Review: Elsbeth, “Crazy in Love” | Season 4, Episode 1 / Cupertino, "Michael & Olivia" | Season 1, Episode 1

Welcome back to Episodic Medium's coverage of CBS' Thursday procedurals, which this fall means coverage of both Elsbeth and new drama Cupertino. To follow along with Josh's coverage through the spring, take advantage of our limited-time, best all year $40 price for an annual subscription. You can see our full fall schedule here.

“The work is never done.”

Though that line comes in the context of a conversation between the killer of the week on the fourth season premiere of Elsbeth and our eponymous lead, the sentiment is equally applicable to this series' long-running nature. Elsbeth is the type of procedural that ideally runs for many years, because networks like CBS live and die by procedurals. To me, the most fascinating question that Elsbeth has to answer this year is "How can it stay fresh and entertaining, to new and old viewers alike?"

In recent weeks, by sheer coincidence, I’ve been rewatching 1970s-era episodes of Columbo on Peacock. It’s the obvious corollary to Elsbeth, even though we've discussed the marked differences between the two shows, specifically in that Elsbeth does end up having longer bubbling storylines beneath each episode’s killer-of-the-week aspect. We knew next to nothing about Lt. Columbo of the Los Angeles Police Department, but we know (and have known) plenty about Elsbeth Tascioni. But each show begins with a murder, each episode has at least one marquee guest star to bounce off the title character, and each show has a titular sleuth who is deliberately off-kilter both because it’s their personality and to frazzle each episode’s murderer.

Columbo, because of the quirky nature of its release pattern over the course of six decades, aired longer installments than Elsbeth. But by the end of this season, Elsbeth will have aired 70 episodes compared to the 69 from Columbo. Yet by the fourth season of Columbo, you can start to see Peter Falk and the writers mix things up and perhaps lean a little too hard on Columbo’s goofy mannerisms to the point of making him a bit of a caricature. While I love Columbo, it was not perfect. Elsbeth Tascioni has not gotten too much as of late, because she’s always a bit too much by design. Columbo became even more defined by his quirks, by seeming even messier, odder, and more in-your-face to throw others off, and to keep Falk as engaged as he was in his burgeoning film work.

One area in which Columbo only touched on in later seasons, and briefly, was that while Lt. Columbo was an amazing sleuth, he was not a great police officer and his fellow cops may have treated him a bit standoffish because of that. Elsbeth, from its inception, had more antagonism built in; while we know Elsbeth to be a shrewd but sunny ex-lawyer, the cops she dealt with from the first episode saw her as an existential threat to their work. Yet over time, her keen observations have led to solid arrests the cops may have otherwise missed. So one way Elsbeth can hopefully remain fresh and entertaining is by minimizing that antagonism. Elsbeth has been around the precinct long enough that you'd think the cops she works with would begin to grasp that her goofy-seeming hunches keep paying off. If that pushback continues, I hope it'll be given better justification.

“Crazy in Love” does establish such a reason for Detective Smullen (Danny Mastrogiorgio) to treat Elsbeth and Officer Hackett (Lindsay Mendez) with disdain. Though we know that the famous couples therapist Serena Collyer (Nicole Scherzinger) has killed her on-again, off-again hook-up Casey Arthurs (Bradley Stryker), Smullen quickly leaps to blame one of Serena’s purported success stories, a rage-filled husband named Luke (Jonathan Higginbotham) who the murderous therapist misleads into thinking Casey slept with his wife. As is often the case, while some of the evidence points to Luke, Elsbeth quickly becomes suspicious of Serena. 

There’s a bit of sitcommy writing in the subplot surrounding Smullen, as Elsbeth and Hackett are stunned to see his profile on a dating app before eventually realizing that his wife has left him and he’s feeling awfully lonely and adrift. (Is it an easy joke to have him looking at a webpage titled “Laundry: A Beginner’s Guide?” Yes. Did I laugh out loud? Yes. I'm a mark for easy jokes.) The same is true of when Smullen and Elsbeth have it out in front of a couples group because the moderator thinks they too are romantic partners. But the push-pull dynamic at least allows for Smullen’s unwillingness to go with Elsbeth’s correct assumptions for more reasons than just the usual antipathy. 

Serena, of course, is only so good at putting up an innocent facade. We know from the outset that she is hopelessly in lust (if not love) with Casey, even when he seems to not even realize the effect he has on her. Perversely, his dismissive attitude towards her intense come-ons and up-and-down nature only arouses her more. It would have to, seeing as he ignores her while she does a sexy striptease for him while he’s playing video games. And even if Serena says she doesn’t watch television, making their literary avatars Sam and Diane is awfully fitting. No, Diane Chambers never killed Sam Malone, but their impassioned on-again, off-again relationship was incredibly toxic over the years. The only difference here is that Sam Malone had an intense energy of his own when paired with Diane, while Casey is tossed-off and self-aware about the fact Serena always comes back to him.

