Courtney B. Vance, who have more or less been working constantly in every part of television for the last quarter of a century. Vance got a head start on his wife as a series regular in the first five seasons of Law & Order: Criminal Intent before Bassett moved in for the final season of ER  as Dr. Banfield, the last chief of the Cook County Er. Her husband had a small role as, you might expect, playing her husband in what was a troubled marriage that the two of them worked out during the series. Bassett has received multiple Emmy nominations for her work on American Horror Story; Vance (to date) has won two Emmys; the first for his superb work as Johnnie Cochran in The People Vs. OJ Simpson. For the last seven years Bassett has been doing her usually sterling work as Athena Grant on 9-1-1 while Vance has worked on many brilliant undervalued series just as 61^st Street and most recently Grotesquerie.

Kristin Dunst and Jesse Plemons have also been two of the more valued performers throughout the last decade. Plemons had been  a lead in Friday Night Lights and played one of the most frightening villains in the final two seasons of Breaking Bad before he and Dunst worked together for the first time in the extraordinary second season of Fargo where they played Peggy and Todd Blomquist, a couple who end up triggering a mob war in the way that dominoes start falling in every one of Noah Hawley’s seasons. Dunst then worked in another of the more brilliant one and done series I’ve ever seen in the last decade: On Becoming A God in Central Florida while Plemons has mostly worked (while brilliantly) in so many anthology series including Black Mirror and Love and Death.

There have been countless other great couples during this period I could rave about (Dax Shepherd and Kristen Bell could fill their own article) but the one that has always given me the greatest of joys has been the work of Carrie Preston and Michael Emerson, who this past Thursday worked together on Preston’s Elsbeth for the first (and the writer’s assure us) far from the last time on this particular series. The biggest surprise is not that that they’re working together but that it’s taken nearly fifteen years for the two of them to work together on the same show created by Robert & Michelle King as each of them have worked on at least one of their prior projects to this point. Then again, maybe it’s not a surprise considering how fricking busy each one of them has always been during the era of Peak TV. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Emerson and Preston, like many actors, started in the theater and worked on Broadway for a long time. Both of them worked in small roles in movies and TV for the better part of the 1990s. They met and got married in 1998. Preston’s first major role was in the best forgotten TV series Emeril in 2001. By chance her husband had just been cast in the role that would bring him to the world’s attention.

He was cast as the unassuming William Hinks on The Practice, a man who has confessed to several murders and has been under psychiatrist’s care. During this period she goes to her friend Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams) and comes to the conclusion that Hinks is not the killer but is pretending to be. Lindsay manages a defense to expose as a fraud – but realizes too late that Hinks has outsmarted her and the psychiatrist. The acquittal is only the start of her problems as he begins to stalk her, kills his psychiatrist and eventually ends up being killed – only to have the last word.

Emerson deservedly won the Emmy for Best Guest Actor in a Drama that year but as you’d expect work was slow to come in, at least on TV. He appeared on several shows in the Law & Order franchise as well as The X-Files  most of which plays on the untrustworthy nature of his appearance. Both he and his wife ended up appear on The Inside, acting together for the first time.

Then in the second season of Lost he was cast as Henry Gale, a man who ends up being trapped in a net and who Sayid begins to suspect is ‘One of Them’. His original role was, theoretically, supposed to be just three episodes but it took very little time for Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse to recognize his genius. By the end of the season, they had revealed that ‘Henry Gale’ was in fact the leader of the Others and starting in Season 3 until the end of the series, Emerson was a regular and his career on TV took off.

Emerson was, along with Terry O’Quinn, the greatest performer on a show filled with incredible performers: he was nominated for Best Supporting Actor every year he was a regular and won the Emmy in 2009. We learned very quickly you couldn’t believe a word that came out of Ben’s mouth, and yet time and again the survivors of Oceanic 815 – particularly O’Quinn’s Locke – fell for it again and again. Emerson seems to be the Wizard of Oz – in fact the first episode centered on his character was called ‘The Man Behind The Curtain’ – but in that same episode we learned what we had suspected for a while: that Ben was not only not the king of the island, he wasn’t even a real monster.

Emerson’s charisma was never more apparent on Lost; this short, near-sighted man seemed to be a monster whenever he chose, but more because of what he said then what he did. (So many of the best lines on Lost were delivered by Emerson over the years.) But it was the genius of the series that after setting him up to be the villain of the piece his first full season, the writers went out of their way to humanize him and reveal that he was, just like everyone else, a pawn for someone bigger that he never understood. During Season 5 (the show Emerson won his Emmy for) he spent the first half of the season appearing to be evil incarnate with no humanity – and then had everything he hoped for taken away from him the moment he returned to the island. While the final season of the show remains controversial, no one doubts that Ben’s arc during the show was one of the great triumphs of television history.

Now in what was Ben’s first episode at the center Preston, who was a huge fan of the show, was cast in a guest role as Emily Linus – Ben’s mother. Emily died giving birth to Ben, and he only saw her on the island as a ghost – though it’s never been clear if that was true. Preston had hoped to return in a guest role – but during that period, her moment in the sun was about to arrive.

During 2007 Preston was cast in True Blood, the adaptation of the Sookie Stackhouse novels for HBO as Arlene Fowler. Unlike so many people in Bon Temps, Arlene was purely human and unlike the majority of the cast Arlene survived the entire series from beginning to end. Arlene was a different kind of role than the one that were played by Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer but it was keeping with the kind of work we could come to appreciate of Preston. Arlene was a good-hearted soul who, unlike almost everyone else on the show wore her heart and emotions on her sleeve.

