The Good Wife ended on a slap so engineered and so calculated that it shouldn’t have worked – not as it so intently invoked the series’ opening scene, or as it so bluntly capped a complex seven-year arc. The final season of the procedural legal drama became relentless in its obsession with circularity; its admittedly thorough recollections of its earliest days prevented a necessary engagement with the hundred-and-some episodes that were produced in-between. That awkward swivel, from irrelevant new characters and storylines to forced callbacks and reminders, was at the heart of this season’s unfortunate failure. It was as if The Good Wife forgot itself, a consequence mainly of an excessive running-time – seven seasons of over 20 episodes – but also of structural problems relating to character development and narrative continuity.
Even so, The Education of Alicia Florrick – The Good Wife’s mantra, its purpose, its thrilling experiment – came full circle in “End,” the series finale. Somehow, situating Alicia (Julianna Margulies) in a position physically identical, yet morally opposite, to the one she assumed back in the series pilot made for a satisfying bookend to a narrative chiefly theming transformation. The “slap” – delivered from one scorned woman to another, from a good wife (Diane) shamed by the originally shamed good wife (Alicia) – struck a chord, its harsh echo permeating the show’s world like a downward spiral, an instantaneous and bleak meditation on its history. The Good Wife, in its prime, tackled a range of issues enormously well: the blurred lines between law and morality; the compromises that greet the maintenance of ambition; the malleability of principle and ideology; and the function of continuously evolving technology in service of the law – among many others. Yet, after over 150 episodes, a slap was all we got. Loud and harsh, it felt just right.
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I wrote about The Good Wife a few times over the years; what fascinated me most, which I conveyed best in this piece, was how the notion of change within the show – its paramount idea, really – paralleled its own maturation as an ongoing narrative. The series began as a legal procedural centered on Ms. Florrick, the stay-at-home wife of the Cook County State’s Attorney embroiled in both sex and corruption scandals. Her return to the legal world exposed her naiveté and privilege; it reignited her drive and her hunger, and made apparent an identity crisis as she went from political wife to novice lawyer, from sidekick to star. So became the story of her aforementioned Education. She’d cutely fumble in early cases before picking herself up; she’d balk at the moral flexibility of her brilliant, seasoned bosses Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski), a potential mentor, and Will Gardner (Josh Charles), a potential (and former) lover. The show was initially comfortable in a case-of-the-week format, and the opportunities it provided for story closure and neat character arcs. But Alicia adapted as necessary, to meet her ambition and to professionally survive. The Good Wife did the same.
The series peaked in its 2014 run, which comprised the back-half of its fourth season and the front-half of its fifth. In it, Alicia aggressively – chaotically, even – took charge and forged her own path, knocking down superiors, manipulating colleagues and propositioning clients on her road to “independence.” The show met the challenge by adapting to a serialized format, resulting in a stretch of thrilling and thematically compelling episodes. To be clear: a series that started out good and only got better managed to reach its creative high at the one-hundred-episode mark, a feat that seems unlikely to be repeated, given the medium’s current transition to shorter seasons and shorter runs.
Where the series could have been a quirky retreading of more familiar terrain, The Good Wife transcended. It was ultimately drawn to the inevitability of compromise; creators Robert and Michelle King posed questions on that topic in regard to personal ambition, professional betrayal, political success, private fulfillment, even NSA spying. Alicia was at the center of that story, but The Good Wife astutely looked beyond her. In Cary Agos (Matt Czuchry), the show introduced a young, Ivy-educated law school grad repeatedly pitted against Alicia, who brought with her baggage but connections, an absence of recent experience but a fair amount of overall experience. In Will Gardner, Alicia rekindled with her romantic foil, but their dynamic was complicated by Will’s aggressive, corner-cutting effectiveness in the courtroom. And in Diane, a relatively green Alicia closely observed an alternate future vision of herself: a woman confident in her morals but also well-versed in the game, a brilliant mind defined wholly by her career.
The Good Wife’s ensemble was its most durable asset. Together, with Alicia’s journey at the center, its cast made for a robust, artful case study in the costs of personal ambition and in the choices we make. The legal technicalities and quirks that the series had a chronic affection for – among the many: processes of military court; finicky international laws; and surprising addendums to legal understandings of “wedge issues” ranging from freedom of speech to same-sex marriage to sexual assault – cleverly reflected its overriding distaste for simplicity. A given case’s aesthetic could range from courtroom thriller to legal comedy to wonky policy debate, but – letting alone what they’d illuminate regarding the intricacies of law and process – what made them important was never unclear.
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For mostly better but increasingly for worse, The Good Wife epitomized the consequences of a broadcast model of storytelling. It’s hard to deny that the show used the procedural format to its advantage; to argue against that would be to argue against the show itself. Indeed, the firm wars that characterized its brilliant fifth season were first toyed with in a standard episodic plotline that the Kings had – perhaps, unknowingly – planted years in advance. The seasons were tiring in length, and none as a result were perfect; but that room for isolated and continued storytelling led to a magnificent recurring cast, one that not only featured a line of tremendous performances – judges played by Jeffrey Tambor, Ana Gasteyer and Denis O’Hare; adversaries by Martha Plimpton, Michael J. Fox and Anika Noni Rose; and clients by Dylan Baker, Amanda Peet and Gary Cole – but also, in cumulation, built a world of drug kingpins and technology moguls and political allies that allowed The Good Wife as extensive a treatment of the modern urban city as The Wire's. The drawn-out nature of network television also allowed the development of Alicia and those around her to take place more gradually, and in turn more authentically.
