Review: Elsbeth, “Murder From Scratch” | Season 3, Episode 18

“I’m a maximalist!”

Casting is such a key aspect to a show like Elsbeth, just as it was to the show’s predecessor The Good Wife as well as its key source of creative inspiration, Columbo. The regular and frequently recurring cast anchors the show to the point where you have to like them enough that you’d want to keep revisiting the world on a weekly basis, of course. However, when your show is focused on a case-of-the-week aspect so heavily, the people occupying the specifics of each case have to be well chosen.

The Good Wife didn't always get its casting right, and even when you do a rewatch (as I did in the fall), that can make the show a tough sit. I'd forgotten, for example, how much I loathed Kalinda's ex-husband, and unfortunately, casting is part of why that was true. And while I do adore Columbo, I'm not going to tell you that all its episodes were created equal. Certainly the writing of each mystery was sometimes a source of creative frustration, but who played the weekly murderer also served as either a plus or minus. If the actor had the right energy with Peter Falk, it was amazing. But sometimes, things don't always gel either because of a bad performance or the wrong vibes.

Elsbeth, too, operates in a quirky little universe of its own, now being considered as a comedy series at the Emmys in spite of being an hourlong procedural. I don’t know that last week’s episode was a hoot (relative to past installments), but that was partly because of the more intense and professional energy Constance Wu brought to her role. Carrie Preston and Wu bounced off each other effectively, but in spite of the latter playing a "wealth therapist," hers was a more muted and devious killer. Often, it's Elsbeth herself who's the most colorful part of the show. But not always.

So, when you tell me that Elsbeth is going to explore a murder committed by a…sigh…tradwife played by Anna Camp, I am not only onboard, I all but demand some comic high points. And “Murder From Scratch” delivered that for me even if I was left wanting more. An episode like this makes me wish that Elsbeth could more directly ape Columbo, because even its shortest episodes were about 70 minutes long. It’s not that I wanted Elsbeth to encounter even more tradwives, per se. As I had hoped, Camp and Preston had a very funny back-and-forth energy in their scenes, and I would have been happy to see them handle each other in passive-aggressive fashion even further.