I’ve mentioned in by review of Elsbeth how Preston came to be cast on The Good Wife; she came to fill a role after Joe Morton was unavailable and the Kings, like the world, fell in love with her. The Kings were more than willing to accommodate Preston’s schedule to have her guest star and it more than paid out: she was nominated for two Guest Actress Emmys and won in 2013. When she accepted her prize, she gave a shout out both to her husband and thanked the Kings for ‘letting me take a break from my True Blood Family.

After Lost came to an end Emerson considered doing a project with O’Quinn but it fell through. He wasn’t out of work long; after one full season Emerson was cast as the lead for the first time in a new series.

Person of Interest was one of the quietly best network dramas of the 2010s. Emerson played Harold Finch, who created a machine that had the ability to identify people who were going to be involved in a crime but ‘The Machine’ didn’t know whether they would be the victim or the perpetrator. Perhaps the best series to deal with a post 9/11 world Finch was one of the great characters in TV history, a man who had principles and wanted to do the right thing but spent much of the series being dragged into an increasingly darker world as sinister forces – including another machine – came to existence for purposes far more sinister than his own.

During this series we learned that before he became Harold Finch, he was in love with a simple painter called Grace. Grace, as you might expect, was played by Preston. Preston only made a handful of appearances during the show’s run (she was as you might expect very busy) but she was important as a symbol of innocence and what Harold had been trying to protect all along. He went out of his way to make sure that she never knew anything about who he really was, loving her from afar and trying to keep her out of harm’s way. In the final episode, in what amounted to a happy ending, one of the last scene’s involved Harold and Grace finally meeting in Europe after the chaos had ended.

By that time True Blood was over and Preston had been trying to act again. She had a recurring role on the deeply flawed but occasionally interesting Showtime series Happyish where she played a forty-ish ad executive trying to stay relevant in a business that kept getting younger. It’s possible that the Kings might have wanted to create Elsbeth then but they were busy working on their follow up series The Good Fight. By the time they got back to Preston’s she’d already been cast in another television series.

Claws was a black dramedy which featured four Miami nail salon workers who are also selling Oxycontin for a Florida gang. A primarily female led show with Niecy Nash at the head (Nash and Preston had worked together in one episode of Nash’s series Getting On) Preston was cast as Polly, a slightly delusional woman who is far less connected to reality then her colleagues. Like most of the rest of her characters she is openly cheerful but there’s a darker side underneath that has to do with her instability.

Person of Interest ended in 2016 and Emerson, as you might expect, had a guest role on the first season of Claws. (Big surprise he played the head of the Dixie Mafia). His next role was a guest role as Cayden James, the supposed big bad in the sixth season of Arrow. In a sign of how that show was heading downhill, his character was killed off before things got interesting. But by this time the Kings had a role for him – and what a role.

In the extraordinary CBS, then Paramount Plus series Evil Emerson was cast as Leland Townsend, the acolyte for all that is malevolent on Earth. You could say this is the kind of role Emerson was born to say. He spent much of the series pulling the strings of the adjunct team looking into signs of malevolence, tempting David Acosta from a life of celibacy, forever tormenting Kristen, dating Sheryl (Christine Lahti) and maneuvering her in to helping father the Antichrist and hoping to usher in the dark age. And because this is a show written by the Kings; it was hysterically funny as much as it was bleak.

Finally after Claws ended, the Kings gave Carrie Preston the show she deserved. It was only a matter of time before Michael Emerson was cast on that show but it’s the first time in all their years of working alongside each other that they are two characters that loathe each other. Emerson was cast as Milton Crawford, a judge who we see kill a man in the teaser of Thursday’s episode, and then sets himself up to judicate the case of the woman’s whose the victim of the crime. Elsbeth ends up getting called for jury duty and wants to get out of it (her son’s visiting from Chicago!) but Judge Crawford doesn’t excuse her even though she’s a lawyer (“I like having lawyers on my jury,” he tells her.)

What follows gives us a chance to see Emerson do pure comedy with as much of an ego as few of his characters have: Milton Crawford never misses an opportunity to tell his audience that his ancestors ‘came over on the Mayflower’ and clearly has as much an ego as he is a human monster. Preston, of course, has spent the better part of fifteen years turning Elsbeth into a force of good who kind of dislikes having to send the killers. She proves our guilty to jail and its fun watching her do her usual puncturing of the bad guys balloon (when Crawford talks about justice in regard to Mayflower, she mentions gently that he’s clearly never seen The Crucible.)

And it’s a tribute to how good these performers are that you believe how much in every scene the two of them hate each other: Elsbeth is offended because she knows Crawford has violated the robe and Crawford is upset that his evil plans have been foiled by this meddling red-head. Like the viewer Elsbeth has no idea why Cranford did what he did, but she’s determined to figure that out.

Emerson’s casting as Cranford is a stroke of genius and not just for the obvious reason. Both Emerson and Preston have been two of the greatest performers on TV for the past twenty years (honestly each of them deserves more Emmys then they have) but as you might expect given this summary both of them are brilliant for a complete different kind of performance. Emerson’s characters are manipulative, morally ambiguous as best and villainous at worse, and you can never trust a word any of them says. Preston’s characters wear their hearts on their (often multi-colored) sleeves and always want to see in the good in people. Some of them have demons, to be sure, but because they are so warm they become clearer than they are for Emerson’s.

Perhaps then it’s not a huge shock that it’s taken this long for the Kings to put this wonderful couple of character (actors) on the same series: they literally represent the forces of Good and Evil in their universes and the twain rarely meet in the shows they’ve created. I had been eagerly anticipating Thursday’s episode from the moment I learned Emerson had been cast on Elsbeth this past fall and now that Cranford is one Elsbeth’s board, this is one clash of titans I’m looking forward to. Bring the bastard down Elsbeth and get him to confess to his greatest secret: strangling Jeremy Bentham. (That’s a joke for all Lost fans out there. I couldn’t help myself.)