‘Elsbeth’ Showrunner Jonathan Tolins Previews ‘Meta’ Fall Finale (Exclusive)

The Elsbeth fall finale is airing tomorrow, Dec. 19, and showrunner Jonathan Tolins previewed the meta episode with PopCulture.com. In “Toil and Trouble,” Elsbeth is thrown “into the world of television after the showrunner of a long-running police procedural is brutally murdered in his office, and although it appears to be the act of a disgruntled fan, she begins to suspect the show’s longtime star Regina Coburn (Laurie Metcalf), who yearns for artistic fulfillment. Meanwhile, Judge Crawford (Michael Emerson) continues to be a thorn in Elsbeth’s side.”

Tolins shared that the episode is the “most meta episode we’ve ever done.” He continued, “It’s about a murder that takes place on the set of a network police procedural, and Elsbeth must match wits with a fictional detective.” Just from the looks of the exclusive sneak peek with Elsbeth getting to the said of said procedural, Father Crime, it’s going to be a pretty entertaining episode and luckily, the creatives didn’t have to do much digging when it came to exploring the world of police procedurals.

“A lot of us who work on the show or in the writers’ room have worked on police procedurals and certainly watch them,” Tolins explained. “So it was all just sort of making lists of all the things you find interesting and funny about them. My last job before Elsbeth was on East New York, which was a CBS police procedural shot in New York. And that’s why when we shot this episode, and we’re casting it, I thought to ask Billy Finkelstein, who was the showrunner of East New York, to play the showrunner of Father Crime. Billy was a writer/producer on The Good Fight, which I also worked on, we knew each other from that. We worked together for five years on that.”

“So it was another thing that just made it all feel so real for us because we actually had a showrunner playing the showrunner,” he continued. “And the production team went crazy. There were Father Crime hats and pens and, coffee mugs, and posters from 20 different seasons of the show. We created this whole alternate universe that some of us, we started to forget that Father Crime isn’t a real show.”

As previously mentioned, The Connors star Laurie Metcalf will be playing Father Crime star Regina, and she is the latest big guest star on Elsbeth. Jonathan Tolins praised Metcalf, saying she is “one of the greatest actresses of all time.” He shared, “And so we knew she would just have a field day playing an actress who considers herself and wants to be considered a very serious trained actress, but who has had the good fortune and bad luck to be trapped in one role for 20 years. She is desperate to prove herself, especially because everyone in her acting class, when she was a young person or a younger person, has gone on to huge awards and important careers, and she still feels the stigma of being on a TV procedural. And so she has an opportunity now to play Lady Em in the Scottish play in the West End, and she won’t let anything keep her from doing that.”

Speaking of guest stars, the fall finale will continue Michael Emerson’s corrupt Judge Milton Crawford storyline, and Tolins said they knew they would “love to have Michael on the show at some point,” and definitely not just because he and star Carrie Preston have been married for 26 years. Of course, the actress “was interested in having him on the show.”

“And we decided we wanted to have a bad guy, a real, new kind of adversary for Elsbeth this season, a character that would last beyond one episode,” Tolins said. “And we came up with this judge character. And as soon as we were talking about it, we just suddenly went, ‘Oh my god. This is the one for Michael.’ We didn’t know we would do it. We gave him the first script, which was 207. And we’re just thrilled. And I knew he’d be good, but I think he’s even beyond what I thought he would be. I think he’s so specific and real and terrifying in the role. He is also one of the nicest people in the world off-camera. So it’s amazing how he transforms himself into this cold-blooded judge.”

There will certainly be a lot to look forward to, both with the fall finale and the remainder of the season in 2025, and fans will want to stay tuned. Tolins admitted he is “really, really proud of this run of episodes. I think that each episode feels different than the one before from the one coming up. And I feel like we’re learning more and more how our show works best and everybody working on it has a very unified vision. And so I hope people will keep watching, and hopefully, we’ll surprise you because we are surprising ourselves.”

The Elsbeth fall finale airs tomorrow, Dec. 19, at 10 p.m. ET on CBS, and the midseason premiere will air on Thursday, Jan. 30 at 10 p.m. ET. All episodes are streaming on Paramount+.