Three Seasons In Elsbeth Is Just As Much Fun To Watch As The Actress Who Plays Her Is

 

One of the pleasures of television that I've always had is when the mere appearance of an actor makes you smile because you know the moment they say any line of dialogue you will almost certainly laugh. I realize that may not be the gold standard my fellow critics use to consider a great comedy or drama but honestly I think the average viewer needs this far more than a show about a white male antihero. I certainly have in the last decade and fortunately during the 2020s many of the best shows will do so.

The overwhelming majority of these performers are the ones who can stand out even in a great ensemble piece. This is true of Janelle James on Abbott Elementary, Harrison Ford on Shrinking and this past year Kathryn Hahn in The Studio. It also can happen, though less frequently, in a great ensemble drama. Gary Oldman has mastered it in Slow Horses and Christine Baranski has it down cold in The Gilded Age and Christina Ricci has turned it into an art form on Yellowjackets.

Carrie Preston was always able to do this from the moment we first met Elsbeth Tascioni way back in the first season of The Good Wife and every time I saw her on that show or its spinoff The Good Fight I kept saying that I wanted her character to have her own series. I got that wish two years ago and I suppose the only doubt I ever had was that it would become stale watching her. At the start of Season 3, it has yet to come close to doing so.

At this point I'm pretty sure the only people who don't love Elsbeth the character may be the killers she sends to prison on a weekly basis and even that's not true much of the time. That may be the greatest gift of Preston's character: she is so empathetic she can feel sympathy even for the killers she spends much of the episode trying to confirm that they are guilty of murder. (The lone exception so far was the evil judge she spent most of Season 2 trying to put in jail and even that was fun because he was played by Mr. Carrie Preston, Michael Emerson.) Elsbeth is a fundamentally good person, there's no antihero tendencies, no rough edges and while she is a ruthless attorney in the pursuit of justice she has such childlike behavior to her you love her every moment she does her thing. In last night's episode when she found out that she was going to an FAO Schwartz like toy store the first thing she asked for was: "Is there a floor-length keyboard?" By this point we've seen this kind of thing so many times before that you wouldn't think there could be anyway there could be joy in it – and that Elsbeth spent the next minute and a half dancing on it as much as playing tunes. Was it necessary to the action? Not really (though there was a moment it became relevant later) Am I absolutely glad it happened? Of course.

There are those who might argue that Elsbeth is the most conventional show that Robert and Michelle King have ever done and while this is true it fails to take into consideration: 1) even the most conventional King TV show is better than eighty percent of television on any platform and 2) ever since at least Season 5 of The Good Wife the Kings are by far the greatest experts in making any TV series into meta territory in ways that are incredible subtle and nuanced.  They have already done so countless times in the first two seasons (who can forget last year's episode when one of the victims was a showrunner of a long running TV show that used a plot from the first season of Elsbeth as a story?) and they continue to do so in the third season.

This was true in the Season 3 premiere which dealt with the murder of a prominent late night TV show host played by Stephen Colbert, which was his first role after his show was cancelled. Rather than take the obvious route about the plot they chose to have Colbert's character be a total and absolute dick to everybody including the producer (Amy Sedaris, who started her career on Exit 57 with Colbert more than thirty years ago) and her husband who was his sidekick (Andy Richter, because who else were you going to get?) The three of them had a long history going back nearly thirty years and in this world Colbert had become the star and the married couple were perpetually under-shadowed and abused by him. This is a similar story to the Stephen Sondheim musical Merrily We Roll Along and Colbert's character was listening to the show at the start of the episode.  Elsbeth was there after coming back from her trip to Scotland (where her current paramour lives) and was there to help a friend through something. She went home to watch the show, collapsed on TV and then had to come back an investigate the murder.

This was more fun then usual mainly because it involved Elsbeth trying to learn improv in order to get into the head of the killer and it was hysterical that Elsbeth had issues with comedy of all things. There was, of course, a darker subtext as Richter's character who had been suffering from poor health in the lead up to this ended up dying of a heart attack when he learned of what his wife had done. As always Elsbeth really didn't like locking up the killer because she always gets on their side. And when Sedaris' character said her last line, it had more meaning then you'd expect.

Last night's episode 'Doll Day Afternoon' was another tweak on the formula. The entire crime was essentially solved by the teaser, mainly because Elsbeth ended up going to the toy store by accident. Unfortunately for her the killer (David Cross) got a hold of the rookie cops gun and started taking hostages. As you might expect Elsbeth eventual got herself traded to get one free.

This was more fun that it sounded because all of the hostages were dressed up as dolls (one of them was in a Raggedy Ann costume) and there were all the other things that should be tense were turned for comedy. The captain in charge (Campbell Scott) tried to make contact and had to deal with the automated service in order to try and make contact and the phone in question was a toy phone.  The hostage taker had to make demands through a megaphone designed to make your voice sound ridiculous. All of the hostages were tied up with tape that said 'Happy Birthday' on it.  Cross's character spent a lot of time trying to find out where the horrible muzak was – and when he turned it off, an attempt to infiltrate the store failed. Elsbeth fed the hungry hostages with food from an Easy Bake Oven. And throughout the episode all the hostages kept trying figure out what movie this was like. By the end of the episode Elsbeth recommended an attorney to get the would be criminal off – and it was Diane Lockhart, who she knows from two previous TV shows. This too had an in-joke because when asked what law firm Diane works for Elsbeth said: "You know, the name keeps changing" which was a running gag throughout in both The Good Wife and The Good Fight.

And just so were clear the Kings are continuing to mock the formula of television in every way possible even now. This includes the captions that follow every major kind of action. Last night, for example, the cops needed to find the ex-con's daughter whose name was Bela. Captain Wagner (the always wonderful Wendell Pierce) said will finder. Cut to: "One Search for Bela' later and the girl is there in a prep school uniform. For the King's the shortest distance between two points is a caption and I love them for it.

I suppose the pedants could complain that Elsbeth is also by far the least political show the Kings have done but it's not like the characters are unaware of the world they live in. This was true in particular at the end of the teaser for the season premiere when Elsbeth's son tells her the show will be preempted. Elsbeth's first reaction: "Is it Greenland?" I don't know if she's actually relieved that the man she met a few hours ago has died because his tie was put into a paper shredder.

I know that Carrie Preston doesn't need an Emmy nomination for her work on Elsbeth because she's already won an Emmy for her work playing the character on The Good Wife a decade ago. I would like to see her get nominated and win one but I'm not as locked into it as I would have been a few years ago. It is enough for me to watch wear her bright colored coats, carrying her enormous bags, and going on her stream of consciousness discussions that always seem to lead to the killer getting locked up, even though sometimes she really doesn't like doing it.  Maybe this is a formulaic show but as Elsbeth herself said when confronted with it in a meta context: "What's wrong with those kinds of shows?!" Nothing Elsbeth, certainly not as long as characters like you are at the center of them.

My score: 5 stars.