Michael Emerson to Recur as Foil for Wife Carrie Preston in ‘Elsbeth’ Season 2

It’s happening! Real-life spouses Carrie Preston and Michael Emerson will be onscreen together again.

Emerson is set for an arc on Preston’s Elsbeth in Season 2, it was announced during the show’s panel at New York Comic Con. He joined Preston, Wendell Pierce, co-creators and executive producers Robert and Michelle King, and showrunner and executive producer Jonathan Tolins on stage to deliver the news. (The panel also included a sneak peek at the Halloween episode.)

Emerson is recurring as “a foil to his wife’s Elsbeth Tascioni, in which he will play Judge Milton Crawford, a haughty, soft-spoken and bespectacled man from an old New England family of public servants who sees his place in the nation’s elite as a birthright.” His first episode will air on Thursday, December 12, and additional episode dates will be announced at a later time.

Both Preston and Emerson have wanted this onscreen reunion—they’ve worked together before, such as on Person of Interest, and he just finished working with the Kings on Evil—to happen and even shared their ideas for who he could play with TV Insider.

When we asked her after the first season for her dream guest star, Preston said with a laugh, “You know I have to say Michael Emerson.” When it came to the type of character she wanted him to play, “It would be fun to see Michael not be a murderer or someone evil. It would be fun to see him be maybe even part of the police department or something like that,” she said at the time. “It’s not up to me, but I’ll take him in any role that I can get him in.”

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And when we spoke to Emerson after that, he was on the same wavelength as his wife. “It would be too obvious if I were the killer of the week or something like that. As soon as my face comes on, everybody will know, which is not so much a problem on Elsbeth because we know who the killer is from pretty much the first frame anyway,” he admitted.

“It would be more interesting to play somebody that was a little bit peripheral, but sort of slowly working their way toward getting Elsbeth’s full attention,” he continued. “I don’t know what the nature of that would be. Someone that she sees regularly and innocently who turns out to be more than she imagined, maybe that would be a good role to play or something that tricks the audience for me to play, someone who is purely innocent, maybe a quiet, innocent person who gets into a predicament.”

Executive producer Robert King told us ahead of the CBS drama’s premiere last season that having them back together “would be so much fun.” Well, it’s time to see that fun onscreen.

Are you looking forward to Emerson’s arc? What are you hoping to see? Let us know in the comments section below.

Elsbeth, Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS