[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for the Elsbeth Season 1 finale “A Fitting Finale.”]
Considering Elsbeth has been renewed for a Season 2 and we can’t imagine Carrie Preston‘s character without Wagner (Wendell Pierce) and Kaya (Carra Patterson), the fact that she’s sticking around isn’t too surprising.
In the finale, Wagner, starting out the episode ready to book Elsbeth’s flight back to Chicago himself after her betrayal with her investigation into him possibly being corrupt (he wasn’t), not only comes around to her staying but also gives her Noonan’s old office! Plus, the show deviates from the case-of-the-week structure a bit by making us wait until the end to see who the murderer was (Andre De Shields’ fashion designer, not Laura Benanti’s model).
Below, showrunner Jonathan Tolins breaks down the finale and shares some early teases about Season 2.
You wrapped up the Wagner investigation in the penultimate episode, and you didn’t have a twist of about it in the finale. When did you know you wanted to do that?
Jonathan Tolins: We realized early on that the way our show is built, we don’t have that much real estate for a big, complicated investigation. I also felt that it would be hard to go too far believing that Wagner was such a bad guy, and I figured the audience would think he wasn’t a bad guy. That’s why we decided to start revealing the truth about Noonan relatively early on. I think it’s in [Episode] 7 where they have that conversation where you see that Noonan has had all this resentment, and even at the end of 6, you see Noonan taking money, though it’s not clear whether or not Wagner is in on it. So we wanted to not let the audience get too far ahead, and we also felt that the relationships growing between the characters was so moving and fulfilling that we wanted to be done with the Wagner investigation before the season ended. … We felt that what we really care about is the emotional fallout of it and the aftermath, and that’s why we saved that for the final episode.
Talk about leaving Elsbeth and Wagner in a good place versus having him maybe just want her to stay and not accept the hug, which was a sweet moment.
Well, it’s funny, she wants to hug him in the pilot, and he says no. So we thought there was a nice bookend to having her hug him at the finale, although I have to say I was editing Elsbeth’s housewarming party in [Episode] 7, and they do hug. But it still felt like it was sort of the closure from where we started, or at least a new place for them where they are in the relationship.
Michael Parmelee / CBS
What do you enjoy most about what everything being out in the open means for what you get to do with the two going forward?
We’ll be coming up with new complications for all of them, but I do like that the secret stuff between them, at least that first event of the investigation, is behind us. I also like the way we sort of found a way to make the whole idea of the consent decree part of the question of, was it ever real and is it believable or not? Which is sort of a meta question about the show itself. And I think we came up with a way that now it feels like, okay, maybe it was a ruse, but it’s turned into something quite positive.
Is there going to be another season-long, multi-episode mystery running alongside the cases of the week next season?
We’ll be working on a much bigger canvas. We did nine new episodes after the pilot. We now have an order for 20 episodes for next season. I don’t know if we’re going to do one big arc or we might do two or three things that last certain parts of the season.
I will say I’m excited by the prospect of having a little more room to do more with the personal lives of our three main characters; the investigation sort of took up a lot of that. Columbo was two hours with commercials, and we’re an hour and plus we have more commercials now than they used to, so we have just under 43 minutes, and we try to build relatively complex murder cases and do some interesting plotting. So it’s tight. We’re trying to find the right balance, but we have these three wonderful characters and actors, and we want to keep their stories as rich as possible while also fulfilling the mandate of the procedural.
Something I enjoyed was seeing Elsbeth a bit out of her depth in the finale when she didn’t have a hunch when she usually does. Why did you want to explore that at this point?
Again, it’s a little bit of a meta thing. There’s always the worry that a show like this might get a little repetitive, and some people complain, if you know who did it at the beginning, there’s no surprise. I actually don’t feel that way at all. Columbo ran 30 years, and the surprise is you’re playing at home trying to figure out what are the clues that are going to give away or how is Elsbeth going to be able to prove who did it? I think that there are plenty of surprises along the way in that, but still, we wanted to show that we can break form. And so the finale doesn’t show you who did it, and we worked hard to have enough misdirect, so you really aren’t clear who did it along the way.
And actually, a lot of people don’t notice, we did do other things. In the co-op episode, which aired second, it turned out it wasn’t the murderer you saw, it was everybody. In Episode 5, Blair Underwood’s character didn’t mean to kill the person and did. In Episode 9, the wrong person gets killed. So we’re always pushing against what’s expected in this form.
Why did you want to move Elsbeth into that bigger office besides the symbolism of Wagner giving it to her?
