Elsbeth has really been stretching its legs this season. After a ten-episode first season, its full-season renewal ordered 20, giving the writers room to roam with the worlds they have Elsbeth and Kaya visit, developing the friendship between the two, and taking a big swing with a three-episode arc featuring Elsbeth’s most formidable foe to date. I’m not going to say that Judge Milton Crawford is her Moriarty, but if the series intends to enhance its serial storytelling, he seems to be auditioning for the role of Midsize Bad (a Big Bad doesn’t seem like Elsbeth’s style). In “Toil and Trouble,” Elsbeth goes very meta, commenting on murder-of-the-week police procedurals; the conflict some actors feel between the job security of a role on a series that promises 20-plus episodes per season versus work onstage or film; the stereotypical showrunner-as-tyrant; and even the over-the-top voices actors tend to fall into the trap of using when they play hard-nosed detectives. None of these bits come anywhere near breaking the fourth wall, but they do give the writers and actors a bunch of fun moments to get particularly playful and self-referential. The whole thing works really well and is sufficiently joke dense that even if I weren’t inclined to watch each episode twice, I’d have done so this time to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
The tyrannical showrunner, Cal, is our victim of the week, done in by his (in her mind) long-suffering leading lady, Regina Coburn (Laurie Metcalf, what a get!), who finally has a chance to put her classical training to work in a production of Macbeth in London. The director, having been impressed with all of the sterling accent work she’s done across the last 20 seasons of her series, Father Crime, cast her immediately as Lady Macbeth. When the episode opens, she’s eagerly looking forward to wrapping her work for the season, as her character, Detective Felicity Watts, is slated to be in a coma for the last few episodes of their 24-episode season. It’s a big deal to have convinced Cal to give her the necessary time for rehearsals and the stage run over their annual hiatus, which is usually too brief for her to take any of the roles she longs to play in historical and costume dramas.
All of Regina’s hopes and dreams seem to go up in smoke — or at least, in the course of a very heated argument — when Cal breaks the news that their network is insisting on a splashier, punchier end to the season than Felicity being comatose, with her devoted holy consultant, Father Garvey, refusing to leave her bedside. He’s going to have to deploy the emergency turbo boost he’s been holding in reserve for nearly 20 years: letting the good ship Wavey set sail at last. He’s going to give the fans what they want by having Watts (the Wa- in Wavey) and Garvey (Wavey’s -very) end the fan baiting and kiss already.
Not only does Regina hate this on principle, due to her personal and professional loathing of her co-star, Jack, but from a timing perspective, it’s impossible. She’s flying to London within days, and a rewrite requiring her to be on set in New York any longer would snuff out her dreams of being considered a serious actor. She takes decisive action the very next day, killing Cal with a stiletto heel through the eyeball after gagging and handcuffing him to his massage table. Regina is nothing if not thorough in her planning; as Elsbeth and Kaya discover in the course of their investigation, she drew the method from a spec script by one of their background actors. She also canceled Cal’s massage appointment using the phone on his assistant’s desk (using one of her specialized accents to disguise her voice), hired an ice-cream truck as a treat for the cast and crew (I assumed we’d be in Mister Softee territory, but she splashed out for Van Leeuwen, schmancy!), and created an alibi for herself by playing a recording of herself running lines on the high-end speakers in her dressing room loudly enough for others to hear it in the hallway.
As usual, the fun is in watching Elsbeth and Kaya work out the details of how and why the culprit did the deed. When Regina couriers over a copy of Blake the background actor’s spec script and some threatening fan mail from a particularly overenthusiastic Wavey ’shipper, Elsbeth undertakes a one-woman table read. The purple prose and her very silly Serious TV Detective Voice wear thin quickly, so she cuts to the chase: After Garvey and Watts enjoy their long-overdue first kiss, they make up for lost time by spending the following 20 or so pages consummating their love in every room in the precinct. This is a network show? Are we sure they’re not moving to Max?
