Nicole Scherzinger Goes Full Villain in the ‘Elsbeth’ Season 4 Premiere

Elsbeth Tascioni has seen some strange things in her years of shadowing New York’s finest, but season four of Elsbeth opened with a killer who gives fantastic marriage advice and deeply terrible life advice. The CBS procedural returned on Thursday, October 8, with its season 4 premiere, “Crazy in Love,” and the show’s favorite trick — dropping a famous face into a murder plot — was on full display. Tony Award winner Nicole Scherzinger guest-starred as Serena Collyer, a wildly successful relationship counselor with a cool demeanor, a hotter temper, and, it turns out, a body count.

If you’ve watched Elsbeth for even one episode, you know the drill. The show flips the usual whodunit on its head: you see the murder in the first few minutes, and the fun is watching Elsbeth — the brightly dressed, endlessly curious, faintly chaotic consent-decree attorney played by Carrie Preston — notice the one thing everyone else missed. And this week, that someone was a marriage counselor who was supposed to fix broken relationships, not bury her problems.

Serena Collyer: The Therapist You Do Not Want

On paper, Serena Collyer has it all. She’s a renowned marriage counselor, a polished public figure with a devoted following, a bestselling brand of relationship wisdom, and a handsome British husband who helps run her empire. Clients pay top dollar to sit across from her and hear how to save their marriages. The catch? Her own love life is a mess, and her coping mechanism is homicide.

Serena had been carrying on a secret affair with an old flame — the toxic kind of ex you never quite shake, the one who blows back into town and reminds you why you left in the first place. When he started pulling away, or rather, when he decided he was done and wanted out for good, Serena didn’t journal about it or call her own therapist. She killed him. And because a woman with a brand to protect can’t just leave a crime scene lying around, she framed one of her own clients — a man already known for his anger issues — for the crime. A convenient scapegoat. Almost too convenient, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes Elsbeth’s antennae twitch.

There’s a delicious irony in casting the premiere’s killer as a marriage counselor, and the writers clearly knew it. All season long, Elsbeth’s own life has been oddly stable while everyone around her falls apart — she solves other people’s murders the way a good therapist unpacks trauma, gently and with alarming perceptiveness. Putting her up against someone who professionally doles out relationship advice while privately committing crimes of passion is the kind of matchup the show lives for. It’s the guest-star formula at its best: take someone the audience loves, hand them a dark secret, and let Carrie Preston unravel them over 42 minutes.

Nicole Scherzinger, Certified Scene-Stealer

Of course, none of this works without the right performer, and Nicole Scherzinger was more than up to the task. Most people still know her first as the lead singer of the Pussycat Dolls, the powerhouse voice behind “Don’t Cha” and “Buttons,” but Scherzinger has spent the last decade quietly building one of the most interesting second acts in pop music. She starred as Grizabella in Cats on the West End. She voiced Sina in Disney’s Moana and its sequel. She judged singing competitions on both sides of the Atlantic. And then, in 2025, she did the thing nobody saw coming: she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her ferocious, career-defining turn as Norma Desmond in the Broadway revival of Sunset Boulevard.

That Tony changed the conversation around her. Suddenly the pop star wasn’t a pop star dabbling in theater — she was a legitimate stage heavyweight, the kind of performer directors fight over. Her Norma was all sharp edges and desperate glamour, and critics fell over themselves. So seeing her pivot to television as a chilly, composed murderer on Elsbeth feels less like a novelty cameo and more like a victory lap. She plays Serena with exactly the right amount of frost — warm enough to sell the guru act, cold enough that you never quite trust her — and watching her spar with Preston is the highlight of the hour. Two formidable women, both smarter than everyone else in the room, circling each other politely. Good stuff.

Carrie Preston's Elsbeth Remains the Best Hang on TV

It says something that a show can bring in a Tony winner as the killer of the week and the person you’re happiest to see is still the lead. Carrie Preston’s Elsbeth Tascioni might be the most purely enjoyable character on network television right now — a woman who dresses like a bag of Skittles, talks to everyone like they’re an old friend, and misses absolutely nothing. The character started as a fan favorite on The Good Wife, where Preston won an Emmy for her guest work, and then became the breakout star of The Good Fight before finally getting her own show. She won another Emmy — Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series — for Elsbeth itself, and honestly, the trophy case could use more shelf space.

What makes the character work is that Elsbeth is never the smartest person in the room in the way TV detectives usually are. She doesn’t do the brooding genius thing. She does the opposite: she asks the dumb questions, the obvious questions, the questions that make seasoned cops roll their eyes — until one of those questions cracks the case wide open. It’s a Columbo trick, updated for the 2020s, and Preston plays it with such warmth that you never feel like she’s condescending to anyone. She genuinely likes people, even the murderers. Especially the murderers, maybe. They’re the most interesting ones.

