In the hit legal drama The Good Wife, and its equally brilliant spin-off The Good Fight, Michelle and Robert King proved themselves masters of the comfort watch. The couple – a TV writing and producing powerhouse – take soapy case-of-the-week television and elevate it with knowing plotlines ripped from real world headlines, and characters so beloved that viewers will follow them for years.
Now, their TV universe has expanded further with a new Good Wife spin-off, Elsbeth, which uproots Carrie Preston’s relentlessly perky, perpetually underestimated defence lawyer Elsbeth Tascioni from Chicago and plonks her in New York City.
Not only was Elsbeth a fan favourite in The Good Wife – where her kookiness belied a killer instinct for the truth – but Preston won an Emmy for the role and from the moment we are re-introduced to her, wearing a Statue of Liberty headdress whilst taking an open top bus tour, it’s clear that both the character and actress are perfectly capable of carrying a solo series.
Elsbeth has always been an outlier in the uber glossy world created by the Kings and while this series moves away from the polished desks of fancy law firms to the mean streets of the Big Apple, she remains a delightful oddity. Kitted out in a baby pink coat, crocheted scarf and heart-print mittens and never carrying fewer than three enormous bags, she is earnest, eternally polite and someone most people judge – mistakenly – to be extremely unserious. When asked if anyone is expecting her, she answers: “oooh, I don’t think anyone’s expecting me!”.
Elsbeth doesn’t just shift its heroine’s location but also turns her from lawyer to detective. With the NYPD having recently faced a spate of wrongful arrest lawsuits, the DOJ has dispatched Elsbeth to be an outside observer and prevent future mistakes. You don’t need to have seen The Good Wife to watch Elsbeth, but if you have, you will correctly predict that Elsbeth – the very best kind of busybody – cannot simply observe. A mere 10 minutes into the opening episode, she worms her way into a crime scene, spots clues no-one else has and cheerfully declares in her sing-song voice: “by the way, I’m not sure this is a suicide!”. Of course, she is right.
The series, now in full police procedural mode, adopts the Columbo technique of showing us the crime being committed right at the very start. Before we even meet Elsbeth, we have already watched the slimy director of a prestigious drama school murder his young actress girlfriend to prevent her exposing him for sleeping with his students. While the police – Captain Wagner (The Wire’s Wendell Pierce) and Officer Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson) – are initially perplexed by Elsbeth (like almost everyone who meets her) they soon concede that while she may be off-kilter, she’s also brilliant.
Sure, giving Elsbeth free reign to investigate crimes might not be real-world-plausible but they are absolutely TV-show-plausible. And anyway, like its heroine, there is more to Elsbeth than meets the eye. In the premiere’s final moments, we learn that Elsbeth’s real mission is to investigate Wagner for corruption, suggesting the series might have something rather more substantial to say about US policing than its frothy weekly murder plots suggest.
This is easy television: enjoyable, familiar and moreish. You can be gripped by the central crime while also fairly safe in the knowledge that the perpetrator will get their comeuppance and Elsbeth will come out on top. But as with all the Kings’ series, it’s executed with precision, wit and class, while Preston has pulled off the tricky balancing act of creating a loveable oddball who never verges into irritation – the kind of woman who serves the killer cookies as she orchestrates their downfall. I hope that as long as New York’s merry murderers keep slaying, Elsbeth is there to kill them in turn – with kindness.
‘Elsbeth’ starts tomorrow at 9pm on Sky Witness and is streaming on Now