ELSBETH Post-Mortem: Jonathan Tolins on Elsbeth's Emotional Confession - Give Me My Remote : Give Me My Remote

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ELSBETH Post-Mortem: Jonathan Tolins on Elsbeth’s Emotional Confession

January 30, 2025 by  

Elsbeth backstory

“Unalive and Well” – When a young man is found dead in his car, Elsbeth visits the holistic wellness center he’d just left, and begins to suspect its charismatic founder (Eric McCormack), on the CBS original series ELSBETH, Thursday, Jan. 30 (10:00-11:00 PM, ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network, and streaming on Paramount+ (live and on demand for Paramount+ with SHOWTIME subscribers, or on demand for Paramount+ Essential subscribers the day after the episode airs)* Pictured (L-R): Marcia Debonis as Sheryl and Carrie Preston as Elsbeth Tascioni Photo: Michael Parmelee/CBS ©2024 CBS Broadcasting, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, January 30 episode of ELSBETH.]

Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) may have been at the holistic wellness center to solve a murder on the Thursday, January 30 episode of ELSBETH…but she also partook in some healing of her own.

After being pushed by her journey partner, Sheryl (Marcia Debonis), she admitted she was there to investigate a death, but that things were also not “going very well for me back in the city.”

Sheryl encouraged Elsbeth to open up—and she did.

“I made a lot of money working for some bad people,” an emotional Elsbeth confessed. “And, okay, it’s part of the job, I know that. But then I found out I didn’t know the extent of the harm that I was participating in because I was tricked. And I do not like being tricked. So now I am so angry and I’m embarrassed because I don’t usually end up in that position. But it happened and the damage was done. And now I can’t find the right way to explain things to my friends. I don’t know how to ask for help.”

“We did a lot of thinking about exactly what her backstory was, what is making Elsbeth emotional,” ELSBETH showrunner Jonathan Tolins tells Give Me My Remote. “And I think we found something that felt true. It’s not that she was involved in something bad…she’s a lawyer. We saw her on GOOD WIFE and GOOD FIGHT: She was a lawyer who was not completely against pushing the boundaries of ethical behavior to help a client. But she was tricked. And it triggered something in her.”

“It had to hurt,” he continues of her conundrum. “We didn’t want it to be just an intellectual problem that she had. She ended up being part of something where someone else is victimized. And for Elsbeth, that is just impossible for her to live with because she is so empathetic. She’ll corner some [people] for a good cause, but to know that she was part of someone being victimized, it was just too disturbing for her to stay in her old profession.”

To get the right tone for Elsbeth’s big confession, “We wrote a monologue and we cast Marcia Debonis and Nancy Hower directed,” Tolins says. “And that’s all you needed. Carrie Preston and Marcia with Nancy directing and a good script by Leah Nanako Winkler, that’s all you had to do. You let them go.”

Sheryl was supportive, and suggested that Elsbeth had to be transparently honest with the people in her life. Elsbeth, in turn, reached out to Kaya (Carra Patterson)…but that will have its own complications. “She will have to find some way to not break attorney-client privilege and yet save her friendship with Kaya,” Tolins previews.

ELSBETH, Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS

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