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While filming the new crime show \u201cElsbeth\u201d<\/a> in an Upper West Side apartment in January, Carrie Preston, playing the title character, tentatively patted the guest star Peter Grosz on the arm. The combination of the gesture and Elsbeth\u2019s hesitant expression made the attempt at comfort come across as simultaneously awkward and funny \u2014 and unmistakably true to the consistently awkward, funny Elsbeth.<\/p>\n Robert King, who created the series with his wife, Michelle, and was directing that particular episode, chuckled in delight as he watched on a monitor. Nearby the showrunner, Jonathan Tolins, said, \u201cShe always finds things like that,\u201d referring to Preston\u2019s flourish. \u201cThat was probably not in the script.\u201d<\/p>\n Premiering Thursday on CBS, \u201cElsbeth\u201d is a new project but Elsbeth herself is not. One reason Preston inhabits her fully enough to improvise such small, telling gestures is because she has been playing her for almost 14 years.<\/p>\n Fans of legal dramas have long been acquainted with Elsbeth Tascioni, a seemingly scatterbrained but diabolically effective redheaded lawyer who popped up toward the end of the first season of \u201cThe Good Wife\u201d<\/a> in May 2010. From the start, the Kings, who also created that hit show, thought of Elsbeth as an answer to Columbo<\/a>, the Los Angeles homicide detective that Peter Falk played in a series, then specials, between 1968 and 2003.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI didn\u2019t really watch \u2018Columbo\u2019 \u2014 it was a little before my time,\u201d said Preston, 56. But \u201cI knew he was a little unorthodox in the way he did things. I was like, \u2018OK, I get it: They want people to not see her coming.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n The Kings kept bringing Elsbeth back for guest stints on both \u201cThe Good Wife\u201d and its first spinoff, \u201cThe Good Fight.\u201d Despite her relatively limited screen time, she became a fan favorite, and Preston landed two Emmy nominations and one win, in 2013, for playing her.<\/p>\n The character was a little more subdued in her early appearances than she is now, but she became ever more madcap. \u201cI guess they liked what I did with it and began responding to my playing of the role over time,\u201d Preston said, referring to the Kings.<\/p>\n \u201cI think they started to bring me on to add a comic note to the proceedings,\u201d she added. \u201cAnd it evolved from there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Nobody could quite let go of Elsbeth, and Preston recalls that the Kings first mentioned possibly building a show around the character when \u201cThe Good Wife\u201d was winding down. They went on to make \u201cThe Good Fight\u201d instead, led by Christine Baranski as the powerhouse attorney Diane Lockhart. Then during the Covid-19 pandemic, the couple found themselves bingeing episodes of \u201cColumbo,\u201d and Elsbeth was once again back on their minds, promising tantalizing narrative avenues.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cPeter Falk\u2019s character is almost perfect, but if you think of him as a woman it creates a new, interesting dynamic,\u201d Robert King said in a joint video interview with his wife. \u201cEspecially post-#MeToo, without putting our hand on the politics.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWith Columbo it was all class \u2014 he got overlooked because he was a working-class guy,\u201d Michelle added. \u201cWith Elsbeth Tascioni, you layer gender on top of that.\u201d<\/p>\n While the previous two shows were set in Chicago, \u201cElsbeth\u201d takes place in New York. (The pilot does include a mention of the \u201cGood Wife\u201d stalwart Cary Agos.) The heroine has been dispatched to New York to be an outside observer at a police precinct headed by Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce), where she ends up helping solve criminal cases.<\/p>\n Watching Preston and Pierce go through scenes on the show\u2019s soundstage in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where the precinct scenes are shot, the fraught relationship between the two characters was evident from their appearance and body language. She flitted around in a bright blouse, a colorful hummingbird darting quizzical looks every which way; he was a solid mass of a man in his dark-blue uniform, letting her eccentricity bounce off him.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThere\u2019s something happening with us,\u201d Pierce said of the budding chemistry between the two characters in a video interview. \u201cDare I say it? It reminds me of Lou Grant and Mary,\u201d he continued, alluding to the characters played by Ed Asner and Mary Tyler Moore on \u201cThe Mary Tyler Moore Show\u201d in the 1970s. \u201cThat\u2019s a bold statement, but it really does.