Of course, this was also The Good Wife’s undoing. Almost symbolically, once it reached the 100 mark, the show struggled to continue telling a streamlined narrative without rehashing or taking shortcuts. Near the end of season five, Will was killed off as a spectacular way of writing Charles out of the show, per the actor’s wishes. Season six then depicted Alicia, lulled into heavy grief and depression, running for office herself, a plotline as dispassionate as The Good Wife ever provided. It ended with a political corruption scandal, of the kind that the show had already used again and again for Alicia’s husband Peter (Chris Noth), who despite his many public failings improbably rose to Governor of Illinois. The Kings then, abruptly, returned to an aggressively procedural format in season seven as a sort of reboot, only with new characters and love interests eating up much of the screentime while others like Cary and Diane were given the short shrift. With Alicia apathetic as ever, Will out of the picture and the writers understandably running out of ideas – half-hearted firm shake-ups were re-introduced to diminishing returns, even if the great David Lee (Zach Grenier) got more to do – the final season particularly was an incoherent mess, only able to live up to its former self when most consciously referring to its past.
Charles, who earned two Emmy nominations for his superb work, was the real loss that The Good Wife could never recover from. But his desire to leave after an exhausting five-season run in many ways reflected the broader mechanical problems that the Kings ran into. Characters would be introduced in critical roles only for their actors to move on, like investigator Robyn (Jess Weixler) or attorney Dean (Taye Diggs). Additionally, the feud (or whatever it was – all involved have been impressively tight-lipped) that developed between Margulies and Archie Panjabi, who played the once-central role of Kalinda, led to the latter’s painfully slow forced-exit, wherein the two actresses did not appear in a scene together during Panjabi’s final seasons on the show – despite the fact that their characters worked in the same office for most of that time period. The consistent pressure of cancellation (and, oddly, renewal) also weighed on the Kings creatively. Specifically, the first half-and-some of the final season was written with CBS intending to bring the show back for an eighth cycle, but with the Kings refusing to continue forward. Margulies eventually implied she would not come back either, leading CBS to allow the Kings to end the show on their terms.
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The Good Wife’s finishing run was still disappointing, however – even with the freedom to decisively conclude. Oddly, it placed Alicia on the sidelines of her own ending, as Peter once more faced prison on corruption charges and as other supporting players were written to haphazard endings. Peter’s culpability was, in what became an irritating narrative habit for the show, never made explicit. The Good Wife didn’t sufficiently explain why Alicia wrapped herself in Peter’s mess once more, with no chance at reconciliation left between them and the kids off at college. Instead, she balanced a new romance with a cipher of a companion, played gruffly by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, with her intention of starting an all-female-firm with Diane, a utopian vision that was smartly played by the Kings as a final firm shake-up, and as a test of their protagonist’s growth.
Given The Good Wife’s encompassing nature, that its concluding focus was so narrow felt inadequate. The Kings very clearly were writing to a trial and a set of circumstances identical to what they’d laid out in the pilot, with Alicia standing by her husband and left to look into the unknown. The idea was smart; the execution, with such an overwhelming amount of time spent on a redundant court case, was anything but. And where the series could have more comprehensively brought characters like Diane and Cary back into the fold, as they certainly deserved, it kept its eyes on Alicia and Peter – where it all began. It seemed as if the opportunity for more complex storytelling had passed, and all that mattered was getting to a strong finish.
I can respect this choice. The Good Wife was a show that always used its economy to its clearest advantage, and transcended its limitations by rendering them artistically motivating. Its final stretch reflected this: an elongated yet deliberate march to the end, well past the show's expiration date but still rich enough to end as something of value. Indeed, it did. In the series finale, Alicia personally betrayed Diane, who was defending Peter, by forcing her new husband – a ballistics expert key to Peter’s defense – to unethically testify in Peter’s favor, and in turn admit to an illicit affair. (To which Diane may or may not have been privy – again, the storytelling getting up to this moment was clumsy.) Alicia’s quest for power, for authority, for agency was completed – she’d learned how to defend her client at all costs, as Diane had taught her over seven complicated years, and how to bend the rules to her desired outcome. But the one thing Diane had that Alicia didn’t was an understanding of impact – a compromising of authority and morality that could be justified.
Alicia slapped her husband at the beginning of The Good Wife, awakening her to the shame he’d brought upon her and to the professional duty that she’d soon need to assume. Fittingly, the series ended with Alicia on the other side of the equation. Blinded by her bulldozing legal tactics and ruthless professionalism, Alicia shamed a woman as had once – nay, repeatedly – been done to her. Faded was the utopian vision of an all-female firm. Gone was the notion that she’d become the person she needed to be. And returned was the slap – that loud, harrowing awakening. This was never a story about good or bad, fair or unfair, right or wrong. It was about choices, consequences and compromise – the tragedy of circumstance and the illusion of the ideal.
As an imperfect, provocative, often brilliant but ultimately hamstrung work of art and commerce, The Good Wife very much embodied those qualities.