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‘Elsbeth’ Star Carrie Preston on Columbo’s Inspiration, That ‘Good Wife’ Reference and Taking Center Stage


"Elsbeth" star Carrie Preston discusses how Peter Falk's "Columbo" inspired her character, and whether fans should expect any "Good Wife” cameos.

Robert and Michelle King created all three shows, but rather than another serialized legal series, “Elsbeth” is a crime procedural, relocating its title character from Chicago to New York City as part of a government consent decree requiring the NYPD to allow a lawyer to observe their activities. The conceit places Elsbeth on the other side of the legal equation in the vein of the classic series “Columbo”: The audience knows from the start who did it — in the case of the pilot, a well-respected theater director (Stephen Moyer) who kills a student to cover up their affair — and then watches Preston’s Tascioni try to solve it. But then in the deepest part of COVID, when everybody was at home watching TV, Robert and Michelle found that they were gravitating towards reruns of “Colombo,” and they thought, this will be this is our way in if we were to do a spin-off centered around Elsbeth.

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