Elsbeth Showrunner on What to Expect in Season 2

This story contains light spoilers on the second season premiere of Elsbeth. 

In the second season premiere of CBS’s Elsbeth, guest star Nathan Lane gets exasperated when the person sitting in front of him at the opera talks on the phone, loudly burps, falls asleep and opens a very crinkly bag of chips. This all stemmed from showrunner Jonathan Tolins’ real life experiences. “I didn’t even put in everything,” he laughs. “I once had someone eat a chicken dinner in the seats near me.” Of course, Lane’s Philip Cross thinks his only recourse is to murder the ungrateful opera patron. “In a way it’s a very silly motivation for murder,” Tolins says. “And yet when we got on set to shoot this episode, everybody in the crew was saying this is our first justifiable homicide.” 

It’s that unique mix of murder mystery with a quirky twist that has become the show’s trademark. The first season took Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), the beloved character from The Good Wife/The Good Fight universe, and moved her to New York to work with the New York Police Department. Every episode up until the first season finale unfolded a little bit like an episode of the classic show Columbo. Viewers knew who had committed the crime and delighted in watching the eccentric Elsbeth figure out the culprit with her maverick and hyper observant style. But in last season’s finale, viewers found themselves in the dark along with the show’s title character. “That was fun to play,” Preston says. “I was really thrown off my game.”

Expect to see more of a shake up to the show’s format this season. “We don’t want the audience to get too comfortable,” Preston explains. “So we are going to mess around a little bit.” Look for episodes where the audience is not given the full story or is given the wrong story or the audience knows things that Elsbeth does not. “We are having a lot of fun trying to surprise ourselves,” Tolins says.

When they thought about the second season, Tolins says they wanted to unsettle Elsbeth’s world a bit. “Elsbeth came with a past from Chicago. We wanted to explore how that can still complicate her life. So we started this plot called ‘the black car plot.’” The second season premiere ends with someone pulling up to Elsbeth in a black car and telling her to “get in.”  

That someone is Christian Borle who reprises his role of Carter Schmidt, a character he played for five episodes of The Good Wife and three episodes of The Good Fight. “He’s a lawyer from Chicago who crossed paths with Elsbeth and he is coming to see her about some newly unfinished business and that’s as far as I’ll go,” Tolins says.

Borle marks the first character, besides Elsbeth of course, to come over from the previous shows. “‘It’s tricky for our show,” Tolins says. “We originally thought let’s not break the universe. Let’s not have actors who were on The Good Wife or The Good Fight play different characters. And that just became untenable. If we stuck to that rule, we would be denying ourselves the pleasure of working with most of the great actors in New York. I love the fact that we have that history to draw on for some fans but I also feel it’s important that you do not have to watch any of The Good Wife and The Good Fight to enjoy Elsbeth.”

The second season premiere also weaves in characters viewers saw in the first season. Jane Krakowski’s real estate agent Joann Lenox is seen on a bench advertisement and Daniel Davis’ Dr. Yablonski is an opera enthusiast. “We have some fun ones coming up,” Tolins says. “It feels like New York. Even though New York is a big city filled with millions of people, you do run into people you know repeatedly. I like that. It makes the show feel more homey.”

Daniel K. Issac also joins the cast as the new by-the-books lieutenant. “Here’s this guy who would like to get Elsbeth’s office and he’s a fun character for us because he’s hard to read and we are figuring him out as we go,” Tolins says.  Also returning this year are the detectives from last year including Smullen (Danny Mastrogiorgio), Edwards (Micaela Diamond), and Donnelly (Molly Price). The clueless detective Buzz Fleming (Daniel Oreskes) who investigates the case in the season premiere will also pop up throughout the season. “We will start to see them at the same place at the same time,” Tolins says. “Something like the judges on The Good Wife and The Good Fight where there’s kind of a stable of them and you pick the one that is the most fun for that particular week.”

Before filming began on the first season, Tolins watched every episode of The Good Fight and The Good Wife featuring Elsbeth. He picked up on little things, like the fact that Elsbeth has a son, something that is only mentioned once. He began to wonder what it would be like to have Elsbeth as your mother? “And what kind of mother would she be? Obviously she is a very loving, heart on her sleeve person which is both wonderful and can cause problems when she is your mother,” he says. 

Will viewers finally meet Teddy this season?  “All I can say is I hope that we get to meet Teddy,” Tolins says. “And I love the fact that people really want to.” 

Last season, viewers also got a peek into the idea that Elsbeth isn’t necessarily always as cheerful as her brightly colored attire would suggest. “I’m very very happy that we’ve started to dig into some elements of her character,” he says. “I think to be as cheerful as she is, that often comes from a deep place. We also know she’s very very intelligent and very intelligent people think about things that are not always so happy.”

Elsbeth returns for a second season October 17 at 10 p.m. on CBS. Episodes are available the next day on Paramount+.

Amy Amatangelo, the TV Gal®, is a Boston-based freelance writer and a member of the Television Critics Association. She wasn’t allowed to watch much TV as a child and now her parents have to live with this as her career. You can follow her on Twitter (@AmyTVGal).

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