[Warning: The following contains MAJOR spoilers for the Elsbeth Season 3 premiere, “Yes, And…”]
Stephen Colbert guest-starred as a parody of himself in the Elsbeth Season 3 premiere, but his prescient line, “We’re going to miss this show when it’s gone,” was written before his real-life late-night show was canceled by CBS this summer. That cancellation came one week before Colbert was set to film his Elsbeth episode, which reunited him onscreen with his Strangers With Candy costar and longtime friend, Amy Sedaris, as well as Andy Richter and Lindsay Mendez (who will be back throughout Season 3).
“Yes, And…” revealed that Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) spent some time with her romantic fling, Angus (Ioan Gruffudd), and was still friends with Sheryl (Marcia DeBonis) from Season 2. Sheryl’s new book was the reason Elsbeth was on the set of Way Late With Scotty Bristol before Bristol (Colbert) was murdered.
Elsbeth used the improv skills she learned from Sedaris’s Laurel to solve the case. Laurel was revealed to be the killer of the week in the opening scene, but Elsbeth is breaking form in Season 3. Not every murderer will be revealed when the episodes begin.
The Elsbeth Season 3 premiere also gave an update on Kaya (Carra Patterson), who’s unable to get in contact with Elsbeth because she’s on an undercover mission. Here, Elsbeth showrunner Jonathan Tolins breaks down the premiere, Colbert’s appearance post-Late Show cancellation, what to expect with returning and new characters, and more.
What is Elsbeth’s biggest internal struggle this season?
Jonathan Tolins: She is dealing with Kaya not being around because Kaya has gone on undercover assignments and has gone off. She says she wants to cultivate her friendships a bit more this season. Those new friendships lead to some thorny questions for her about honesty and truth, and what is most important to her.
Carrie told us that Crawford [Michael Emerson] is an emotional burden on Elsbeth after she witnessed his murder.
We will be meeting someone from Crawford’s world who will make an appearance that will have an effect on Elsbeth this season.
Crawford was a major villain for Season 2, with a long arc. Will this character connected to him have a similar arc length?
No, I think this season, we do have some longer arcs and some new characters who have longer arcs, but we’re not doing a big new villain. We didn’t want to feel like we were repeating ourselves in any way, so it’s a little different this year.
How else are you breaking form in Season 3?
Well, we’re doing a lot of episodes that don’t adhere to the strict Columbo form of seeing the murder and then Elsbeth figuring it out. There are some episodes where you don’t see the murder, some episodes where you have no idea who did it for a while, which we’ve done once or twice before in the past. And also we’re finding fun structural ways to bring the case into Elsbeth’s orbit that’s not the typical, the police call, and we go to the crime scene, and we try to figure it out.
Michael Parmelee / CBS
Could you expand on that?
I just finished editing an episode where the murder, you see the whole murder story start, you see the murder, and then we just go to Elsbeth in her life at an event, and you think you’re in a totally different story. And then the murderer walks in, and Elsbeth meets him, and something he says sort of leads her to the case. Things like that. We like to keep our audience guessing.
That murderer is not very slick.
Well, he has no idea that this woman he’s meeting under perfectly reasonable circumstances works with the NYPD.
You wrote the premiere with Colbert in mind for the role of Scotty Bristol, correct?
Yes. What happened was, Wendell Pierce was a guest on Colbert’s show, and Colbert joked about how he really wanted to be a corpse on Elsbeth, and I think someone was there from CBS who immediately let Amy Reisenbach, who was the president of CBS, know that. Amy texted me immediately, like, “We’ve got to get Colbert on the show.” I’m a huge Strangers With Candy fan, and I wanted to get as much of Stephen as possible. To have him have a big part, we had to work out exactly how much time he would be able to give us due to his schedule.
Once I had the basic parameters, we put together a story that felt fun and that would be right for him, and also that would play a little bit on the audience’s understanding of who he is anyway. That’s why we made him a talk show host and all that. It was a real thrill for me. We cast Amy Sedaris in it, which I was well aware of their long history because, as I said, I’m a Strangers With Candy fanatic.
What was your reaction to Colbert’s cancellation, given that the news came out one week before he was set to start filming on your show?
Well, I was shocked and appalled, but then I immediately selfishly started thinking, Oh God, is he going to back out of doing the show? But then I realized he probably wouldn’t back out because he seemed very enthusiastic. And also, he would be working with his old friend, Amy. It’s not my department, but I think it’s terrible that his show is ending.
How was he on set? It was literally just days later.
He was a total delight, a total professional, just warm as can be. He was everything I wanted him to be. It was a great day.
There’s a line in this episode where he says, “We’re going to miss this show when it’s gone.” I was taken aback by how prescient it was.
I know. I felt the same way. That line was always in the script before. I’m very happy with the fact that the episode sort of resonates with what happened, but is not in any way a direct comment on what happened. I did not rewrite the script to reflect what was happening in the news that week. This was the story that we broke before we shot the episode, and then before all that happened.
Mark Schafer / CBS
We talked a bit about how Elsbeth is struggling without Kaya there, but how is the Elsbeth-Wagner relationship evolving in Kaya’s absence?
I always say that they have a Lou and Mary kind of relationship, for those of you old enough to remember The Mary Tyler Moore Show. There’s such a genuine warmth between the characters and the actors. And also, there’s a really nice understanding now between the characters at this point. We’ve had 30 episodes where Elsbeth turned out to be right in the end. And so we didn’t want to keep having Captain Wagner say, “What are you doing? You’ve got to play by the book.” So we find lots of variations on where tension comes between them. And a lot of times they’re a team, a really fun team.
We have some new stuff coming up for Captain Wagner’s family and personal life, and we didn’t decide to create some big new conflict between Elsbeth and Wagner because we’ve done that. We had the first season end in a very difficult time between the two of them, and then they came back together again. We don’t like to repeat ourselves. And so I would say it’s just the relationship gets deeper and deeper as we go between them.
It seems kind of easy between them now. They just gel together.
And in the first episode that you saw, she is able to challenge him in a way that you wouldn’t have in the past about how [Lieutenant Steve] Connor [Daniel K. Isaac] is being treated in the precinct.
We hear mention of Kaya in the first episode, and we get an update on her undercover work. It’s been revealed that Kaya comes back in Episode 3. How often can fans expect to see or get updates on Kaya this season?
I’m not being cagey. A lot of it depends on scheduling and people’s lives and how the story goes. All I’ll say is, we love the character of Kaya. We love the relationship between Elsbeth and Kaya, and we love Carra Patterson, so we’re going to keep trying to get her as often as we can. That’s what I’ll say.
But we are also introducing fun new characters. We have a new uniformed officer in the premiere, played by Lindsay Mendez, who’s wonderful as Grace Hackett, and she’ll be back a number of times. We have some of the people that we introduced last year. We’re going to be introducing a new detective later on this season, so we mix it up.
One of the things about our show is that in order to get all these huge, incredible guest stars, we don’t have a huge cast of regulars. So I would say one kind of frustration of my job is that we work with these wonderful actors who everybody wants, and sometimes we can’t get them when we want them. So we have to be flexible and work it out as best we can. But I think we’ve done a good job of creating this stable of wonderful characters that we want to see. But we only have 43 minutes and a murder mystery and all these things. So I can’t make promises all the time about when you’re going to see who you want to see, but just know that we want to see them too.
Elsbeth, Regular Air Time Premiere, Thursday, October 16, 10/9c