Offbeat, but in a good way
Good Wife attorney Elsbeth Tascioni shines in her spinoff of hit legal dramas
Elsbeth CBS
Say “Elsbeth Tascioni” in a crowded room, and those in the know may look — for a fraction of a second — a tiny bit like her. Pleased. Alert. A little goofy. Their eyes might widen as Carrie Preston's do when she plays the loopy attorney who steals the show whenever she guest-stars in The Good Wife or The Good Fight.
It was big news, therefore, when TV power couple Michelle and Robert King announced that their next project for CBS would be Elsbeth, a spinoff starring Preston as the deceptively daffy redhead. Elsbeth! Could Tascioni — whose quirks offered a pleasant but highly potent contrast to the poised reserve in vogue at Good Wife law firms such as Lockhart/Gardner — anchor a show herself?
The answer, briefly, is yes — but perhaps at the expense of the show's world, which feels a little thin.
The premise of the new series is implausible but straightforward: The New York Police Department has been operating under a consent decree issued by the Justice Department requiring an outside observer to confirm that it is, indeed, complying with the law. This task falls to Tascioni. She relocates from Chicago to New York and starts genially nosing around the department, annoying everyone, particularly the guy in charge, Captain C.W. Wagner (Wendell Pierce, playing a mildly different kind of cop than he did in The Wire). The sole exception is Kaya Blanke (Carra Patterson), a lonely and competent police officer who warms quickly to Tascioni and appreciates her talents. Tascioni turns out to be better at observing crime scenes than the police she's ostensibly there to watch. Relieved she no longer needs to defend the guilty, Tascioni notices details the cops miss. Solves cases. Even extracts confessions.
You can see the jokes coming. This is a fish-out-of-water story whose chief pleasure turns out to be Tascioni's flair for cheerfully besting insufferable New Yorkers. Perennially delighted and deeply uncool, Tascioni gabbles about the wonders of the city while her interlocutors roll their eyes at her lack of sophistication and taste. Her trademark awe, so apparently guileless, causes people to underestimate her. Result? The sometime attorney, who is supposed to be supervising, ends up moonlighting as an amateur detective.
Skeptics might observe that a spinoff of a spinoff sounds a little unpromising. Viewers may notice that the case-of-the-week format, in which the sleuth notices things the police don't, isn't exactly carving out new ground. Neither is this latest entry into a long-proud tradition of female detectives weaponizing the way people misjudge them.
Novelty, in short, is not the draw. But Elsbeth Tascioni is a fabulous creation. And if the glut of ambitious shows that fell short during Peak TV taught us anything, it's that the nuts and bolts (your plot, your dialogue) are trickier to master than they might seem. There's a lot to appreciate about the humour and skill and sheer muscular competence that goes into good, solid, episodic network TV. Elsbeth benefits from terrific guest stars (Jane Krakowski plays a real estate agent for the superrich, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson is a reality TV producer). And the main ingredient — a memorable character you want to see in a TV world — is here in spades.
On these fronts, Elsbeth just works. Every scene is efficient, entertaining and clear. The jokes are fun, the outcomes gratifying. We get some winks about what makes “good TV,” some tantalizing backstory on Tascioni herself and plenty of footage of our hero hilariously and clumsily goading murderers.
But if Elsbeth succeeds as episodic TV, confidently establishing the cast of each new case, its serial aspect — the longer story building over a few episodes — suffers from the effort to bridge registers that start to feel incompatible. The choice to set a fantasy about a quirky attorney (who changes the course of police investigations by finding tiny relevant facts) in a real-life institution like the NYPD, with its documented history of egregious misconduct, racial profiling and indifference to exonerating facts ... well, it can seem flippant.
Put another way, the show feels a little unstuck in time, populated by more fantasies and conventions and clichés than characters. Its world feels quite small, especially because the cast changes so much from case to case.
That's not necessarily a problem. Elsbeth Tascioni is a force unto herself, and she can easily anchor a pleasant detective show in a fantasy world. It's less clear whether — when real and painful specificity surfaces — she can anchor a crime procedural in the real one.