A ‘Good’ return: Carrie Preston is back as lawyer ‘Elsbeth’

Two shows in which she was featured are over now, but you can’t keep Elsbeth Tascioni down.

The quirky, high-spirited lawyer portrayed by Carrie Preston — who won a Primetime Emmy for the role as a guest star in “The Good Wife,” then reprised it in the spinoff “The Good Fight” — now has a show of her own as the character. Premiering Thursday, Feb. 29, on CBS and Paramount+ with Showtime, “Elsbeth” transfers Tascioni from Chicago to New York, where she has a secret agenda as she works with the city’s police department in a special investigative job. Wendell Pierce (“The Wire”) plays the stern police chief, Capt. C.W. Wagner, while Carra Patterson (“Straight Outta Compton,” 2015) is Kaya Blanke, the officer partnered with Elsbeth.

“I could not be more thrilled,” the friendly Preston says of giving Elsbeth her own showcase now. “It’s been such a wonderful and interesting journey with this character. I started to play her 14 years ago, at the end of the first season of ‘The Good Wife,’ and you do these guest spots and don’t ever think they’re going to repeat. You hope you do it well and then you move on to your next job, but I knew there was something special about that character even back then.

“I felt so lucky and privileged that they would entrust me with it, because she was so unique,” Preston continues. “She seemed to resonate with audiences, and then a [TV] season went by and I was like, ‘Well, OK. I guess that’s that.’ Then they brought me back for more, and the audiences again seemed to respond to her and her unconventional way of doing things. And as the seasons [of ‘The Good Wife’] went by, I would hear, ‘Why don’t you do a spinoff that centers around her?’ [Executive producers] Robert and Michelle King and I would touch base about that, but it wasn’t the right time.”

Instead, “The Good Fight” happened as the first spinoff, with Christine Baranski’s (“Mamma Mia!,” 2008) Diane Lockhart character front and center. “They would bring me back periodically [on that drama],” Preston notes, “and I even got to direct on that. Then at the end of ‘The Good Fight,’ we started talking a little more in earnest [about what has become ‘Elsbeth’], and COVID-19 happened.”

After the resulting delay, the Kings remain among the executive producers of “Elsbeth,” which starts each story by showing the perpetrator committing the given week’s crime. Elsbeth then matches wits with the felon — in the series premiere, a homicidal stage director played by guest star Stephen Moyer (“True Blood”) — with her homespun manner cloaking her keen method of interrogation. If that sounds like the approach of a certain other television series and character, that’s not a coincidence.

Preston says that at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, the Kings “found that they were going back and watching reruns of ‘Columbo,’ and they just kept getting drawn to the structure of that show. Coincidentally, out of nowhere, a reporter wrote a piece about how she also was watching ‘Columbo’ … and at the end of it, she wrote, ‘We don’t need a reboot of “Columbo.” Just give Elsbeth Tascioni her own show.’ [The Kings] already had the idea of Elsbeth doing something like that, then they called me and said, ‘Let’s come up with a pitch.’”