Elsbeth: Elsbeth Season 2

February 5, 2025 3:53 PM - Season 2 (Full Season)

Elsbeth continues to help the NYPD follow procedures and solve murders one bag, scarf, and awesome guest star at a time.

The subject of this season’s multi-episode mystery arc is Judge Crawford, played by Carrie Preston’s IRL husband, Michael Emerson.

Other guest stars include Nathan Lane, Pamela Adlon, Eric McCormack, Vanessa Williams, Daniel Davis (the butler from The Nanny), Rob Riggle, Vanessa Bayer, Brittany O'Grady, Christian Borle. Ioan Gruffudd is guest starring later in the season.

posted by emkelley (13 comments total)

There isn't that much to say other than that the second season has been just as much fun as the first, just as many fun guest stars, with a vibrant and amusing continuity, I really like what the Kings have done here.
posted by Kyol at 7:55 PM on February 5 [3 favorites]

It's a very pleasant show! It's funny that I enjoy this and the Good Fight so much when I could never quite warm to the Good Wife. My main caution is, if you are as suggestible as I am, you might find yourself buying a wholly out-of-character floral blazer.
posted by grandiloquiet at 9:11 AM on February 6 [2 favorites]

Yeah, I absolutely _love_ her fashion sense, although I'm pretty sure I'd find it absolutely exhausting in real life.
posted by Kyol at 9:32 AM on February 6 [1 favorite]

I am glad that season 2 will have twenty episodes!

I still wish that Michelle and Robert King would have done a spinoff about The Collective from The Good Fight; that would be compelling for the moment we're in. But this is really enjoyable, smart comfort viewing. It is so fun watching Elsbeth spar with the suspects each week, and I appreciate that Elsbeth's relationships with the NYPD characters (besides Kaya) are developing as well.
posted by emkelley at 4:41 PM on February 6

I loved The Good Wife and liked The Good Fight and Elsbeth was always one of my favorite characters, but I don't find this show good at all. Like, I watch every week and it's very enjoyable and I love Carrie Preston and I love Elsbeth and I love her fashion. And the guest stars are top-notch of course. But I just find it kind of dumb. The mysteries are just not great. They are trying to do Columbo in 44 minutes and it's not enough time to really develop the mystery, especially when they are also trying to squeeze in larger subplots about this judge and about Elsbeth's old firm and develop all these relationships between Elsbeth and everyone at the NYPD. The resolution to this week's episode (spoiler tag since it just aired last night)

where Elsbeth just gotchas the old client and that's the end of that? He threatens her and goes to jail! yay!

would have been handled with so much more subtlety and not so cleanly tied up with a bow on The Good Wife. You solve a problem but it just opens up many more problems. She wins but at what cost? Elsbeth is so black-and-white, all our heroes are Good and never corrupt and everyone who is clearly bad is super bad - even the people at the NYPD who are critical or skeptical of her soon come around and see how totally great she is. It just completely lacks the moral complexity of TGW/TGF (even though those shows both had a clear moral point of view)

Anyway I'll be over here buying up orange and pink floral blazers if anyone needs me
posted by matcha action at 5:49 AM on February 7 [1 favorite]

I find the vibe of the show fun, but I agree that the mysteries are not super compelling. I don't think the show is trying to hide the villains, either! 99% of the time, the murderer is the celeb guest star. The most interesting part of the show is finding out that (Guest Star) lives in New York, or at least is doing a big theatre run there.
posted by grandiloquiet at 8:11 AM on February 7

I don't like the choice made in the second season to turn this show into a straight comedy where everybody's funny, and the villains are just as goofy as Elsbeth. In the first season there were serious cases with very smart antagonists (like the Theater professor who carefully planned the murder of his student girlfriend) who get rattled off their cool competence by Elsbeth's wacky, unexpected behavior. (That was how she operated in The Good Wife as well.) (Even then, she tended to guess right a lot of times in a row, in order to keep the show moving quickly.) But now we've got episodes like the one with a whole space capsule full of hilariously cray-zee spoiled millionaires.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:41 PM on February 9

The Columbo references ("dotting our Ts and crossing our Is") and the corner poking is fun.
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 12:53 PM on February 11

Reading this is interesting as someone who never watched Columbo, The Good Fight or The Good Wife. I like this show but have no idea of the context people are talking about. I find it very silly and very fluffy but a pleasant watch. I honestly find most of the crimes to be ridiculously non-serious and I like that about it. I felt it as somewhat meta, doing a police procedural while making fun of police procedurals. Might go watch The Good Fight for more Elsbeth, but I don't like lawyer shoes in general.
posted by fennario at 7:40 AM on February 13 [1 favorite]

I thought this weeks' Valentine's Day episode was the best one since at least the pilot. (I wonder how much of that might be because they more or less ditched the Columbo framing. When they lampshaded the "Elsbethian" leaps of logic, it struck me that those leaps are more pleasurable when they're not simply getting her up to speed with what we already know with certainty from the intro. But something also just felt sharper about her characterization in general, and how her uniqueness fit into the rest of the world.)
posted by nobody at 5:17 AM on February 15 [1 favorite]

What would "par ce chemin" mean on the crate of the Cézanne in Episode 13?
posted by Monday, stony Monday at 8:47 PM on March 9

It looks to me like they intended it to be a French version of a "This Side Up" shipping label, but the only example I've been able to find of that phrase being used that way is from a subreddit for bad French translations, where someone posted a still from this very show.
posted by nobody at 5:13 PM on March 11

Does anyone know if Ioan Gruffudd is coming back? They were charming together. Although it also felt like it could be a back door pilot for his charming Scottish murder mystery show. (I have not gotten any further so I don’t know if the fireman thing was a nonstarter for her.)
posted by rednikki at 4:18 PM on March 15