ELSBETH Season 1 Finale Post-Mortem: Carrie Preston on Elsbeth’s Job Offer and that Themed Fashion Show

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Thursday, May 23 season finale of ELSBETH.]

With Elsbeth’s (Carrie Preston) days of working with the NYPD numbered—thanks to Wagner (Wendell Pierce) declaring she was done, now that her investigation into him had concluded—she found herself unable to figure out how, exactly, a fashion photographer was killed on the Thursday, May 23 season finale of ELSBETH. 

Elsbeth remained stuck, but she did inspire a designer with her eclectic fashion style; before she knew it, there was a whole Elsbeth-inspired line, with the lawyer walking on the catwalk.

While Elsbeth did her best strut, she was stopped in her tracks (and clearly overjoyed) when Wagner showed up to support her. Almost immediately, her mojo snapped back and she realized a reflection in sunglasses could reveal the killer. (Unfortunately for her, the designer who was so enamored with her did the deed.)

But there was a bit of good news: Wagner changed his mind and asked Elsbeth to stay in New York.

“I thought about it,” he told her, as she was preparing to move her stuff out of the precinct. “You were sent here to root out corruption and you did. Not to mention, you keep helping my detectives solve cases.”

So Elsbeth got a brand new, bigger, office…and celebrated her continued stay in New York.

“Well, she’s absolutely relieved,” Preston tells Give Me My Remote of Elsbeth’s continued work with the NYPD. “She had such guilt, she was so torn all season long knowing that she was being duplicitous and not liking that. But at the same time, doing her job; this is what she was brought there to do. And trying to do that in the most upstanding way that she could was a real challenge.”

“But also she knew that Wagner…it just wasn’t adding up in her head that he was this person that they were saying he was,” she continues. “All of the clues were not lining up. So she was really being very judicious about what she told Celetano and what she didn’t tell him until she really had the whole picture in her head, the way she approaches all of her cases. So I feel like she did the best that she could, given all of the obstacles that were in her way.”

Getting to portray an out-of-sync Elsbeth in much of the finale was a challenge, the actress admits. “We see her in a deeper way than we’ve seen her before,” Preston says. “It was definitely more dramatic and more emotional. And I liked it. It made me nervous. I was afraid that it was so different than what we had been doing with the character that it would feel like a different character. But Rosemary Rodriguez, who directed the episode—she’s a wonderful director—she really encouraged me to get angry, to get emotional, to get frustrated, to really feel off my game as an actor, to bring that to what Elsbeth was going through.”

“So there were some parallels there, which I thought was great,” she continues. “I mean, as an actor, I love this because we always like to have things that stretch us—or at least I do. And so I think it was good to flesh out the character in a way that we hadn’t seen before. That’s one of the things that we should be doing; she’s at the center of the show now. And we can’t just play the same thing the whole time. We have this opportunity to really grow as a character, to watch the character grow. And I think that’s great.”



With the investigation and conspiracy around Wagner playing such a big part of the season 1 overall mythology, Preston acknowledges she’s still waiting to see how season 2 is formatted.

“Well, we have incredible writers, and Jonathan Tolins, our showrunner, is a very seasoned, brilliant person,” she says. “And everyone knows that good TV relies on not just the crime of the week, but creating some other storylines to keep things fresh and move forward in a positive way. And so I’m not sure what those B- and C-storylines are going to be, but I do feel certain that there will be some. And I just trust the writers and John and [co-creators] Robert and Michelle [King] and everyone involved in the creation of the scripts to come up with some really fun stuff for us to play.”

Like, for instance, the aforementioned Elsbeth-centric fashion show. “It was so crazy and weird to look at this line of people dressed like me,” Preston recalls. “And people on the crew, a lot of them, would get a little fooled. One of the models would walk in the room and they would, for a second, think from behind, it was me. We, of course, had a great time, taking a bunch of selfies and stuff, all lined up together.”

Preston credits the show’s costume designer, Daniel Lawson, for doing “such a beautiful job” with the hour. 

“Not only designing the Elsbeth fashion show, but designing the other fashion shows that you see [in the episode] that are going on, that the other designers did,” she points out. “So he really got to stretch himself with not just creating an Elsbeth look, but creating these other fashion designers’ looks from scratch. It’s a great episode for him.”

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