Season four finds Elsbeth and the 11th Precinct under what the show is calling new pressures — the usual mix of fresh cases and family drama. Captain C.W. Wagner, played by the great Wendell Pierce, is back leading the precinct, and Gloria Reuben continues in her recurring role as his wife, Claudia Payne. If those names ring a bell, they should: Pierce is Avon Bunk himself from The Wire (and Antoine Batiste from Treme, if you have taste), and Reuben spent years on ER. That’s the other thing about Elsbeth — the regular cast is stacked with character-actor royalty, which gives the whole thing a lived-in, grown-up feel that a lot of procedurals lack.

And then there’s Teddy. Ben Levi Ross returns as Elsbeth’s son, Teddy Tascioni, and the premiere sets a wedding date — Teddy is getting married to his fiancé, Roy. Preston has said her character is over the moon about it, in exactly the way you’d expect: thrilled, emotional, and almost certainly going to be more involved in the planning than Teddy wants. “She’s probably the happiest mother of the grooms-to-be,” Preston has said of the storyline, and you can already picture it — Elsbeth with a binder, color-coded tabs, opinions about napkins. There’s also chatter that the wedding could bring back familiar faces from the character’s past, including Elsbeth’s ex-husband Mike Tascioni, and possibly even a glimpse of Elsbeth’s mother. Family drama, indeed.

Wait — Is Elsbeth Getting a Love Interest?

Here’s the thing the internet is going to be talking about. The premiere ended with a moment — a look, really — between Elsbeth and Detective Smullen (Danny Mastrogiorgio) that made both of them see each other differently for the first time. It was small. It was quiet. And the show’s fans absolutely lost it.

The pairing even has a ship name: “Smelsbeth.” Showrunner Jonathan Tolins has admitted that fans — and, apparently, CBS employees — have been telling him for ages that these two are going to end up together. He’s been careful not to promise a full romantic arc, saying the moment in the premiere was more of a nod to the shippers than a mission statement. But the seed is planted, and it’s an interesting one, because the episode itself was all about romantic relationships — Serena’s toxic affair, Smullen’s own split from his wife and the messy adjustment that followed, Wagner and Claudia quietly relieved that their own marriage is solid.

Smullen’s divorce is the emotional engine of the hour. He’s raw, he’s off-balance, and Elsbeth — who has appointed herself his unofficial emotional support attorney — is doing her best to help. There’s something genuinely sweet about watching this unstoppable force of nature try to comfort a sad detective, and that final look landed because it felt earned, not engineered. Whether the show actually goes there or just keeps teasing it, the “Smelsbeth” crowd is going to be insufferable about this one. Affectionate. But insufferable.

The Guest-Star Parade Is Just Getting Started

If there’s one thing Elsbeth does better than any other show on television, it’s the killer-of-the-week casting. Every episode brings a new famous face with a dark secret, and season four’s lineup is genuinely stacked. After Scherzinger’s premiere turn, the season has Succession’s Nicholas Braun playing Jeremy Perrick, the son of a famous playwright who’s spent his whole life in his father’s shadow. Girls star Jemima Kirke shows up as Winter Redgrave, the sleek CEO of a lifestyle brand whose perfect world starts cracking when her sister becomes a threat. Ted Lasso favorite Sam Richardson plays Cody Baxter, a Coney Island native and up-and-coming competitive eater with a deadly appetite for fame. Glee’s Lea Michele is Darcy Miles, a Pilates instructor who pushes her clients a little too hard. Nat Faxon plays Perry Macintyre, the least popular member of a country club whose miraculous hole-in-one sets off a murder. And in the most delightfully random casting of the season, New York Knicks star OG Anunoby is making a cameo.

It’s a murderers’ row in the most literal sense, and it’s the reason the show keeps working. The formula is simple — famous person, dark secret, Elsbeth figures it out — but the execution stays fresh because the guest stars keep committing to the bit. These aren’t phoned-in cameos. They’re real performances, and the show treats its killers as the co-leads of their episodes.

Elsbeth airs Thursdays at 9:00 p.m. ET on CBS, and “Crazy in Love” set the tone for what looks like the show’s most confident season yet. The cases are twisty, the family stakes are rising, the guest stars are A-list, and somewhere in the 11th Precinct, a detective and a lawyer just shared a look that launched a thousand fan theories. Not bad for a Thursday night.

Source: Just Jared