Photo: CBS
The A-plot of this week's episode of The Good Wife involves Alicia's efforts to write a keynote address, for the ABA conference, about what her career has been like as "an opt-out mom," and the way her actual writing is broken up by her memories/fantasies of the events she's documenting parallel's Will's decision tree in "The Decision Tree," and for that reason carries most of the episode's dramatic and emotional heft, particularly since Will and Alicia later happen to run into each other at a diner and, after exchanging barbs, agree that they can be mutually respectful adversaries from now on (though, given the trouble he may be in if he doesn't turn on Peter, that might not last much longer). All of that is well done -- particularly that Alicia's guilty conscience is embodied by Jackie, because who else? -- but none of that made me squeal when it appeared on screen. I did squeal, like I always do, when I saw Elsbeth Tascioni.
Back when I was still kind of on the fence about The Good Wife, one of my problems with it was that the opening-credits cast members were all playing characters who were boring and flat, presumably so that they wouldn't seem to be competing with the quirks of all the weirdos -- judges, in almost every case, but sometimes (rarely) defendants or other lawyers. And in cases where they seem like quirks for quirks' sake (Peter Hermann repeating, over and over, that he's the youngest judge on the bench in the state of Illinois; Denis O'Hare starting the proceedings by urging all the gathered personnel to go donate to a blood drive), Alicia's general disinclination to offer any emotion more demonstrative than a slightly raised eyebrow feels like a bad bargain. But Elsbeth is the exception who proves the rule.
It's not that Elsbeth isn't quirky: she is. She might be the show's biggest weirdo, actually. But the difference between her and any of these (made-up) freaks is that every distinctively unusual thing about her feels like part of a cohesive whole. For instance: the way she comments on Alicia and Diane's outfits suggests that she might like to emulate what she admires in them, but she can't spare the mental bandwidth or free time to shop for the right purse, and instead just keeps carrying whatever ratty old piece carpet bag her mom probably handed down to her. I assume she bought a pedometer because she saw a headline about it on an elevator news screen on her way to a deposition, and thought -- wrongly -- that it would be a good tool to help her work exercise into her very busy schedule. Elsbeth has a lot of natural enthusiasm, and maybe not quite as much follow-through.
In fact, Elsbeth seems like she's not great at any aspects of her life outside of the law, which is fine, because she is a fucking legal genius. When we first met her back in the first season, it was because she'd been recommended to defend Peter against a murder charge. Eli and Peter both doubted that she had what it took, given that she seemed constantly breathless, she was grinning like a simpleton, and she couldn't get her computer to work. But then came the moment, later in the episode, when Glenn Childs, her opposing counsel, told the Court, "Mrs. Cosco heard directly from her husband that if he were to die under mysterious circumstances, that it would be at Peter Florrick's hand," and Elsbeth snapped, "Yes, and I heard from a butterfly it wouldn't be." And I think that's when we all realized that one underestimates Elsbeth at one's peril. If she seems breathless, it's because her mouth can't move as quickly as her mind. If she's grinning, it's because she's good-natured and friendly. And if she can't work her computer, it's because she's almost fifty and a mom and that's one of the things she's earned the right not to know about.
In Season 4, Elsbeth got a showcase that demonstrated that the show's producers recognized what a treasure they -- and Carrie Preston, who plays her -- have in Elsbeth. In "Je Ne Sais What?," Elsbeth is trying to represent an athlete who's had an endorsement deal revoked because she's been accused of doping. But that part of the episode, with all due respect to her client, hardly matters, because Elsbeth's own story is so much more interesting: she starts the episode calling Alicia for help, because she was trying to speak to someone involved in the case when he was at a speaking engagement, and she's been arrested for harassing him. As Will and Diane step in to represent the athlete on getting the doping charge overturned, Alicia works on springing Elsbeth from jail -- which, unfortunately, will require Elsbeth to pass a psych evaluation. Alicia gamely coaches her not to fall for the examiner's tricks -- not to get hung up on compound questions, or keep talking just because he leaves a pregnant pause (Elsbeth, anxiously: "You think I talk too much?!"), but Elsbeth is who she is, and if an insight about the case is going to come when she's supposed to be convincing a medical professional that she's sane, then she's not going to sit on an exculpatory theory and advance her own cause at her client's expense. Elsbeth may be nutty, but she's a good lawyer above all. And so is Alicia...with an assist from Elsbeth, the defendant, when Alicia's defending her in court: when Elsbeth busts out some obscure knowledge about which floors are leased to whom in the building when she was arrested, Alicia asks how she knows; Elsbeth: "I don't know how I know half the things I know!" Regardless of who's the more responsible for Elsbeth's freedom, it's how we get the pleasure of seeing Elsbeth, just released from jail, holding her heels while she races down a regulation track and up to the hearing, just in time to help win it for her client. We even get to hear her speak French! Obviously, this was the episode the show chose to submit on Preston's behalf to the Television Academy; of course she got a nomination for it; and of course she won.
This week's episode is another showcase for Classic Tascioni. She breathlessly gives a speech. She cozies up to a costumed character in Times Square. She gets abused with an anti-Semitic slur by said character and stays outraged by it for the entire remainder of the episode. She lays a trap for an antagonist (Eric Bogosian's Nelson Dubeck, on the hunt for Will) that he blunders right into. And when that very antagonist seems to have gotten the better of her after all, the fun is over and she switches to safe mode, sternly keeping Will from talking too much. But you can see the wheels turning as she ponders which strategy she'll need to deploy now. Elsbeth's style may the exact opposite of Will's, but when he finds himself threatened by another legal action against him, he knows she's the right person to represent him. As he marveled in "Je Ne Sais What?": "I just realized: you're Rambo!" Rambo with a pedometer clipped to her Vera Bradley bag. But yes.