The weirdo detective is making a comeback

polygon.com:

There are few TV pleasures as dependable as the weirdo detective. It’s a trope as old as Arthur Conan Doyle — the skills necessary to deduce the wily ways of evildoers either demand someone be stranger than their peers or eventually make them that way. This can be misanthropic (Dr. Gregory House), endearingly annoying (the Psych boys), or some combination of the two (Castle), but it’s always good fuel for TV. Not only do you have a mystery to solve every episode, but you get to have fun watching normal-ass people just dealing with these characters — the weirder the better. And now, they’re making a comeback. Adrian Monk, Charlie Cale, Detective Danner — names new and old to the weirdo detective pantheon are cropping up on TV, joined this week by a face very familiar to some: Elsbeth Tascioni.

The star of Elsbeth, the new CBS case-of-the-week show, has some considerable lore. Played by Carrie Preston in what was initially a bit part in Elsbeth creators Robert and Michelle King’s breakout series The Good Wife, Elsbeth made an immediate impression on viewers, returning throughout The Good Wife’s run and occasionally its spinoff/sequel series, The Good Fight. Scatterbrained yet endlessly wily, Elsbeth was one of the secret weapons of The Good Wife-verse, used sparingly but to great effect.

A lot of this was due to Preston’s performance, taking a character that on paper could easily be annoyingly quirky, but realized by Preston as a mischievous lawyer that disarmed people with her easily distracted nature before clotheslining them with tenacity. The fun of an Elsbeth Tascioni episode is in knowing that she is 90% genuine and 10% putting on an act, yet never knowing which 10% was the act.

As the star of her own show, however, Elsbeth reads a little differently. Moving from her native Chicago to New York City in her new role as an outside observer to an NYPD precinct following some legal trouble for the cops, Elsbeth casts the former lawyer as a Columbo-type detective.