CBS Studios has ordered a pilot for The Good Wife spinoff, Elsbeth. The drama series will star Carrie Preston and comes as the studio orders just one other drama pilot, Matlock. As first reported by Deadline, only two drama pilots have been ordered for this season—marking the fewest number of drama pilots ordered so far, with comedy pilots to come—with the network’s new entertainment president Amy Reisenbach making the decision to go ahead with Robert and Michelle Kings’ spin-off. The project will be a collaboration between CBS and Paramount+, set to be developed as a broadcast procedural for CBS.
Elsbeth is a police procedural series that forms part of The Good Wife franchise. The series will focus on unconventional attorney Elsbeth Tascioni (Preston), who played a recurring role in both The Good Wife and The Good Fight. The new series will see Elsbeth leave Chicago for New York, working alongside the New York Police Department to corner criminals. King, King, and Liz Glotzer will act as executive producers for the series on behalf of King Size Productions, with King and King also acting as writers. A full cast for the project is yet to be announced.
CBS has also ordered a pilot for a reboot of the legal drama series Matlock, as well as ordering two writer’s rooms. Matlock is set to star Kathy Bates (American Horror Story) as brilliant septuagenarian Madeline Matlock. The series is planned as a gender-swap of Dean Hargrove’s classic drama of the same name (which ran from 1986–1992), with Jennie Snyder Urman (Jane the Virgin), Joanna Klein (Good Sam, Broke), Eric Christian Olsen (Woke), and John Will (Band of Robbers) acting as executive producers on the project. The series will see Matlock rejoin the workforce at a prestigious law firm, where she will expose corruption and win cases using her unassuming demeanor.
Alongside Matlock, CBS also ordered writer’s rooms for The Pact, based on Lisa Frazier Page and The Three Doctors’ 2002 novel The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream and medical drama Watson, which is set to use characters and detective elements from Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. The Pact will be executive produced by Marcus Dalzine, Sheila Ducksworth, Leon Russell, Derrick Johnson, Dr. Sampson Davis, Dr George Jenkins, and Dr Rameck Hunt, with Craig Sweeny, Aaron Kaplan, Brian Morewitz, and Shäron Maolem executive producing Watson.
No date has been set for either pilot at this stage. The Good Wife is currently streaming on The Roku Channel, Paramount Plus, Prime Video, Vudu, and Apple TV.