Elsbeth is a fun little Friday night show

I love to see a quirky character solve a murder

A few weeks ago at this very newsletter, I wrote a big thing where I whined about the lack of Good Friday Night Shows, a genre without a firm definition but which can be shoved under the big umbrella of “a fun and chill and relatively low-stakes show to watch where the episodes stand on their own with a beginning, middle, and end.” It’s good to have a show like that in the rotation, in there with your stressful prestige dramedies and epic dragon shows and goofball comedies. Variety is good. Which is why it brings me such pleasure to tell you I found and finished a lovely Friday Night Show recently: Elsbeth.

Elsbeth, quickly, goes like this: Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston), a quirky defense lawyer from The Good Wife, gets a spinoff series on CBS where she goes to New York and begins working with the NYPD as part of a consent decree over corruption and such. There’s a running thread throughout the first season about all of this, about who is corrupt and why and the various subterfuge involved on both fronts, but mostly it’s a device to get Elsbeth to solve some murders. Which she is great at. 

The structure is all very Columbo. Each episode opens with the murder itself. We know who did it and how they did it and why they did it before Elsbeth even shows up. Then, the cat-and-mouse game is afoot. It’s a fun little trick that works well when done well, which it is here, more of a How Will She Catch Them than a whodunnit. Preston is a blast in the role, all quirks and sideways glances and disheveled appearances that mask a brain that’s running 1000mph. There’s a formula here: she meets the murderer, the murderer underestimates her until it’s too late, the murderer gets tripped up and arrested. All very satisfying. 

It helps that the murderers are played by fun guest stars each week and are usually so insufferable and/or evil that you can’t wait to see them get ruined. Gina Gershon shows up one week. Jesse Tyler Ferguson shows up another. Retta pops up in an episode, too, and yes, more shows should let Retta swoop in and commit a murder or two. It would really spice up The Bear.

The second season is in production and I’m already excited about who they might bring in as the next crew of murderers. Edi Patterson would be incredible. Lucy Liu would be delightful. Jon Hamm is on every other show so let’s get him in there, too, just in the name of completism. The options are almost limitless, or at least only limited by who is willing to pop up in a goofy little CBS murder procedural as a killer. It looked like everyone in the first season had a blast being evil so maybe word will spread. Walton Goggins would be the ideal get here, of course.

But yes, the main takeaway is that Elsbeth is exactly the kind of show I was asking for when I wrote that. It’s perfect for a mid-summer binge, or even to leave on ice for when your brain is cooked and you just want 45 minutes of mystery to be introduced and solved before bed. If you are looking for a show that fits the framework we’ve talked about here, you could do a hell of a lot worse.

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STUFF I TYPED

— my weekly House of the Dragon Scorecard for Vulture, in which I propose that the show should introduce a character named Wally

— the Five Spot, which opens with a free section about how happy I am that Manny Jacinto has the internet all sweaty this week

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— Liz Shannon Miller gave us 62 Tom Cruise facts for Tom Cruise’s 62nd birthday 

— good blog about the stingray controversy 

— as an old man who has been listening to pop radio on the way to and from various Wawas this summer, I appreciated this explainer thing about Chappell Roan

— Platformer interviewed Threads top banana Adam Mosseri about the first year of the project, which was a good read but not good enough to get me to start using Threads

—wellllll July 4th was Thursday so I watched the Joe Pera fireworks video again

— HitchBOT situation here 

— I did not know that Leo the Lion, the guy that roars before the MGM logo shows up at the beginning of movies, ended up in Philly

— Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are doing a movie together and somehow it’s not a Bourne/Accountant crossover like when Godzilla and King Kong show up in the same movie 

— Hollywood poop scandal

— Mina Kimes is correct, as usual

—officer fired for stealing 700 pounds of cheddar cheese 

— I am massively curious how one plans to enforce a fine for peeing in the ocean

— the Pittsburgh Pirates hit so many home runs against the Mets (lol) (go Phillies) that they ran out of celebratory fireworks before the game ended

— I challenge any of you to find anything more American than “Danny Trejo involved in fist fight over water balloon attack during July 4th parade and the local news interviewed a teenage eyewitness in a shirt that said ‘I LIKE OLDER WOMEN’”

Okay, that’s enough for this week. Please share and subscribe and watch Elsbeth.