The Recipe Works
Elsbeth and High Potential illustrate the enduring appeal of quirky crime-solving-TV comfort food.
admin
Quick, what’s your favorite television show about a quirky consultant with unconventional methods who is brought in to help the police solve crime, often over the repeated objections of a cranky detective? Did you say Psych? Yeah, I get that. Psych was fun. So was Monk. Did you say Monk? Oh, sorry, you said Castle. Castle was another good one, at least for a while, if you like shows about mystery writers solving murders, which most people have dating back to Angela Lansbury doing it on Murder, She Wrote. Sherlock probably falls under the umbrella, too, which is nice because it rained a lot on that show and an umbrella would come in handy.
What’s that? The Mentalist? Sure, I guess we can include The Mentalist. And White Collar. Suits? Hmmm. Might not count only because the quirky hotshot was helping lawyers do law stuff, not solving crimes. But good thought. Columbo is a toughie, too, because Columbo already was the detective, not an outside consultant brought in to assist a detective, but his methods were unconventional enough that we should probably go ahead and put that one on the board, too. It’s our list anyway. Who’s gonna stop us? That stuffy chief who has been doing things by the book his whole career and has had it up to here with our loose-cannon shenanigans? Well, tough cookies, chief. We get results.
The point is that these shows, when done well, still do the job even though we’ve seen varying iterations of them nearly as long as we’ve had television to watch. They fell out of favor a little bit back when the prestige-television wave hit and every crime drama tried to sell itself as a ten-hour movie about a depressed person who smoked cigarettes while driving around town at night, but it’s still nice to have a mixture out there. Sometimes you just want to eat some pasta and watch a crime get committed and solved in 45 minutes, you know?
The good news here is that you have a couple of solid current options on that front. The first is Elsbeth, a Good Wife spinoff that follows Carrie Preston’s Technicolor Chicago defense lawyer to New York City as she tags along on homicide investigations as part of a consent decree to keep an eye on the police. Elsbeth checks a lot of the boxes. Is she quirky? Buddy, is she ever, but in a lively way that Preston just devours. Does she get results? Every time. Are there skeptical members of the NYPD who do not approve of her antics? You know it. These skeptics are softening considerably as the show moves through its second season (a 100 percent case-closure rate will do that), but it’s important to note that one of the now-softened skeptics is the show’s chief of police, played by Wendell Pierce.
Wendell Pierce is so good on this show. That’s not exactly a surprise because Wendell Pierce is always good (see: Wire, The), but it’s still worth noting. He gets more out of a sigh or dismissive grunt than most actors can give you with a full monologue. Also, because this is a network-television procedural, sometimes he gets to say really incredible lines of police-chief dialogue. This one is my favorite:
No, I will not be providing context.
Elsbeth also takes a page out of the Columbo playbook with its structure. Every episode starts by showing the audience who committed the murder and exactly how and why they committed it. The rest of the episode builds backward from there, with Elsbeth and the — usually wealthy, usually high-society — killer circling each other like goofy predators. This means the killer gets a meaty role every week. That means the show lures in prominent guest stars. If you’re wondering if this is the kind of show where Nathan Lane plays a man who is driven to homicide because the people in front of him at the opera make too much noise, well … spoilers, but yes. It’s a good time.
(Speaking of Columbo, as I often am, this feels like a good place to mention Poker Face, another delightful show about a quirky redhead using unorthodox methods to solve a crime. It’s a little different from the kind of shows we’ve been discussing so far, seeing as it aired on a streaming service and had a big fancy auteur behind it and lacked the typical structure you get from a network — even basic cable — television show, with little act breaks at each commercial and a uniform run time. But there’s never really a bad time to mention a show where Natasha Lyonne goes full Peter Falk, you know?)
High Potential is a pretty good time, too. The show stars Kaitlin Olson from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and Hacks as a single mom and cleaning lady who ends up working with the LAPD to solve murders. It checks all the boxes, too. Is she quirky? Well, she’s a flighty high-IQ super genius with a fun-house brain and a wardrobe that looks like a zoo exploded, so let’s call that a yes. Does she get results? Yes, every time, usually because she noticed some small detail that the other detectives missed in a way that mayyyyybe stretches credulity a bit. Is there at least one skeptical detective who doesn’t approve of her methods? Yup, and the sexual tension is a-bubbling.
If you read all of that and found yourself thinking, Hold on, this show just sounds like a gender-swapped version of Psych, the show about the flighty fake psychic who used his powers of perception to solve crimes, there’s a good reason for that: It basically is Psych, just with Judy Reyes as the chief and no Dulé Hill. Yet. Psych star James Roday Rodriguez has popped up as a director on High Potential, so we can’t rule out anything here. Let Dulé Hill murder someone. He’s earned it.
That brings us back to the point from earlier. Shows like this often get labeled as comfort food, which is sometimes delivered with a sneer. But there’s a reason the foods we refer to that way actually do bring us comfort. They have a familiar recipe that triggers the various receptors in our brain that make us feel all warm and snuggly. If you can wrangle the right ingredients — say, Carrie Preston and Wendell Pierce being charming together, Kaitlin Olson in a leopard-print jacket explaining the history of California’s freeway system, the episodic structure we discussed in the parenthetical up there, and fresh herbs and produce — you can have yourself a lovely little dinner.
Shows like Severance and Succession are like fine dining, a fancy restaurant dish full of unexpected combinations of flavors. Shows like Elsbeth and High Potential are like a beef-stew recipe you’ve been making for years. It’s fun to challenge your taste buds sometimes with something new and exciting, or even try out an elevated stew recipe with different cuts of meat and some vegetables you picked up from the expensive grocery store downtown (Poker Face), but please don’t ever forget that your classic beef stew can be delicious, too.
Related
