Carrie Preston: Elsbeth Bags Led to Physical Therapy
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- Carrie Preston said Elsbeth's multiple bags caused physical problems that reached "'got to go to physical therapy' kind of issues," forcing the production to rig the bags to look full while staying light enough to carry all day on set.
- Continuity is equally punishing: if a bag slips off Preston's shoulder mid-scene, the take is unusable, so her on-set costumer uses top stick tape and safety pins to anchor the bags — making them hard to remove between takes.
- Patti LuPone guest stars in the Elsbeth Season 3 finale airing May 21 as a cabaret singer, with showrunner Jonathan Tolins writing the episode, and Preston called it "a great way to end the season."
- This season's guest roster also includes Stephen Colbert and Amy Sedaris (parodying late-night TV), Dianne Wiest, Beanie Feldstein, and Steve Buscemi, who Preston said discovered the show by watching over his wife's shoulder and then called his own agents to request a role.
- Preston framed the recurring guest-star model as a deliberate echo of Columbo — high-profile actors come in for roughly eight days to film their episode, then return to their other projects, and so far "we haven't had anybody that has gone off the rails."
- Preston's first-ever mention in Variety came on Wednesday, July 12, 1995, for a Shakespeare in the Park The Tempest opposite Patrick Stewart (as Prospero to her Miranda), directed by George C. Wolfe in his first Shakespeare production.
Why it matters: The bags anecdote exposes how a small character-defining visual choice on network TV carries real production costs — physical strain on the lead actor, added wardrobe labor (taping, safety pinning), and stricter continuity rules that can scrap otherwise usable takes. The stacked guest roster, capped by a Patti LuPone season finale on May 21, shows CBS is leaning on the *Columbo*-style weekly-marquee model to keep a light procedural format competitive in a crowded TV landscape.
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