Spoilers ahead for the fall finale of CBS' Elsbeth Season 2, called "Toil and Trouble" and available streaming now with a Paramount+ subscription.
Crime procedurals are some of the most successful shows on television, ranging from new shows becoming quick hits to series like Law & Order and NCIS both at 20+ seasons and still counting. Elsbeth qualifies as one of those newer options, and is currently going strong in its second season with the fall finale wrapping up the 2024 TV schedule with none other than Laurie Metcalf on board as the murderer. The CBS dramedy's fall finale had a take on procedural production that I for one found a hilarious as a fan of the genre, which also had SVU on my mind when I spoke with showrunner and executive producer Jonathan Tolins.
In "Toil and Trouble," the actress best known for her sitcom work on shows like The Conners and Roseanne played Regina Coburn, the leading lady of a hit police procedural TV show with a passionate fanbase and a very long-lasting will they/won't they relationship between the two main characters. Honestly, that felt very true-to-life, which I'm sure many Law & Order: SVU devotees would agree with me about. (More on that later.) Rather than let the showrunner of Father Crime deprive her of her opportunity to play Lady Macbeth overseas, Regina decided to follow a spec script and murder her boss, impaling him through the eye with a stiletto heel. As one does?
Because this is Elsbeth and the show wasn't going to lose its sense of fun heading into the 2025 TV schedule, Laurie Metcalf also brought her comedic talent to playing a killer. The mystery unraveled for Regina when Elsbeth connected the dots that the actress' terrible attempts at accents were always dubbed in post-production, making her think that she's the master of accent work and landing her the job as Lady Macbeth without having to audition.
Hilariously, she even chose a stiletto heel as the murder weapon because after twenty seasons, she doesn't fully read the Father Crime scripts. (And for the record – Father Crime is a wonderfully ridiculous premise and title for a network procedural that I could also see as a midseason replacement.) When I spoke with EP Jonathan Tolins about the fall finale shortly after the reveal of the Moriarty to Elsbeth's Sherlock, he shared that it's the "gift of the procedural" to enjoy long runs on network television, and there are certainly plenty of examples. He went on:
At first I was worried, 'Oh god, how are we going to come up with all these murder mysteries or these cases?' But there is something wonderful about it. I always say it's like working in sonata form, if you're a composer, where the form itself gives you a structure to start with, and then you just find endless variety in it. And because you have that, you know you're going to have something that's going to feel like a beginning, middle, and end. You can find more and more fun ways to challenge yourself and to surprise yourself and keep it fresh that way. But if you just said, 'Go make a TV show [of] 20 hours,' that can be scary, because you might end up stretching things out too long.
Considering that Tolins brought his background as an opera enthusiast to the Season 2 premiere involving a murderous Nathan Lane, his comparison to a "sonata" makes perfect sense. Elsbeth also has yet to run for a full season of 20 hours, after the WGA writers strike meant a first season of only ten episodes. Season 2 is slated for 20, though!
The fall finale was about halfway through that count, and I'd say that Regina's murder was one of the most gruesome as well as one of the most morbidly funny. It takes a lot for a person to stab somebody with a stiletto heel, but not a lot for it to happen due to not fully reading the instructions. Tolins explained the origin of Regina confusing a stiletto heel with a stiletto dagger, sharing:
That came out of [that] there's a rule I have in the room that when we're putting together the details of the case, we try to have everything come from the very specific details of the world of that week's case. Or if there are going to be things that give away the murderer, it should be something that is deeply connected to who they are as a character, like when Vanessa Williams' character in Episode 4, she couldn't bear having an incomplete set of silverware, and so she gets caught stealing the spoon to replace the one he used to poison Claude.
The Vanessa Williams-starring episode may have particularly stuck out to me for highlighting Elsbeth and Kaya's friendship, but as Tolins noted, it's also a great example of a killer sabotaging themselves and ultimately dropping clues to be caught. The showrunner went on:
In [Episode] 209, the stiletto mistake that Regina makes is because, as an actress who's been doing this part for 20 years, when she gets a script, she only reads her lines. [laughs] Those are the kind of juicy things that just feels so like the character is what gives the murderer away, and that's what we try to do. We think it's just more fun than if it's just like, 'Oh my god, there's a security camera.'
There's a time and place for mysteries being solved on procedural TV due to security camera footage and forensic smoking guns, but would Elsbeth really be as much fun if the leading lady didn't get her big reveal at the end of each episode? As somebody who watches and enjoys a lot of procedurals as part of my job, that's part of what has made the show so refreshing over the past year.
And yet, as somebody who has been watching NBC's Law & Order: SVU off and on since high school, a NYC-set long-running crime drama combined with a leading lady who has been on board from the very beginning and a very passionate fanbase of shippers had me thinking of a very indirect spoof Mariska Hargitay's Olivia Benson and Christopher Meloni's Elliot Stabler.
When I spoke with the Elsbeth showrunner, I had to check in with Jonathan Tolins about whether any SVU similarities were deliberate. He shared:
Any resemblance is coincidental.
Honestly, when a procedural is running for 26 seasons and counting and gone in some wild directions over three decades like SVU, there are inevitably going to be similarities in some form or other to any crime shows! Once Tolins debunked any deliberate nods to SVU, he did clarify one of the most fun elements of "Toil and Trouble" other than Laurie Metcalf herself.
When I asked if the behind-the-scenes footage of Father Crime was simply shot on the Elsbeth set with the cameras turned backwards instead of forwards, the showrunner explained:
We were on the same stage sometimes. I love the gag we do, when they're in the interrogation room, and then they take the wall away, because it's actually the Father Crime interrogation room. I don't know if that was actually our interrogation room set, or we might have used some of the walls and all that. But yes, we were absolutely playing with the fun of this. We're on a cop show set on our cop show set.
All in all, "Toil and Trouble" goes down as one of my favorite episodes of Elsbeth's first two seasons so far, and the fun of the Father Crime storyline didn't mean that a much more serious cliffhanger couldn't be included due to Judge Milton Crawford, played by Carrie Preston's real-life husband Michael Emerson. I'm looking forward to seeing how the show keeps the action rolling in the new year, with the only downside that winter hiatus is going to last until nearly February.
Tune back into CBS on Thursday, January 30 at 10 p.m. ET for the winter premiere of Elsbeth Season 2, following Matlock as usual. For now, you can always revisit earlier episodes of Carrie Preston's show on Paramount+, and I'd recommend at least giving another look at the pair of episodes featuring Ben Levi Ross as Elsbeth's son.
