ELSBETH: Jonathan Tolins Previews the Meta ‘Toil and Trouble,’ as Elsbeth Tries to Solve the Murder of a Police Procedural Showrunner

ELSBETH gets very meta with the Thursday, December 19 episode, “Toil and Trouble,” when the showrunner of a long-running police procedural is killed. The murder puts Elsbeth (Carrie Preston) toe-to-toe with Regina Coburn (Laurie Metcalf), the show’s long-time star.

“Each season, we do a boot camp where we have all the writers in a room together, and we just start listing all the different worlds that might be fun to set an ELSBETH episode in,” ELSBETH showrunner Jonathan Tolins tells Give Me My Remote. “Obviously, my last show I worked on before ELSBETH was EAST NEW YORK, so I have procedural experience. And we have other writers on the staff who have worked on procedurals. And it just felt like, well, what are things that happen in New York, where ELSBETH is?”

“And we love doing meta things on our show,” he continues. “A lot of times we’ll do things [in that meta world]. I mean, in the first episode of the second season, Elsbeth was complaining that we were just getting going and then we had this long summer break. So we’re always sort of playing with that. And the idea of a police procedural that’s shooting in New York, that’s been going for a long time, and Elsbeth having to match wits with a fictional detective—when she is a fictional detective—just felt too delicious. And Matthew Begbie, who wrote the script, really hit it out of the park.”

The hour also reunites Preston and Metcalf, who previously worked together in an episode of the HBO series GETTING ON.

“Laurie Metcalf is the right answer for basically any role,” Tolins says with a laugh of bringing Metcalf into the ELSBETH world. “She’s one of our greatest actresses. She is always smart, always hilarious. One of the things I love about her is she always seems impatient, which is the sign of intelligence. Like, she just can’t wait for you to finish talking so she can make her next point. And that’s great for the energy of our show, because we try to keep things moving fast. And she’s perfect to be a murderer because she’s someone who you always see her thinking and processing. And so we had a lot of fun with her. She was a dream choice for it.”

While the fictional series Regina stars in, FATHER CRIME, pays homage to the well-known trope where a talented/skilled civilian helps a member of law enforcement solve crimes (like BONES and CASTLE), the inspiration for Regina herself appears to be a different story: When viewers meet Regina in “Toil and Trouble,” she has spent two decades in the same role, playing a cop, unable to branch out beyond that show. (A feat really only replicated by one performer in real life, on a series where an ELSBETH executive producer spent two seasons as a co-executive producer.) 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tolins deadpans when questioned about the similarities. “The only thing I would say is that we did like the idea of someone who has been playing the same part for many years—which is also true of Carrie Preston as Elsbeth. You know, she’s been playing this character for about 15 years now; not straight and she wasn’t in every episode of THE GOOD WIFE or THE GOOD FIGHT. But that was the fun of it: Of someone who’s been at it a long time, and how the pressures of a job like that can also make one feel trapped. And so that’s what we’re playing with. But we really didn’t get into thinking, you know, about any particular person we were parodying.”

The showrunner does acknowledge that finding the right tone for the hour—much like the series as a whole—was something they were conscious of.

“We’re always working to make the tone [right], to play things as straight as possible,” Tolins says. “Because Elsbeth is kind of a quirky, sort of outlandish character, she only works when you’re playing the world she’s in straight down the middle. In fact, on this episode, a lot of it was in the edit just making sure we never felt like we were obviously going for a joke or going for a laugh. Primarily because that makes it so much funnier when the characters in the show are not acknowledging that we’re doing something funny.” 

“But it’s like pornography—you know it when you see it,” he continues. “And you just keep trying to follow that voice in your head…The nice thing is that, as the show has gone on—we’ve done over 20 episodes—we’re finding that the show expands and you can try different things. The episode that will follow the Laurie Metcalf episode is one that has surprising emotional depth that comes in. And now we also have Elsbeth’s son, Teddy, Ben Levi Ross, on the show where we’re getting to do more personal stories for her.” 

“We’re finding that we’ve gotten to the point now where we feel really like we know what the show is that we’re making, and we can follow it where it takes us,” he concludes. “And it’s exciting, because we keep finding ways to keep from being bored. And I think that the audience feels that, too. We keep trying to surprise and challenge ourselves.”

ELSBETH, Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS

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