It’s a comment, in a way, on the predictable nature of something long-term. Casey ends up being wrong that Serena will always come back, since she murders him to eliminate the temptation he represents. A show like Elsbeth could run for a long time, if all the right factors fall into place. (Not “on for six decades like Columbo” long, but you get what I mean.) But to do that, it may need to shake things up a bit itself. I hope it does, and I hope it sticks the landing well. The third-season premiere couldn’t have hinted at “What if Elsbeth dated a Mamdani type?” as being the long-term storyline last year. My hope is this season offers surprises, too, instead of doubling down on the lead character's quirks. It's avoided that temptation before. Fingers crossed the writers don't step in that trap this year.

Stray observations

• Teddy and Roy setting their wedding date for May 1, of course, allows this to be a long-running backstory for the whole season. 
• That, and Teddy inadvertently reminding us that we haven’t ever met Elsbeth Tascioni’s mother before. (Carrie Preston has, in recent interviews, said her dream guest star to play Elsbeth's mom would be Meryl Streep. The Kings should call in a favor with her Mamma Mia! co-star Christine Baranski.)
• Speaking of Teddy and Roy, I did snicker at Elsbeth saying they were getting really into hockey. I wonder why, said the man who hasn’t watched Heated Rivalry but knows enough about it to get the presumed reference.
• "Josh is a mark for easy jokes, Part Two": I snickered at Elsbeth scoffing at Serena for not watching TV because “some of it’s great.”
• I sincerely hope we see more of Gloria Reuben on this season of Elsbeth, after not seeing her at all as Wagner’s wife Claudia last year. One brief scene is nice, but let’s have more!
• Just as sincerely, I hope the show does not attempt to create a romance out of thin air between Elsbeth and Smullen. Come on now. They don’t have a will-they-won’t-they-vibe.
• Fun fact: Columbo was on TV for so long that the final killer, in an episode from 2003, was a young Matthew Rhys.
• I'm always fascinated by how the order of producing episodes and the order in which those episodes air isn’t always a one-to-one scenario. To wit: “Crazy in Love” is the second episode produced this season, whereas next week’s installment was produced first. (The sheer amount of guest stars in that episode, which I’ve also seen, is enough that I’m surprised it didn’t air first too.)

“Help me find peace.”

At their core, the Kings’ natural creative habitat is the courtroom. The Good Wife proved to be so much more intelligent than the stereotypical procedural, so much more adept at navigating ripped-from-the-headlines storytelling without having to remind its audience how current it was being, and so much more compelling thanks in no small part to its soap-opera-style setup and deep bench of richly developed characters. I do very much enjoy Elsbeth, but I also had a lot of fun rewatching…well, most of The Good Wife last year. (I don’t think it’s specifically because of the surprising and tragic death of one of its leads in the fifth season, but the creative downturn did start soon after.) The Good Wife, at its creative zenith, was an immensely better show because the Kings are clever writers beyond the standard killer-of-the-week stuff you see on Elsbeth.

And so I'm quite glad that we have back-to-back Kings dramas on Thursday nights now, with Cupertino, a show whose name should be recognizable to you even if you don’t know why. If you know anything about Big Tech, or if you happen to have an Apple product, you have probably heard the name Cupertino, the Northern California city where Apple’s headquarters are based. Real-life tech giants like Apple get name-dropped in “Michael & Olivia,” the show’s pilot, but the focal point is the fictional S-Talk, a tech startup looking to become an apex predator in the industry that begins the series by firing its head counsel as well as a relatively-fresh-out-of-law-school associate. By firing Michael Price (Mike Colter) and Olivia Siffre (Rachel Keller) on the same day at the same time, S-Talk inadvertently sets them on a new joint path.

The overarching premise of Cupertino is to have Michael and Olivia serve as the legal David to the Goliaths of Big Tech, defending the little guys who would otherwise get chewed up and spat out by companies like S-Talk. First, our heroes have to join forces and sue for wrongful termination (in Michael’s case) and sexual harassment (in Olivia’s case). Michael is righteously angry about the realization that he’s been fired specifically so the money he would otherwise collect from the company going public can be reallocated to new investors, under the guise of them saying he leaked proprietary information. Olivia, meanwhile, has two grim arguments. First, as flashbacks show us, the company's founder (Will Brill) sexted her in the middle of a one-on-one work session; second, that same founder has used her voice and personality as the model for S-Talk's AI chatbot Daisy, which has an almost gleeful willingness to talk freely about sex in very NC-17-rated fashion.