Of course, it’s symbolic, it felt like, Noonan had this office, and wouldn’t it be nice as a nice sort of symbol of her moving into it? And another behind-the-scenes reason, it’s very hard to shoot in that tiny little office. So this gives us more, and I’m sure Nick Francone and the other people in the art department are going to do wonderful things with that space.
I can’t wait to see how she decorates it.
And I think we will have a new version of her magic window.
Kaya’s on track to become a detective. Talk about what you wanted to do with her this season being on Elsbeth’s side, being the one that Elsbeth confided in about Wagner, and professionally.
The two of them are wonderful actresses, and they have a fantastic chemistry both on and off screen. I can’t really answer what we’re going to do for sure, but it certainly felt like Kaya had grown a lot working with Elsbeth and probably became a little bit more confident through the course of the year and more willing to rock the boat. And she actually stands up to Wagner in the last episode, so it felt like natural for her to get what she’s been talking about wanting all season is to eventually become a detective. Now, there may be complications because certainly we don’t know, are they able to work separately? Does Elsbeth have the same magic without Kaya? Does Kaya have the same magic without Elsbeth? And I have some other ideas and tricks up my sleeve that the writers room will be grappling with, but I can’t say for sure.
Have you talked about what Kaya being on the fast track to detective means for the rotation you have going?
I certainly don’t expect us to have just Kaya the detective and Elsbeth the consent decree lady working together every case. We will continue to have our fun rotation of detectives, and I hope to add more. We’ll mix it up.
Are you looking at keeping the main cast as it is for Season 2?
Yeah, I’m hoping we might have a little bit more flexibility of getting really some great people who can recur a bit like our detectives do. But the way the show is built, it’s not just creative. It’s also a strategy for budget that you have a small cast of regulars, so you can afford to have these wonderful bigger guest stars.
Talk about capping the season off with Laura and Andre in the finale.
Yeah, it was tricky because it was the first time where we’re not revealing who did it at the beginning, so you had to have Nadine’s part absolutely fit the pattern we’ve set for the murderer. And then we wanted to have someone who would bring the sort of gravitas and also the mentor role and be vivid and hilarious the way Andre is as Matteo. But the strategy was, if Matteo is functioning to create the Elsbeth fashion show, then the audience is not going to immediately think of him as a suspect in the murder. And that was just figuring out a way to do our best to try to make the audience think, is it Nadine or is it Nick or is it the two of them working together, and try to hide the ball as long as we can.
The thing I was very excited about is the hard clue that we finished that with, finding the picture if you zoom into Gisela’s sunglasses, which was a very fashion week kind of clue. And that actually came up, because at the very first dinner the writers room had, the night before we met for the first time, somehow I was showing on my phone a picture that my daughter Selina took of our dog Buddy with an iPhone. And if you zoom in closer, closer, closer, closer, you could see a reflection of Selina taking the picture in Buddy’s eye. And I was showing that, and I remember Michelle King said, oh, that’s a clue. And then when we were working on the story for 110, and we were saying we could have a certain kind of big fashion figure who sits in the front row, I thought, we can use that clue. And the visual effects people did an amazing job.
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Andre and Carrie were so good together in those scenes at his house in Connecticut.
Yeah, they’re wonderful. And that was a little bit of me. I live in Connecticut. Also, I was thinking there are a lot of artsy people who buy houses up in Rockport where Sondheim was and all that. Also, we wanted a place where something or someone could be buried.
That was great. I was like, there’s something going on with that dog.
I’m also very excited about Gonzo, who is now Elsbeth’s dog, and what I’m so happy about is it really just came out naturally. We were writing Episode 8 and the dognapper and Gonzo helping solve the crime, and then we just started to think, what if Elsbeth had a dog? Columbo had a dog called Dog, a Bassett hound, I think, it was really lazy. And so we thought, what if Gonzo becomes her dog? And we had her take her home. Blossom is the name of the real dog who plays Gonzo, and Carrie is a dog person, and she fell in love with Blossom.
So Gonzo’s sticking around?
Gonzo is here. We’re keeping Gonzo.
Have you talked at all about having two-episode cases or something like that in Season 2?
We haven’t yet. We’ll see. We certainly are going to have a break over Christmas and stuff where we’re not going to have new episodes for us, so we might want to do some kind of cliffhanger to keep us going. But again, all that is also in addition to creative questions, there are production and business questions about it. Sorry, I’m being so vague. It’s just I depend on my room so much. I don’t like to make a decision without it.
I was just curious if there were conversations in Season 1, and because there was a small episode count that you just knew you wouldn’t be able to do it?
Oh, we were just trying to get that order for Season 2, and we were already shooting the finale when we found out we were going to come back.
Elsbeth, Season 2, Fall 2024, CBS