CBS’ Elsbeth is your new favorite weirdo detective show

There are few TV pleasures as dependable as the weirdo detective. It’s a trope as old as Arthur Conan Doyle — the skills necessary to deduce the wily ways of evildoers either demand someone be stranger than their peers or eventually make them that way. This can be misanthropic (Dr. Gregory House), endearingly annoying (the Psych boys), or some combination of the two (Castle), but it’s always good fuel for TV. Not only do you have a mystery to solve every episode, but you get to have fun watching normal-ass people just dealing with these characters — the weirder the better. And now, they’re making a comeback. Adrian Monk, Charlie Cale, Detective Danner — names new and old to the weirdo detective pantheon are cropping up on TV, joined this week by a face very familiar to some: Elsbeth Tascioni.

The star of Elsbeth, the new CBS case-of-the-week show, has some considerable lore. Played by Carrie Preston in what was initially a bit part in Elsbeth creators Robert and Michelle King’s breakout series The Good Wife, Elsbeth made an immediate impression on viewers, returning throughout The Good Wife’s run and occasionally its spinoff/sequel series, The Good Fight. Scatterbrained yet endlessly wily, Elsbeth was one of the secret weapons of The Good Wife-verse, used sparingly but to great effect.

A lot of this was due to Preston’s performance, taking a character that on paper could easily be annoyingly quirky, but realized by Preston as a mischievous lawyer that disarmed people with her easily distracted nature before clotheslining them with tenacity. The fun of an Elsbeth Tascioni episode is in knowing that she is 90% genuine and 10% putting on an act, yet never knowing which 10% was the act.

As the star of her own show, however, Elsbeth reads a little differently. Moving from her native Chicago to New York City in her new role as an outside observer to an NYPD precinct following some legal trouble for the cops, Elsbeth casts the former lawyer as a Columbo-type detective. Much like that classic show (and Poker Face, another recent imitator), each episode starts with a crime, and the mystery lies in how Elsbeth will solve it, noticing things the cops don’t — or won’t. This in itself is a sly bit of commentary — the Kings have made imaginatively socially conscious TV procedurals their calling card over the years — making the tension of the show not just between Elsbeth and the perp, but between her and the police department’s incentive to close cases, not solve crimes.

In this context, Elsbeth plays the part of the sweetly annoying tourist, both in the literal sense of visiting New York City and also in the more calculated sense of slyly allowing the NYPD to think she is just a nuisance to be tolerated, and not there to do a job. Like a lot of King shows (Evil being a notable exception), Elsbeth is off to what is hopefully a deceptively simple start, settling into its procedural rhythms while slow-playing a larger serial plot that hopefully takes the show somewhere bolder.

Photo: Elizabeth Fisher/CBS

This is all great stuff. However, if you’re familiar with Elsbeth from The Good Wife or The Good Fight, it is a little odd. Elsbeth files off a bit of the edge from Elsbeth the lawyer, the more openly adversarial aspect to the character that made her so compelling to watch. It comes with the territory of making a side character a main one — in the wings of The Good Wife/Fight, it’s possible to delight in neither the audience nor the characters quite being able to figure Elsbeth Tascioni out. As the main character, however, that dynamic can be frustrating. More contentious is the specific context Elsbeth places its fan-favorite character in.

In The Good Wife and The Good Fight, Elsbeth Tascioni was who good lawyers called when they were in a jam even they couldn’t figure their way out of. Generally speaking, this involved overreach by the federal government, as Elsbeth figured out how to stymie Treasury Department investigations or fraudulent wiretaps using the same bureaucracy the government used to corner her clients. Elsbeth was always a little weirdo, but she was a weirdo who loved to win; the harder that win was, the better. This is, ultimately, the biggest challenge facing Elsbeth: What kind of a win is the show setting her up for, and will it be big enough to satisfy?

Elsbeth airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. EST on CBS and is available to stream on Paramount Plus.