[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Elsbeth Season 2 Episode 8 midseason finale, “Toil and Trouble.”]
Elsbeth ended its Season 2 midseason finale on a major cliffhanger that further deepens the new rivalry between Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) and Judge Crawford (Michael Emerson, Preston’s husband). The legal drama’s December 19 episode mostly took place on set of a long-running fictional series called Father Crime, and TV legend Laurie Metcalf was recruited to play one half of the procedural’s lead duo. The drama off of the set was just as juicy.
The case Carter (Christian Borle) from The Good Wife/Fight warned Elsbeth about earlier this season came to light in the episode’s final moments, setting up a storyline that will finally reveal why Elsbeth left Chicago for New York in such a hurry at the beginning of the series. The case involves a messy divorce with a client named Mark Van Ness. As Crawford seemingly revealed to the press, Elsbeth was allegedly involved in unethically burying documents from this case. This was revealed on the news just as Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce) joined Elsbeth’s fight to bring this crooked judge to justice.
Here, showrunner Jonathan Tolins breaks down the meta midseason finale and what this reveal means for the future.
This episode ends with major twist revealing the possible reason why Elsbeth left Chicago for New York. Is this the beginning of revealing that tale?
Jonathan Tolins: Yeah. We’re finally filling in the full extent of what happened in Chicago. Elsbeth, her reputation will be jeopardized as will her friendship with Kaya [Carra Patterson]. And so she’s going to be driven to make things right. And I think that’s because she’s such an empathetic person and just hates the idea of having been a party to the victimization of an innocent person in Chicago. She’s not going to rest until she makes things right.
How will Elsbeth’s colleagues other than Kaya react to this very public scandal? Because she has this reputation of being the most moral of people.
It’s going to be tough. She’s going to have to make it right. Fortunately, we’re now at a point where the people she works with regularly know her and love her, ’cause it’s impossible not to love her after a certain point. They’re going to be helpful to try to figure a way out of this.
Crawford made this move against Elsbeth because she suspects he’s a bad guy, which of course we know he is. But as that bombshell news came out, Wagner had joined Elsbeth’s fight to take Crawford down. How long can we expect this feud to press on?
A bunch of episodes [laughs]. I don’t want to say exactly how it’ll play out. All I’ll say is that it’s going to take a while.
Is the Van Ness divorce your main drama for the second half of Season 2?
We were very happy with how the Van Ness divorce oddly ended up then merging and being taken over by the judge story. We will bring the Van Ness divorce story to a satisfying conclusion, I think. But what’s nice is that we basically had two big stories that we realized actually became one story.
CBS
How often can we expect Elsbeth’s son, Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), to return? How will he react to his mom’s sudden scandal?
Teddy will come back for a bunch of episodes. We love him. Ben Levi Ross was kind of magical casting. We saw a lot of people for it. And then when we saw Ben read with Carrie, it just felt instantly right. So we were very relieved to find him. He’s wonderful. His mother was actually a big TV executive and producer who I wrote a pilot for years ago, so go figure.
Teddy is very protective of his mother and is looking to make sure there are boundaries when there need to be, because she likes to be in every part of his life. But I think most of all, he just doesn’t want his mother to get hurt.
To talk about Laurie Metcalf’s plot, I chuckled at the bit about copaganda, and Elsbeth’s reaction to it, while Elsbeth and Kaya watched Father Crime. There’s also that line later on about TV mysteries not being fun when you already know who the killer is. Why include this meta commentary about your show’s own format in this episode?
Oh, we love a good meta idea or joke. Not that we want to be too responsive to what we read about our own show. Sometimes it’s fun to have the show in the debate and acknowledge that there are these different ideas about what makes a good TV show in the show. We did a thing in the Christmas episode where when Elsbeth walked down the crime scene and she looks up and she says, “Ooh, those hanging lights sure are fun!” Well, there was a cartoonist who did a thing on X of Elsbeth coming into a murder scene and she says, “Ooh, those hanging lights sure are fun!” So we like to show that we’re in there.
That is the big debate about howcatchems [an inverted detective story like Columbo]. I always like to say, people say, oh, it’s not as fun if you know who did it. And I don’t think that’s true at all. First of all, there are plenty of shows where you don’t, and also sometimes on our show you don’t, or you don’t know why. We play with the form quite a bit. But I think one of the reasons why the Columbo format is really fun is that there is a particular pleasure you get watching an actor when you know the character is lying. There is something just delicious about watching actors lie, which is not the same as they’re lying, but you don’t know whether or not they’re lying. And so I think it’s still got a lot of life left in it.
Have you always wanted to recreate a procedural within the show like you did in this episode? And did you save it for the Season 2 midseason finale for any particular reason?
No, I wish I could say we were that smart about everything. I mean, we’re lucky we were able to do the Christmas episode when we wanted, and we have a Valentine’s Day episode coming the night before Valentine’s Day. But once we realized it was going to be the last episode before a break, we did manage to bring things to a head nicely with the Crawford story to make sure.
But we knew the meta episode would be fun and special because it’s just so juicy because there are so many meta elements to it. I also did something really fun for me and hopefully the audience. The part of the showrunner Cal, who is in the showrunner of Father Crime in 208 is played by Billy Finkelstein. Billy Finkelstein was the showrunner of East New York, which is a cop show that was on CBS that I worked on. It was my last job before Elsbeth. Billy and I met, we were both writer-producers on The Good Fight for many years. I think he ran LA Law and he was on NYPD Blue. He just brings such a level of reality to it that you totally buy it.
Our production team went crazy and made so much Father Crime swag of posters and hats and tote bags. Everybody on our show now has Father Crime mugs and things. So when you walked on the set, you totally believed this alternate universe really existed, which was very exciting.
Michael Parmelee / CBS
How much convincing did it take for you to get Finkelstein to act?
Billy likes to act. Billy played a judge on The Good Fight a few times, and he also was in a movie, I think Bad Lieutenant, that he had written the screenplay and plays a tough bad guy in that. So he enjoys it. It was one phone call. I spoke to Billy, I said, Billy, we’re doing this thing. And I sent him the script and he liked it. He said, sure. And he didn’t want to leave the set. He was having a great time.
Why was Laurie Metcalf perfect for this episode?
First of all, Laurie Metcalf can play anything. She’s one of the greatest actresses on the planet, and she’s just extraordinary in everything she does. But she is particularly fantastic in this part. She’s just so funny and scary and great. I love her.
And how funny of you to cast her to play a kind of bad actor. Laurie Metcalf as a bad actor? It was entertaining.
[Laughs] Yeah, well, when she plays that moment about she’s been asked to play Lady M [MacBeth] and she can’t hide her delight that she’s finally going to be taken seriously, it’s a hoot.
The Gilded Age‘s Sullivan Jones was introduced in this episode as a potential love interest for Kaya [Carra Patterson]. Can we trust that Cameron will continue to be a good guy? Or is there another shoe to drop?
Oh, he seems like a good guy to me. He’s a sweetheart. He just gives off this sense of a nice, shy guy. The problem with Kaya and Cameron is going to be that both of them are pretty shy, and it’s going to take a while for them to let down their guards. All I’ll say is that we do have a Valentine’s Day episode coming up.
Elsbeth, Midseason Premiere, Thursday, January 30, 10/9c, CBS