Will ‘Elsbeth’ Season 2 Bring Carrie Preston Back to a Courtroom?

Over the course of The Good Wife and The Good Fight, viewers saw Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) the lawyer. Now, on her own show, Elsbeth, she’s solving crimes alongside the NYPD; at first, she was ostensibly there as part of a consent decree while secretly investigating Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce) for possibly corruption, but now, with that case closed (he’s innocent) and everything out in the open, she has an official office at the precinct. But there was a storyline discussed that would’ve brought Elsbeth back into a courtroom.

“At one point, we talked about there being a murder and Wagner being  arrested for it, and Elsbeth having defending him at the beginning of season 2,” showrunner Jonathan Tolins told TV Insider. However, “it wasn’t the show that was emerging as we worked on the season.”

But could we see Elsbeth back in the courtroom for another reason in Season 2? “She still has to take the bar in New York if we do that,” Tolins noted, adding, “We have a fun idea of possibly bringing her back into a courtroom, but not necessarily in the same way we’ve seen her before.”

The Good Fight (Patrick Harbron / CBS)

He also pointed out that Elsbeth, unlike the other two shows in the universe, isn’t a legal procedural. “It’s a hard time to do legal dramas with the faith in the courts being what they are right now, sadly. And we really do think of this as it’s a fun police procedural with a twinkle in its eye,” he said. “We’re not going into either politics or sort of issues of the week kind of legal stuff because also the history of Good Wife and Good Fight, the legal [parts], what made it so fun and exciting often is that they were taking really thorny legal questions. And that’s just not where our show lives. Our show lives in a different kind of place.”

Preston does think that if Elsbeth returns to the courtroom, she’d be a different person. “I think it would be interesting to see her in a courtroom setting again, given everything that she’s learning from the order side of the law and order and the justice side of things. She got out of law because she really didn’t want to be defending people who’d done things that were wrong,” she shared. “And so I think it would be interesting to see what kinds of skills she would bring to the courtroom based on what she’s learned.”

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She continued, “I think she has found her new calling in life, but that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t still have really extraordinary skills as a lawyer. So maybe there will be some case coming up where a lawyer has committed a crime or something like that and she can really use her background. That would be a really fun world.”

And then Elsbeth would be unstoppable.

Elsbeth, Season 2, Fall 2024, CBS