\u201d<\/p>\n That analogy is especially apropos because when Lou Grant was spun off from Moore\u2019s sitcom into his own self-titled series, it was a drama. Elsbeth, too, has changed formats, going from two legal dramas to a lighthearted procedural.<\/p>\n \u201cI would say this is a comedy,\u201d Preston said. \u201cIt\u2019s an hourlong show on network, but it\u2019s a comedy.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Elsbeth is the latest in a line of unconventional TV puzzle-solvers, following the prickly heroes of \u201cMonk,\u201d \u201cHouse\u201d and, of course, most anything that borrows from \u201cSherlock Holmes.\u201d But as its creators suggest, it is \u201cColumbo\u201d that the new series most openly honors.<\/p>\n Both shows are \u201chowdunits\u201d in which we know the culprit\u2019s identity from the beginning. Elsbeth\u2019s antagonists also are affluent and powerful, or at least power-hungry. In the first season, she is thrown into rarefied micro-worlds that include reality television, luxe co-op boards, elite matchmaking and high-level tennis. Naturally, their denizens run on hubris and look down on the ebullient Elsbeth as a na\u00efve Midwestern bumpkin. Each episode involves verbal cat-and-mouse games between her and a murderers\u2019 row of, well, murderers. (Guest stars in the first season include Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Jane Krakowski, Retta and Blair Underwood.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Even those supposedly on Elsbeth\u2019s side make the mistake of misreading her. As the cast ran through a scene on set, Gloria Reuben swanned in as Wagner\u2019s wife, telling Elsbeth \u201cAren\u2019t you a slice of heaven?\u201d with a buttery undertone of condescension.<\/p>\n \u201cI think all our shows have played with the idea of being underestimated, having characters who use their quirkiness and folksiness and their silliness to hide the fact that they\u2019re really cunning,\u201d Robert King said.<\/p>\n As Preston noted, being misjudged only helps Elsbeth win cases and, now, solve crimes. \u201cShe will cut you with a razor blade and you won\u2019t know you\u2019re bleeding until she walks away,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n One of the reasons Elsbeth fascinates viewers is that it is unclear whether her sunny demeanor and free-associating non sequiturs stem from her unfiltered nature or are part of a strategy to ensnare her opponents. The show addresses this ambiguity in the pilot, in which the killer is an acting teacher (played by Preston\u2019s \u201cTrue Blood\u201d co-star Stephen Moyer). He may be an overly confident, smarmy lech, but he is also good at his job, and at one point he tells Elsbeth, \u201cYou\u2019re doing some very fine acting right now.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Not even Elsbeth\u2019s creators fully agree on her motivations, at least publicly. Michelle King said \u201cthe character is actually totally sincere. She\u2019s not putting on an act.\u201d But Preston was more equivocal.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cI don\u2019t ever want the audience to know, because I think it\u2019s more surprising and interesting,\u201d she said. \u201cMaybe she doesn\u2019t even know sometimes when she\u2019s manipulating.\u201d<\/p>\n These divergences are par for the course for a character who remains largely opaque despite her many appearances over the years. Of her personal life, we only know that she has an ex-husband and a son. When asked if either would pop up in \u201cElsbeth,\u201d Tolins was evasive.<\/p>\n \u201cPossibly, possibly,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019ll have to watch.”<\/p>\n \u201cElsbeth has always been a side dish, and it\u2019s a delicate thing to move a side dish to the center of the plate,\u201d he added. \u201cSo we are finding lots of cool ways to hint at unexpected layers to this character and of this woman\u2019s life.\u201d<\/p>\n What will definitely remain front and center is Elsbeth\u2019s idiosyncratic charm, kindness and \u201cchildlike enthusiasm,\u201d Tolins said. \u201cThrowing that kind of character in the world of a police procedural, it\u2019s a fun tension, but also you root for her and you care about her.\u201d<\/p>\n In other words, \u201cElsbeth\u201d is a departure from the usually gritty world of modern police shows, and the woman herself is a counter to the dour parade of troubled cops with predictable dark sides instructing us about the poor state of the world.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I turn on TV, I\u2019m aware that certain shows feel like vegetables, like \u2018OK, this is meant to be good for me in the long run but that doesn\u2019t really appeal,\u2019\u201d Michelle King said, as her husband let out a laugh. \u201cThis show is dessert. It is meant to be fun and entertaining and comic, and just enjoyable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n