Serena Collyer (Nicole Scherzinger) opens “Elsbeth” season 4 onstage, giving a seminar on keeping a marriage together, and the episode keeps cutting away from her to the affair she is having behind her husband’s back. CBS aired the premiere, “Crazy in Love,” on Thursday, October 8th, at 9 p.m. ET, and it streams on Paramount+. Robert and Michelle King, who spun the show out of “The Good Wife,” hand the hour to a couples therapist who turns out to be much better at hiding a body than she is at keeping a marriage together.
Serena is the author of a relationship book, “Keeping It Together,” and she has been married to her husband Graham for eleven years by her own telling. She repeats that number to a room full of strangers before the show reveals how little of it is actually true. This review is written from the broadcast and the published recaps that followed it, not from an advance screener, so every beat below is cross-checked against at least two sources. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Elsbeth” season 4, episode 1, including who the killer is and how Elsbeth Tascioni (Carrie Preston) catches her.
Robert and Michelle King, who spun the show out of “The Good Wife,” hand the hour to a couples therapist who turns out to be much better at hiding a body than she is at keeping a marriage together.”
The affair belongs to Casey Arthurs, a 48-year-old musician who still has an apartment and an ID in Van Nuys, California, but has spent the last two months house-sitting on the Lower East Side for a friend walking the Camino de Santiago. Casey notices, mid-rendezvous, that Serena still wears a keepsake he bought her in Costa Rica some twenty years ago, which is a tell the show plants early and pays off later. When Casey announces he is staying in New York rather than flying home, Serena does not take it as good news.
What happens after that is the frame job the rest of the hour spends unpicking. Serena cleans Casey’s apartment and takes a gun out of his own drawer. Then she texts a former therapy client of hers, Luke Prescott, from Casey’s phone, claiming to be sleeping with his wife, Lauren. Luke’s jealousy problem is extensively documented in Serena’s book under the pseudonym “Jack,” and he drives over and beats Casey badly before leaving him on the floor. Serena has been watching the building from the street, and she lets herself back in once Luke is gone and shoots Casey dead. It is a plan that only works if nobody looks very hard at the apartment afterward, and Elsbeth looks very hard at the apartment.
Elsbeth, Detective Smullen (Danny Mastrogiorgio) and Officer Hackett (Lindsay Mendez) process the scene the next day, and the show lets Elsbeth’s attention wander the way it always does. She notices an expensive bottle of wine sitting incongruously among cheap beer, in an apartment somebody has clearly cleaned. The physical evidence looks damning for Luke on its face. His bloody fingerprints are on the doorknob, and the angry texts are sitting right there on Casey’s phone. But the gun that killed Casey has no fingerprints on it at all, Luke’s included. Smullen is willing to live with that gap, and Elsbeth is not.
Lauren complicates the frame further by admitting to an affair of her own, just not with Casey. Her boyfriend turns out to be a man named Steve, which means Luke was sent to confront the wrong man for the right-sounding reason, and it is the first loose thread Elsbeth pulls on. The second comes from Serena herself, who throws Luke under the bus as a “hothead” the moment the detectives ask about him. Officer Hackett, meanwhile, finds no link between Casey and Lauren anywhere in his phone. She does find Serena’s number saved under a misspelled version of her own name, “Coreena,” exactly the kind of small, early plant this show likes to reward a sharp viewer for catching.
Smullen and Elsbeth go back to Serena at one of her group-therapy workshops, and the episode’s funniest stretch has the bickering pair mistaken for an actual married couple. Once they finally corner Serena, she claims she only knew Casey in grad school and lost touch with him afterward. Elsbeth starts chipping away at that version almost immediately. Casey’s bandmate, a drummer who goes by Viper, tells the detectives that he and Serena were on-and-off for years in a relationship he calls toxic and addictive. He adds that Casey did not own a cell phone until 2014, a full five years after Serena claims they had already drifted apart. The math does not work, and Elsbeth is the only one in the room doing it in real time.
