Only two episodes remain in Season 3 of Elsbeth, and the CBS crime procedural is saving one of the best guests for next to last. This week’s mystery, titled “Catch and Kill,” will put Carrie Preston‘s fabulously dressed sleuth on the trail of a veteran gossip columnist named Betty Heymouth, who’s met all the biggest stars and dealt in their secrets. However, she may have also killed to keep her own dirty laundry under lock and key. Collider can exclusively share a new sneak peek that sees Elsbeth trying to find out as she pays a visit to the writer’s home. Making it all the more exciting is that Betty is played by a famous, Emmy-winning television legend who has rubbed elbows with plenty of celebrities herself — Tracey Ullman.
Elsbeth is paired with Detective Buzz Fleming (Daniel Oreskes) for this investigation, as the video begins with the pair following Betty into her luxurious apartment. Fleming is all business, but Elsbeth is simply starstruck by all the people her suspect has met and written columns on. She peruses the various framed newspapers on the wall, starting with a piece about Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, and gets a story from Betty about a time he tried to interrupt her while dictating her column in a phone booth. Betty does emphasize that she has “not once” missed her deadline, which Elsbeth makes a mental note of. While Fleming tries to learn about a woman upstairs from Betty, his colorfully clad partner keeps asking about all the people she’s met, not only hilariously interrupting the questioning but also betraying that she is, indeed, not from New York.
The moment of truth comes when Fleming asks about how long Betty has known her upstairs neighbor, Lorena, who, from the sound of it, is the prime suspect for a murder. Elsbeth butts in by circling back to the fact that Betty never misses her deadline. Upon learning that Betty files her work by 11:30 p.m., something clicks into place, and Elsbeth pulls out her latest column to read out a passage about Lorena pulling a gun on a man. The footage doesn’t provide an answer, but evidently, something doesn’t add up with the timing of the article and the timeline of the crime. She may be unconventional, but Elsbeth proves once again how astute she can be even in the face of another detective taking a more traditional approach. The rest of the episode is bound to be a battle of wits between the sleuth and the high-powered gossiper now that Elsbeth has a potential lead.
Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In? The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs
Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.
🚨The Pitt
🏥ER
💉Grey’s
🔬House
🩺Scrubs
01
A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct? Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.
02
Why did you go into medicine in the first place? The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.
03
What do you actually want from the people you work with? Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.
04
You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it? Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.
05
How would your colleagues describe the way you work? Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.
06
How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure? Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.
07
What does this job cost you personally? Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?
08
At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back? The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.
Your Assignment Has Been Made You Belong In…
Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center
The Pitt
You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.
You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.
County General Hospital, Chicago
ER
You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.
You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
ER is television about endurance. You have it.
Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle
Grey’s Anatomy
You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.
You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.
Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ
House
You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.
You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.
Sacred Heart Hospital, California
Scrubs
You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.
You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.
‘Elsbeth’ Season 3’s Penultimate Episode Is Full of Reunions
Even by Elsbeth‘s lofty standards, Ullman is a big get for the penultimate episode of what has been a stacked Season 3, though this isn’t her first rodeo with Preston. The multi-talented actress and comedian is a rare repeat guest on the CBS series, previously appearing in Season 2 as professional psychic Marilyn Gladwell. She again brings a stacked resume to the table, including seven Emmy wins, with two for her landmark sketch comedy series The Tracey Ullman Show. She’s also appeared in plenty of works not emblazoned with her name, including Ally McBeal, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Small Time Crooks, Corpse Bride, and, more recently, Ella McKay. Alongside her, “Catch and Kill” will also mark the return of Laura Benanti once again as Nadine Clay and welcome Madam Secretary‘s Erich Bergen to the show for his second guest appearance in the Good Wife universe after a brief appearance on The Good Fight.
Elsbeth Season 3, Episode 19, debuts on CBS this Thursday, May 14. After that, the finale will bow on May 21, though that won’t be the end, as the Preston-led series is already locked up for Season 4. Check out our exclusive sneak peek in the player above.
Release Date
February 29, 2024
Directors
Nancy Hower, Robert King, Lionel Coleman, Rob Hardy, Robin Givens, Ron Underwood, Rosemary Rodriguez, Aisha Tyler, Bille Woodruff, James Whitmore Jr., Joe Menendez, Kevin Rodney Sullivan, Lily Mariye, Nick Gomez, Peter Sollett, Sam Hoffman, Tyne Rafaeli, Darren Grant, Fong-Yee Yap, Mary Lou Belli
Writers
Jonathan Tolins, Erica Shelton Kodish, Bryan Goluboff, Sarah Beckett, Michelle King
