In 2024, Quirky Crime Solvers Like ‘Elsbeth’ and ‘Matlock’ Have Me Watching Network TV Again

Confession time: Even though I review plenty of broadcast network shows for Decider’s Stream It Or Skip It column, I don’t tend to watch past the first episode. I might get to the second one if I’m curious, but my curiosity tends to stop pretty early in a show’s season.

There’s a reason for that: 2025 will be the 20th anniversary of the first time I wrote about TV professionally, for the now-defunct (but much-missed) AOL site TV Squad. This means I’ve been reviewing shows for a long time.

Even back in the naughts, anyone who was paying attention could see where network television was going. Despite a creative early-’00s period that brought viewers creative shows like Lost, Desperate Housewives and Arrested Development, the Big Four (and the CW) had already started ceding the creation of challenging and engaging shows to premium channels like HBO and Showtime and basic cable upstarts like FX and AMC.

They still had their hand in making interesting comedies, but dramas became a boring slog of procedurals, with spin-offs of Law & Order, CSI and NCIS dominating their schedules. When a drama landed on the schedule had any sort of interesting premise or characters and became a hit — like Grey’s Anatomy in 2005 or This Is Us in 2016 — all of the networks stumbled all over themselves to make their own versions.

This is the long way of saying that I had pretty much given up on network TV by the time the pandemic came around, with the only show I regularly watched being Abbott Elementary. But in the past two years, the networks have rolled out a number of crime dramas that have sparked my interest in watching what they’re offering again, simply by centering them around quirky crime solvers with personalities and backstories that are as much a part of the show’s plots as the mysteries they’re trying to solve.

First, in 2023, it was Will Trent on ABC, with Ramon Rodriguez playing the title role; a GBI detective who has his own interesting methods of gathering and organizing evidence, mainly due to having dyslexia. But his background in foster care is front and center in most episodes, coming out during investigations where that knowledge is useful, but also in his relationship with fellow foster kid Angie Polaski (Erika Christensen). His at-first contentious relationship with his partner at the GBI, Faith Mitchell (Iantha Richardson), has now grown into unconditional trust as the show enters its third season in January.

Then, at the beginning of 2024 came Elsbeth on CBS, with Michelle and Robert King spinning off Elsbeth Tascioni, Carrie Preston’s character from The Good Wife and The Good Fight. In the process, they leaned on the character’s quirks and created new ones, making Preston a presence in the series, with her colorful designer duds, multiple tote bags, and ability to immediately identify the person who committed the murder she’s called to investigate, then burrow under that person’s skin after at first ingratiating herself to them.

In the fall, we got Matlock on CBS, with Kathy Bates playing a 75-year-old attorney who manages to get herself a job at a top firm, but who has a secret agenda for doing so, and High Potential on ABC, where Kaitlin Olson is a mother of three with a messy life, who helps the LAPD solve cases with her expansive knowledge base that’s due to her 160 IQ and photographic memory.

Yes, these shows are procedurals, for the most part. But instead of a couple of glowering cops or federal agents who spew snide lines over dead bodies, people whose characters get maybe five minutes’ worth of backstory during a 24-episode season, these crime solvers’ backstories are well known, sometimes to the detriment of the case of the week.

I’d rather see Will and Angie working out their issues, or the besuited detective becoming an old softie around his chihuahua Betty (played by the adorable Bluebell) than hear about blood spray patterns. And I’d rather see Elsbeth hang out with her son or deepen her friendship with Kaya (Carra Patterson), the patrol cop who accompanies her on investigations, than watch her interview one witness after another that offer little to no information.

One of the reasons why I love these shows so much is because they remind me of the shows I used to enjoy as a kid, where the characters solving a case were as important to the story as the cases themselves. The Kings have readily admitted that Elsbeth is influenced by Columbo, which is the proto-example of the “howcatchem” show, where we know who the killer is, and we watch as the crime solver pursues and catches them (Peacock’s Poker Face is another example of this genre). Of course, there’s also Murder, She Wrote — from the makers of Columbo! — that perfected the network whodunit, encouraging viewers to play along with Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher as she noses her way into murder investigations.

But they also remind me of other crime dramas that didn’t necessarily fit the same molds, like Magnum, PI, The A-Team, Riptide, and Simon & Simon. The crime solvers weren’t hardscrabble cops, and the camaraderie that we saw among the people who teamed together to solve cases always made the shows watchable, even if the cases of the week weren’t that interesting. Sure there were memorable cases on those shows, but what I remember most about the original Magnum, for instance, was the chemistry that Tom Selleck, Jonathan Hillerman, Larry Manetti and Roger E. Mosley displayed week in and week out for 8 seasons.

It’s more than just being TV comfort food, though; these newer shows have remembered that characters that people want to spend time with, who grow and change over time, are just as important to a crime drama, perhaps even more so, than who did what and how the crime was solved. It’s a formula that served USA Network very well through most of the ’00s, and seeing that formula maintained at the broadcast network level confirms the idea that shows like this will always be on TV, even if they go out of style for a few years at a time.

As exhilarating as anti-hero “prestige TV” shows like Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad and The Shield were, watching those shows required attention and energy. Shows like the ones cited above as well as NBC series Found and The Irrational, only requires the viewer to enjoy spending time with the “family” that each show has fostered. In a world where real life is more energy- and attention-sapping than ever, that relatively simple requirement is hard to pass up.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.