Carrie Preston
“The first thing that Robert King said to me 14 years ago when they offered me this role was ‘We’re looking at her as like a female Columbo.’”
On “Elsbeth,” Carrie Preston reprises her Emmy-winning role as the eccentrically shrewd attorney Elsbeth Tascioni, a fan favorite from the CBS drama “The Good Wife” and its Paramount+ spinoff “The Good Fight.” Robert and Michelle King created all three shows, but rather than another serialized legal drama, “Elsbeth” is a procedural in the vein of the classic series “Columbo”: The audience knows from the start who committed the crime, and then watches Preston’s Tascioni try to solve it.
• How was Elsbeth first described to you for “The Good Wife”? The first thing that Robert King said to me 14 years ago when they offered me this role was “We’re looking at her as like a female Columbo.” And here we are 14 years later, basically borrowing the structure of “Columbo” to make the show. She is an unconventional character in the same way that he was, somebody that people don’t see coming.
• Elsbeth makes these hairpin turns of thought from completely frivolous to life-ordeath serious. How do you find your way into that? In the first couple of scripts, they wrote the word “pause” in parentheses, and I became more interested in what the pause was than what the words were. What is happening in that pause? What if there’s something that’s firing in her brain that nobody else knows? I started thinking of it almost like creating a map that I would follow: What am I thinking? What is my body doing? And what am I saying? If all three of those things are at odds, it makes her fun to play, and hopefully surprising to watch.
• How did this series wind up happening? It really started at the end of “The Good Wife.” There were a lot of fans who were suggesting that a show centered around Elsbeth would be a fun idea. They decided to do “The Good Fight,” and they invited me to come on a couple of times, and they even invited me to direct. Then in the deepest part of COVID, when everybody was at home watching TV, Robert and Michelle found that they were gravitating towards reruns of “Columbo,” and they thought, this will be our way in if we were to do a spinoff centered around Elsbeth.
• Will we see more aspects of her personal life on this show? Elsbeth has talked about her son before. He has a name now — he’s called Teddy. We see her confiding in her co-workers about Teddy, and little comments about her divorce, things like that. Whether you’ll ever meet Teddy, I’m not sure. They haven’t told me yet. But I think it would be more interesting not to. Columbo always talked about his wife. We never met her.
• Does the episodic nature of the show, and not wanting to alienate viewers who haven’t watched every episode, change how you think about playing Elsbeth? It does, in that the language is different now. There’s a lot of questioning. There’s a lot of police procedural situations, which are quite different than what we did in “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” so I’m acclimating to that. It’s not going to be how Mariska Hargitay’s character questions people on “Law & Order.” But she’s in a situation that is rather “Law & Order”-like, you know? This very bright, colorful, prismatic, mercurial character is dropped down in the middle of the black-and-white-and-gray world of New York City police procedurals. I think that’s where the fun of it is.