Posted in: TV | Tagged: Carrie Preston, cbs, doctor who, Elsbeth, Good Fight, Good Wife, jodie whittaker

Elsbeth: "The Good Fight" Spinoff Has Jodie Whittaker/Doctor Who Vibes

CBS's Elsbeth is a fun new spinoff from "The Good Fight," but it feels more like if Jodie Whittaker's Doctor Who was more of a detective show.

Elsbeth is the new quirky detective procedural series that spins off from The Good Fight, which was a spinoff of The Good Wife, and if you look at it just close enough, feels like an alternate universe version of Jodie Whittaker's Doctor Who. You might think this was another clickbait article that wants to "Doctor Who" everything, but hear me out.

Elsbeth Tascioni, originally introduced in The Good Wife and became a fan-favourite character thanks to the quirky scripts and Carrie Preston's performance, is a lawyer who everyone around her always underestimates because she comes off as wacky, distracted, and outright eccentric but is always really ten steps ahead of them all. After the end of The Good Fight, show creators Robert and Michelle King decided to pitch a crime procedural spinoff like Columbo with Elsbeth as the detective character. The format of Columbo is not a whodunnit; the famous guest star of the week is always the killer. It's an hour-long series about how the detective outsmarts and exposes the killer. Elsbeth is the wacky lawyer who picks up clues and immediately figures out who the killer is, and the fun is watching how she dances with the Bad Guy of the Week to get them to slip up and expose themselves. And if you watch Elsbeth's mannerisms and Preston's performance, you might spot a doppelganger for Jodie Whittaker's Thirteenth Doctor.

In just the pilot episode of Elsbeth, the wacky lawyer drops into New York City like a cheerful alien loving the newness of being in a new place, taking all the sights, and trying to make friends with everyone she meets. When she visits her first crime scene, she regards it with the same childlike wonder The Doctor does with every place she steps into. She immediately spots clues everyone misses and has insights that don't occur to anyone else there. She immediately knows who did what when she meets them. Then she starts dueling with them, her mental processes shift unpredictably from silliness to seriousness without skipping a beat, all the while enjoying life to the fullest. Then she gradually weaves together a trap to bring down the bad guy. Preston's wide-eyed glee and mannerisms are remarkably similar to Whittaker's Doctor. Elsbeth might as well have gone home to an unseen TARDIS at the end of the episode.

It's like Elsbeth was a new pilot for Whittaker's Doctor Who from an alternate universe, a show that's not Science Fiction but mystery-comedy. Preston's Elsbeth and Whittaker's Doctor are like mirror universe versions of each other. The only difference is Elsbeth is like Whittaker's Doctor – if Whittaker's Doctor was written by writers who cared about the character. We're one episode into the CBS series so far, and it's already more fun and surprising than Chris Chibnall's entire run of Doctor Who.

Elsbeth is on CBS and Paramount+.

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