Many of the hallmarks of the Kings’ past work are present in “Michael & Olivia.” Like The Good Wife and Elsbeth, this drama is set amidst the 1%. (Considering the setting, it’s really taking place among the 1% of the 1%.) As in the high-watermark fifth season of The Good Wife, our two leads have to create a legal firm from the ground up, this time with a fancy lobby that's connected to an otherwise-empty bit of real estate. Naturally, faces from other King shows pop up here, like Colter (from both The Good Wife and Evil) and Joe Morton, playing Michael’s legal-star father. And, of course, there are goofy judges. I was intrigued when I saw Jackie Earle Haley’s name in the guest list, and thought it was a hoot when he showed up as a folksy judge listening to the concurrent cases Michael and Olivia have against S-Talk, only brought in after they successfully get the first judge to recuse himself due to a financial conflict of interest.

The advantage to this familiarity that the Kings have with the broader audience means they get a bit of breathing room to work. We know that they can craft intensely emotional and dramatic storylines and characters. We know they’re adept at turning legalese into something compelling. And we also know they like to have a whimsical sense amidst even real-world horrors, now including AI taking over everyday life. Sometimes, that whimsy comes out in wink-wink, nudge-nudge-style jokes. There’s the fact that the company at the heart of this opening episode’s dual cases is named S-Talk, or…y’know, stalk. And one I will keep coming back to is one that’s going to be unavoidable for a while: our female lead’s last name is spelled Siffre, but pronounced “cipher,” which feels like the Kings daring themselves to ensure the character and performer don’t feel like one.

Rachel Keller, as Olivia, is one of the new faces to the King-iverse, and makes a solid impression in this first hour. Both she and Colter have to navigate a lot in the 42-minute episode, as Olivia and Michael have to grapple with the rampant harassment they face due to their gender and race, while also quickly demonstrating that they’re talented enough lawyers who can fend off bigger firms and companies. And they have to help lay the groundwork for what this show will become on a week-to-week basis. If I’m being honest, I liked Keller’s performance more; she's playing something closer to an audience surrogate with less familiarity about the world of Big Tech. Colter's got a few good moments, but it's going to take a couple episodes for me to shake the image of the powerful and sly drug kingpin Lemond Bishop.

The Kings, as evidenced by the best seasons of The Good Wife, seem to thrive most when there’s a lot going on. Here, it’s a great deal of setup, including the base-level characterizations of the episode’s title characters. Michael is frustrated with the fact that he’s best known not for his own legal prowess, but for his father’s fame. Olivia is balancing her own relative naivete to the world of Silicon Valley, her religious background, and her somewhat savant-like legal skills. The easy reason that younger audiences tend to dismiss procedurals is that each episode feels like a faint echo of the previous installment, just the exact same thing each week. The Kings have shown long before now that they can buck that trend, and Cupertino is further proof. It’s only in the episode’s final minute or two that we get a sense of what the week-to-week experience is going to be with the cliffhanger-esque appearance of another of the show’s regular characters played by Nik Dodani. I liked the opening salvo of Cupertino, but I'm equally curious to see how the Kings balance the case-of-the-week elements with longer-form storytelling. As a number of other critics have pointed out, it's seemingly a breath of fresh air that they're getting a full season to tell this story. I'm ready for it. 

Stray observations

• We’re going to see a lot of returning favorites from the King-iverse on this show, especially since the Kings don’t need to worry about playing fair with certain actors and actresses having appeared on The Good Wife. (Aside from Colter and Morton, Steven Pasquale appears as a legal rival of Michael’s, and I have to assume he’s coming back at some point.)
• Two performers who are notably absent in this episode, at least considering that they’re apparently regulars, are Busy Philipps and Renee Elise Goldsberry. 
• The other series regular is Ella Stiller as Christy, the snarky assistant who gets fired for having spoken to Michael after his dismissal. (You can guess who the actress’ real-life dad is by her last name. Explains why she’s got good comic timing!)
• The Internet tells me Haley is 5 foot, 5 inches, so I suppose the height thing would be a challenge for this character in most courtrooms.
• The Internet also tells me I should be more familiar with Keller, since I definitely watched the first season of HBO Max’s Tokyo Vice, on which she was a regular. I have apparently memory-holed that experience!
• One aspect I wonder about: though our heroes briefly attempt to play the race card (because of how low they’ve already stooped), this show is largely pretty white among its cast so far. And the way that New York studios are doubling for Northern California is like how Vancouver often doubles for big U.S. cities in other TV shows. Point being, I hope the show does a better job of looking like Cupertino moving forward.
• On that latter point, I smiled at the young actress’ reference to The Gilded Age (not least because that show’s cast includes the aforementioned Baranski), but was quickly reminded that it, too, films in New York.
• Olivia’s religious background is going to keep coming up, which is no surprise considering how the Kings have discussed religion in shows like Evil (also co-starring Colter). But my eyebrows did raise at her Liberty University diploma. 
• Come on, Michael, who doesn’t like musicals? (To that point, Colter rolling his eyes at himself for singing “Hard-Knock Life” was his best moment.)