Wagner — with some reluctance, but mostly to ensure Elsbeth and Kaya keep the investigation moving — gives them 48 hours to find sufficient evidence to release the screenwriter they have under arrest and to charge Regina. Ultimately, it’s Regina’s much-vaunted accent prowess (the source of her hubris! I see what you did there, episode writer Matthew K. Begbie!) that proves her undoing. The accent Cal’s masseuse could only describe as “weird”; the discrepancy between Regina’s Scottish accent in an episode that aired and her line delivery in raw footage of the episode; and her accent when saying “out, out, damned spot” live to get Elsbeth off her back — it’s all one thing. The fictional Felicity Watts may be a master of accents, but Regina absolutely is not. Her blessedly brief Lady Macbeth bit matches the original footage, sounding like what I might manage to bleat out while attempting to audition for Derry Girls while drunk and possibly underwater. That’s the weird accent the masseuse heard, too. It seems that although Cal was demanding and often deeply unpleasant, he and Regina’s accent coach had been protecting her fragile ego for all these years, having the coach overdub Regina’s bad accents with accurate ones and just never telling her that they did so.
The cherry on the sundae — by which I mean Elsbeth, getting to deliver a far more detailed and dramatic confrontation speech to her perp than usual — is a callback to a detail I particularly relished. When we first saw Regina having it out with Cal, he came across as 100 percent villainous to me. His remark that “everything you have is from me!” struck me as a classic bad boss thing to say and as a very Wolf Hall moment — it’s almost word for word how Cardinal Wolsey describes his former riches and offices, all bestowed by Henry VIII. That guy knew a thing or two about being mildly capricious. In the raw footage, Elsbeth and Kaya see when trying to get to the bottom of the weird accent, Cal yells at Regina that it’s not enough for her to only read her own lines in each script, that preparation entails at least noting stage directions and being aware of other actors’ lines. Cal was being very unprofessional in both cases, but he was also right, and in the second case, was giving her advice that might have helped her pull off his murder. Because she hadn’t read the full spec script, she incorrectly assumed the stiletto in question was the shoe type, not the knife type. Whoops!
Meanwhile, in other plot threads, Kaya may have found herself a love interest and roommate in new medical examiner Dr. Cameron Clayton, who is, in no particular order: accomplished, funny, possessed of good credit, a friend to animals, tidy, given to stress baking, and very handsome. I like the cut of this guy’s jib and will take it quite personally if he hurts Kaya in any way.
Judge Crawford makes a return to start getting up to whatever nefarious nonsense he has waiting for Elsbeth up his sleeve. He piques Wagner’s very concerned interest at a cocktail party, non-casually mentioning that he knows she was at the courthouse the previous day and then pointedly asking the good captain to pass on his regards to Elsbeth, assuring her he’ll see her very soon. My sincere congratulations to Michael Emerson on having delivered one of the most bone-chilling line readings this side of Claes Bang in the first season of Bad Sisters. Shudder.
Wagner knows the signs of Elsbeth being on the investigation trail from last season when she had him in her sights on behalf of the DOJ, and he’s both very worried for her safety and signs up to be a charter member of Let’s Get This SOB ASAP Club. He stops just shy of saying, “If you come at the king, you’d best not miss,” but that’s the tenor of his advice. Crawford is wily and dangerous, so Elsbeth is going to need all the help she can get to take him down.
They’re going to need to get a move on, though, because the long-simmering chicken subplot about Elsbeth’s long-ago client, Mark Van Ness, and his shady divorce proceedings has come home to roost. Kaya hurries off the phone (with Cameron, oohh) when it pops up on TV, and Crawford notes this development with some malicious pleasure, sipping a whiskey and saying, “Your move, Ms. Tascioni.” You can practically hear the mustache twirling in his voice! Don’t let this man get near you with a baseball bat, Elsbeth!
In This Week’s Tote Bag
• Dr. Cameron Clayton is played by Sullivan Jones, who also plays newspaper owner and investigative journalist (and, briefly, Denée Benton’s love interest) T. Thomas Fortune in The Gilded Age. I can’t recall if he’s shared a scene with Robert and Michelle King–iverse alum Christine Baranski, but here’s hoping we’ll see him again whenever season three of my beloved Opera Wars arrives.
• Judge Crawford seems to have one of the courthouse clerks in his confidence or on his payroll; how else would he know that Elsbeth came to the courthouse with Delia, the Non-Murderer, to request transcripts from her trial?
• I would love to see a supercut of Laurie Metcalf practicing all the bad accents Regina used across her 20 seasons on Father Crime (not to be confused with Papa Cop, about a retired cop who helps his daughter solve crimes). It would be a fine way to honor the massive degree of difficulty required to suppress your skill at something so you can convincingly act as if you’re bad at it.
• Speaking of acting, a production of Macbeth starring King-iverse alum Cush Jumbo and actual Scotsman David Tennant just closed in the West End!
• Regina is wearing a tartan blazer in the scene featuring her bad Scottish accent. Reader, I chuckled.
