Exclusive: Inside ELSBETH's Musical Finale with Showrunner Jonathan Tolins

Last night, Season 2 of Elsbeth went out with a bang. With the return of past guest stars like André De Shields, Stephen Moyer, and Mary-Louise Parker (to name just a few), the episode also brought to life a big, star-studded rendition of Chicago's Cell Block Tango. 

Despite Elsbeth now being in prison, her detective skills don't wane a bit after one of her fellow inmates is murdered. As she performs an investigation, the surviving inmates take the stage inside Elsbeth's head, revealing their motivations through the iconic musical number.

Just in time for the finale, BroadwayWorld caught up with showrunner and writer Jonathan Tolins to discuss the conclusion of this season, staging this major musical number, and the "schedule Jenga" of bringing back a slew of former guest stars.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for Elsbeth Season 2 Finale

This interview has been condensed for clarity and length.

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A good portion of Season 2 had this throughline, with Andy Merten and Milton Crawford's deaths, and, ultimately, landing Elsbeth in prison. How far in advance do you know how those storylines will unfold? 

At the beginning of the season, we do a boot camp where all the writers get together in person. We had 20 episodes for season 2, and we broke it up into three acts. We had a map, but didn't completely stick to it. We always knew we wanted to do the last episode of a murder in prison and have as many of our former guest stars as possible. And we thought, "Let's do Cell Block Tango!" That was always there. 

We love the character of Milton Crawford as a Professor Moriarty-type nemesis for Elsbeth. We planned to introduce him in that jury duty plot, give him a few scenes, and then have a big episode where Elsbeth would catch him. But as the year went on, we started to think about how she's always catching everybody, and this character feels so powerful and dangerous. What would happen if she couldn't get him? We liked that idea, and then someone said, "What if something bad happens to him?" 

So we set up this Shakespearean ending for Crawford where, right when he thinks he's gotten away with it, he has set up his own demise. And we're living in a world where things like that happen. It felt real to us, and it felt like we had been writing to it without knowing it. And so that's how we ended up there, and I'm really happy with it. I feel like, sadly, it does feel resonant with life now.

The finale has so many familiar faces, so many of them being people whom Elsbeth helped put behind bars. How did you decide which ones to bring back? 

It was schedule Jenga. Firstly, our executive producer, Gail Barringer, decided that we should build our own prison. We also shot some things at a real prison, but we built that whole prison set, so it meant that we were committed.

At that point, we didn't know yet if any former guest stars were going to be able to come back. Findley Davidson, the casting director, put the word out and started calling to see who would be even a possibility. As we were figuring out the story, we had a rough order of who we needed to approach first and who seemed most important to make the story work.

Once we decided that Alex should be the victim, we had to work that out with Steven Moyer. Alyssa Milano's Pupetta having Mafia ties made it possible that she had family members who had been at the same prison, which helped us with the plot we were putting together. So we locked her in. We thought we'd get four or five people, but we ended up with eight who were willing to come back. We leaned toward people from season one and earlier in season two, because we get more pop of the surprise.

Having Elsbeth end up in prison with those whom she convicted is such a good example of situational irony, and also particularly interesting because there are so many ways you could flavor it. Obviously, you want to keep the tone in line with the show, but, as you were writing, did you feel like that story decision lent itself more to drama or comedy?

At first, we just thought we'd do a murder in prison. I think it was Eric Randall, the writer in the room, who said, "Let's make Elsbeth a prisoner," which was a great way to up the stakes and get into the prison organically. The absurdity of having all those people present made it funny automatically. So much of the humor is just in the callbacks to who they are.

When I wrote the outline and when we were developing the story, we basically came up with ways to use a lot of people who ended up not being able to do it. The dirty secret about it was, by making the warden the murderer, ultimately, all of the motivations and the alibis of our prisoners are irrelevant. So it didn't matter. I was able to cut and paste and switch and mix things up as people's schedules got locked.

I love that Elsbeth gets to have this theatrical moment, even if it is in her imagination. What made you decide to incorporate that, and were there any backup plans in case you ran into rights issues?

We had it planned early on, but I had no backup plan. If we didn't get the rights, we were not going to have a musical number. It had to be Cell Block Tango. Elsbeth is Roxy Heart and it's an homage to the movie of Chicago, where it's all in her head. The problem was that we needed to get the rights to the show, but also the show, because it contains all those monologues. But in that kind of situation, you can only get the rights if you can submit exactly what you are going to shoot.

But we didn't know who could be in it. We were pushing so hard to lock in deals and dates for the women who would be in the number. As soon as I had that, I wrote those monologues and wrote the number. Then we didn't get confirmation of the rights until the Friday before we were shooting the number on a Tuesday. It was crazy, but everyone just believed, "Well, we're just going to do it, dammit!" And our Costume Designer, Dan Lawson, was bedazzling uniforms ready to go.

Are you open to doing more musical numbers in the future?

If it feels like a good reason to do it, absolutely. I think this was great practice because we did the pre-recording, and we learned how to produce a number on our schedule. 

The show was renewed for another season earlier this year. Is there anything you can tease about what’s in store for Elsbeth in Season 3?

We start the writer's room for Season 3 on May 19th, and I'm going into it very open. I am not sure what we're going to do. I think that there will be things that were set in motion at the end of this season, especially in 218, that we'll have to deal with. There's an Internal affairs investigation going on.

The first thing we do when we start a new season is look at what worked well and what didn't work as well. And then ask, "What do we set up without knowing it? What are the things that are there that we should pick up?" I'm excited. I feel like our writer's room can handle just about anything we throw at it now.

Photo Credit: Michael Parmelee/CBS

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The Season 2 finale of Elsbeth is now available to stream on Paramount+. Watch a preview of the episode below.

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