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Elsbeth was created as a deus ex machina.
Back in 2010, on “The Good Wife,” the writers kept painting our characters into corners, finding dilemmas they couldn’t escape, and then finding ways for them to do so.
Elsbeth Tascioni was such an escape.
We wanted Alicia Florrick, our lead, to have to rely on a character who was the exact opposite of her: a quirky and confused lawyer with no color sense who was intuitively brilliant. In other words, a female Columbo — someone Alicia didn’t know she needed until she arrived.
It was a character meant to last only three episodes. Then we met Carrie Preston.
Our casting director, Mark Saks, mentioned Carrie as someone who was available coming off of “True Blood,” but we remembered her even more from a small part she had in the excellent Tony Gilroy movie “Duplicity.” She played one of the only honest and vulnerable characters in it. And what was remarkable is she made honesty and vulnerability funny.
In this week’s episode of The Envelope, we’re joined by ‘Lessons in Chemistry’ star Aja Naomi King and Michelle King and Jonathan Tolins, who are part of the team behind ‘Elsbeth.’
The first scene we shot with Carrie was her introduction on the show. She entered Alicia’s apartment and got the better of a cop who underestimated her. The scene had no obvious comic beats. It had some character shading but not much more.
But one of the most valuable things a showrunner can do is to watch dailies. All of them. It’s the best way to see how an actor tweaks a character, plays with inflection, finds comedy in lines you never thought were funny.
That’s what we saw in Carrie.
The next episode we started writing toward those tweaks, finding the comic pauses she played up, never aiming straight toward a punchline, giving her an offbeat line or two, letting Carrie find the comedy.
Almost immediately, Carrie made the character her own, bringing in a sort of aw-shucks Midwestern sweetness. But also there was a cunning there. Elsbeth knew she was being underestimated by her foe and she wasn’t offended. She used it. And that goes to the core of what’s fun about Elsbeth. It’s never completely clear when her innocence is real or faux.
We still watch Carrie in dailies, 15 years on, and love the way she makes Elsbeth both sweet and cunning.
On “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight,” we always thought of Elsbeth as a spice — an oddball character who strolls in every eight or nine episodes and offers a contrast to the more serious plot.
Then the pandemic hit and we decided to catch up on all the streaming shows we missed. But we realized so many of the “prestige” serialized shows felt like homework: too much backstory, too many episodes you had to absorb to be up to date. At the end of the day, we decided we just wanted to watch another episode of “Columbo.”
And we realized we missed Elsbeth, we missed Carrie Preston, and she would make a great female Columbo. And that’s how it started.
We talked to Fred Murphy, our director of photography on everything we’ve ever done, and discussed the usual cliches of New York police shows. They’re gritty and grungy and handheld. We wanted just the opposite for “Elsbeth”: blue skies, a picture-postcard view of New York — Elsbeth’s view of New York.
The creator of Netflix’s hit rom-com recalls feeling like ‘a loser with a wonderful boyfriend’ before real life provided her with divine inspiration.
We talked to Dan Lawson, our wardrobe designer on everything we’ve ever done, and we discussed how Elsbeth has to be the stranger in New York. All the New Yorkers had to be stylish, cool, all wearing versions of the same muted palette. Only Elsbeth didn’t get the Upper East Side memo, wearing every wild color on earth.
Those collaborations led the pilot and series toward its final iteration. Elsbeth was the ultimate tourist, ignoring every trash can and alleyway, seeing only the beauty of New York. Even the murders she sees as classy and pretty.
We were running another show at the time, “Evil,” a streaming series that couldn’t have been more different. It was very odd to be on one call about the prettiest tourist locale to best sell Elsbeth’s love for New York and another call about what a demon’s guts should look like when Andrea Martin’s Sister Andrea pops them like a pimple.
The answers: Rockefeller Center ice-skating rink and red oatmeal.
That’s where Jon Tolins came in. Jon is a writer-producer and excellent playwright who we’ve worked with ever since “Braindead.” He had Elsbeth’s voice and attitude down perfectly, so we asked him to run “Elsbeth” after the pilot. He’s been running the show ever since.
One of the joys about writing for TV is how much it’s not a lone experience. It’s an accumulation of great work from talented collaborators and friends. We’d love to take sole credit, but like the best TV, it’s a group effort. And we still watch the dailies.
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