‘Elsbeth’ Star Carrie Preston Says Season 2 Finds the Crime-Solving Lawyer on ‘Shaky Ground’

Note: This story contains spoilers from the “Elsbeth” Season 2 premiere.

Elsbeth Tascioni is back and on the case of a peeved opera fan who stabs an annoying audience member to death in the Season 2 premiere of the CBS series “Elsbeth,” while facing a major roadblock from within the NYPD precinct she now calls home in the form of a strict new lieutenant (Daniel K. Isaac of “Billions”).

Carrie Preston, who has played the lawyer-turned-sleuth for 14 years across “The Good Wife” and “The Good Fight”and now her own series, told TheWrap that the theme of Season 2 is,”You can’t escape your past,” which proves true not only for the lineup of colorful suspects, but for Elsbeth and her colleagues in the police.

She also discusses working with Nathan Lane — the opera buff whom Elsbeth immediately sizes up as the murderer, who is flattered that she wants to listen to him talk about the art form for hours on end.

“Starting the season off with Nathan Lane was a dream come true for me, and I’m happy to report he is just the first in a string of sensational actors who are coming to play with us this season,” showrunner Jonathan Tolins told TheWrap in a statement. “We’re having a great time playing with the show’s format this season, while throwing Elsbeth and the rest of our characters into even more vivid slices of New York life.”

TheWrap: Can you talk about Elsbeth’s interactions with some of the new characters, like the lieutenant, who tells her that if he does his job, right, she’ll be gone in a few months?

Carrie Preston: Just when she thought she could be comfortable and count on this job. [After this] introduction, she’s on some shaky ground there. He will keep popping his little head in and start poking around her world and figuring out how other people in the precinct feel about her being there. It makes sense. She’s not a detective. She doesn’t really have any license to be acting like a detective other than this very vague consent decree, so I would imagine that it is causing some ripples in the department.

On the other hand, the new detective that she’s working with on this case is happy to admit when he was wrong. It’s got to be refreshing for someone to actually listen to Elsbeth so early in the process.

Yeah, it is nice. Usually we see [the detectives] come in and have a little bit of conflict with Elsbeth and feel threatened by her. You would think that a stereotypical character like that would think one way, and the writing is so clever that it’s not going to lean into the obvious. I think that’s what keeps our show really fresh and exciting.

Another development in the Season 2 premiere is that, unfortunately, Kaya (Carra Patterson) is no longer on the fast track to become a detective.

That’s such a blow, because we ended Season 1 on such a high, but the theme of Season 2 is you can’t escape your past. It’s going to throw a wrench into things for now. There’s also some stuff that’s going to come up for Elsbeth and for [Captain] Wagner [Wendell Pierce] about their past that they’re going to have to grapple with. Luckily, Kaya and Elsbeth have such a wonderful friendship that they’re going to be able to help each other out and find a way through it. It’s a lovely thing to see, the relationship between those two.

This was a really fun episode.

Jonathan Tolins, our showrunner, is a huge opera aficionado. He was very excited to write this episode and get very specific, and he wrote it for Nathan Lane. To have Nathan Lane in there with us, it really set the tone, and it set the bar. And we had Nancy Hower directing, one of our most brilliant directors, and to have all of that combo for our first episode, it really set us off to the races in a great way.

She befriends Nathan Lane’s character and you’re almost sad that a murder had to take place for them to meet.

I love that about the show, and I love that about my character, that she tries to appeal to the murderers on a human level, even if she doesn’t like them. Of course, she doesn’t approve of their behavior, but she does want to understand where it’s coming from. That makes it really fun to play, because we’re connecting them on an emotional level or a human level. 

By all other accounts, they probably would have stayed friends, because I think she really enjoyed his passion for this art form. And he was so lonely. Jon wrote some wonderful lines where I also made some astute observations about the art form that no one else around him had really gotten. I think he was thrilled to have somebody who was a captive audience.

Her sort of superpower is she’s able to be disarming enough to where she gets them to let down their guard. 

Sometimes you really do identify with the murderers, although in this case I think we can all agree that he definitely overreacted.

Elsbeth loves the cat-and-mouse of it, because she knows that she’s going to catch that mouse. But sometimes, she doesn’t love it as much, sometimes it hurts a little bit, like in the finale of Season 1, where she really had an affection for [fashion designer and killer] Mateo. I think she sees the loneliness in Nathan Lane’s character, but he just snaps and that’s not forgivable

And we see that the Elsbeth fashion line that Mateo designed is being taken out of shops.

Everything is temporary in the world of art and fashion. I thought that was really funny. And also it enables Elsbeth to be the only one dressed like Elsbeth in this world.

“Elsbeth” airs Thursdays on CBS at 10 p.m. ET/PT and streams the next day on Paramount+. 

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