The case Elsbeth cannot stop thinking about is the one sitting in Serena’s own book. “Keeping It Together” includes a chapter on a couple Serena calls “Sam and Diane,” a dysfunctional pair whose chemistry she frames as not uncommon. The detail that sticks is that “Diane” wears a keepsake “Sam” bought her on a trip years earlier, the exact shape of Casey’s Costa Rica gift to Serena. Surveillance footage from a specialty wine shop near Casey’s apartment puts Serena buying the same bottle of wine found at the crime scene, just before the murder. On its own, that only proves an affair rather than a killing. The piece that closes the case belongs to Serena’s own husband. Graham, trying to be helpful, hands detectives the keepsake jewelry his wife wears, and it tests positive for both Casey’s blood and gunshot residue. Confronted with all of it, Serena breaks completely. She calls the affair the thing that ruined her life, and admits in the same breath that her devoted, dependable Graham simply bores her. She is arrested for Casey’s murder, and a case that looked, on paper, like an open-and-shut Luke Prescott conviction ends somewhere nobody in the precinct expected.
The premiere spends real time on the people around the murder, too. Smullen has been uncharacteristically sharp all episode, and it turns out to be grief rather than temperament. His wife, Sally, has left him. Elsbeth, rather than making a joke of it, simply offers to listen whenever he needs it, a small, sincere beat that Collider’s review flags as the start of a possible “will they/won’t they” the site only half-jokingly calls “Smullscioni.” Captain Wagner (Wendell Pierce) gets time with his wife, Claudia (Gloria Reuben), and Collider counted her return among the premiere’s pluses, calling Claudia “a character not seen often enough.” And Elsbeth’s son, Teddy (Ben Levi Ross), shows up at her office holding Serena’s book and leaves with the season’s other piece of news. He and his fiancé, Roy, have finally picked a wedding date, May 1st, and Elsbeth is instantly in planning mode. He also mentions, almost in passing, that Elsbeth’s mother keeps calling and that Elsbeth keeps not calling back. The premiere plants that thread and does not pull on it, and it is probably a deliberate setup for later in the season rather than an oversight.
The early reviews landed warm. Collider called it proof that “Elsbeth’s Season 4 Premiere Keeps the CBS Procedural in the Perfect Sweet Spot,” singling out Scherzinger for how she “steps up her game as the villain-of-the-week.” The TV Cave rated it 4.7 out of 5 and wrote that Scherzinger “makes Serena an entertaining villain, balancing the polished public persona with the deeply troubled woman underneath.” It added that the hour “delivers the quirky murder mystery, clever observations, and unexpected humor that make Elsbeth such an enjoyable series.” FandomWire’s season review, which screened the first two episodes rather than the premiere alone, still called the show “the wildly entertaining procedural from the makers of ‘The Good Wife'” and described Preston’s Elsbeth as “part Columbo, part Lucille Ball.” That is arguably about as accurate a shorthand for this character as any outlet has managed. Deadline’s own description of the Serena Collyer role, quoted by TV Insider ahead of the premiere, promised “a popular and highly paid relationship counselor whose torrid affair with an old love leads to murder.” The finished episode delivers exactly that, without padding it out or rushing past any of it.
What “Crazy in Love” gets right is the same thing “Elsbeth” has gotten right since it first spun out of “The Good Wife” universe. The show was never really asking whodunit. It opens with the answer and spends the hour watching Elsbeth notice the two or three details everyone else in the room talked themselves past: a wine bottle that does not belong, a phone contact saved under the wrong name, a book passage that is really a confession. Season 4 starts by trusting that formula completely, and it pairs that trust with a genuinely rattled performance from Scherzinger. Add in just enough precinct warmth, between Smullen’s quiet heartbreak and Teddy’s wedding news, and the hour ends up feeling like more than a case-of-the-week reset.
What Do You Think? Does Serena Collyer hold up as a season-opening villain against the guest stars “Elsbeth” has thrown at Carrie Preston in past years? Are you hoping for a real “Smullscioni” arc now that Smullen is separated, or should the show leave their partnership strictly professional? And why do you think Elsbeth keeps dodging her mother’s calls?
See you on the next binge!
