Ben Levi Ross takes the stage as Teddy Tascioni and sings the jazz standard "That's All" in the season three finale of Elsbeth, a number staged as part of a cabaret-soaked murder mystery.
Ross’s Teddy — the son of the show’s titular attorney — croons the Bobby Darin-popularized 1959 classic to his boyfriend Roy, played by Hayward Leach, with Nathan Lee Graham supporting on piano in the background. The episode, titled "That’s All," finds Elsbeth and Detective Kaya Blanke watching from the sidelines; both agree Teddy’s talents would be a great fit for the Broadway stage.
The scene matters now because the episode airs Thursday, May 21, 2026, from 10:00-11:00 PM ET/PT on CBS and arrives with the series already greenlit for a fourth season in the 2026-2027 broadcast schedule. Patti LuPone guest-stars as legendary cabaret performer Ruby Lane and Michael Urie appears as philanthropist Monty Blakemont III, a casting move that keeps the series tethered to theatrical talent — a thread viewers will see again in future seasons. (More on Urie’s casting here:
Writer Jonathan Tolins and director Joe Menendez mount the episode around a logline that pushes the show fully into its theatrical conceit: "A minor royal’s mysterious death at New York’s most legendary hotel brings Elsbeth into a world of faded elegance, cabaret and murder." Against that backdrop, the intimate club performance doubles as plot and punctuation — a private serenade that plays into the episode’s larger investigation.
The weight of the finale is in its staging and the names assembled. Bringing a three-time Tony winner like Patti LuPone into a story that hinges on a legendary hotel and a vanished aristocrat is a deliberate signal: Elsbeth is leaning into Broadway’s talent pool and its vocabulary of showbiz secrecy. Ross’s rendition of "That's All," the song Bobby Darin made famous in 1959, is not a throwaway moment; it’s the show asserting its hybrid identity as a legal procedural that thinks in musical beats.
That hybrid has been the series’ rhythm all season. Elsbeth frequently trades in Broadway-connected guest stars and theatrical references; this season’s roster has included Annaleigh Ashford, Andrew Rannells, Beanie Feldstein, Joanna Gleason, Dianne Wiest, Lois Smith, William Jackson Harper, Stephen Colbert, Jaime Pressly and Tony Hale. The finale stacks those associations against a classic whodunit: celebrity, legacy, and the cargos of old-stage glamour.
The tension in "That’s All" comes from how neatly the song-and-detective interplay fits the show’s brand even as it complicates its moral frame. A crooning scene softens a murder story; sweet music humanizes suspects and witnesses who would otherwise be evidence. Elsbeth and Detective Blanke’s applause for Teddy’s Broadway prospects sits alongside an investigation into a minor royal’s death, a contradiction that the episode uses to unsettle viewers: do you fall for the performer or trust the prosecutor?
For Ben Levi Ross, the moment is both character and career beat. He’s introduced not as a plot device but as someone whose talent commands the room — and who, within the story, earns a public endorsement to pursue the stage from two of the show’s central figures. For the series, the scene is an answer to a recurring question: can a television procedural sustain a long-term relationship with Broadway culture without collapsing into pastiche?
The answer, at least for now, is yes. With a season four order already in hand and high-profile guest turns anchoring the finale, Elsbeth is committing to the theatrical tack that has become its signature. If the series continues to marry polished musical moments to courtroom maneuvering, expect more finale-size set pieces and more cameos from the stage world — and a clear path for characters like Teddy to move between television drama and the bright lights of Broadway.
